*Welcome to another edition of the #Nerdflow Newsletter!*
I recently watched Raoul Peck’s Exterminate All the Brutes. It’s a provocative and genre-bending documentary that combines essayistic narration, archival footage, animation, and fictionalized scenes to tell a story about colonialism and genocide. To be honest, I initially found it to be a little all over the place. Each of the four episodes contain many abrupt transitions, leaping back and forth across time periods—discussing Native Americans in the early colonial U.S. then Hitler. The fictionalized scenes sometimes fall flat in comparison to the parts where the director/narrator connects the material to his personal life. But the deeper I got into Peck’s film, the more it started to grow on me. I began to question my own questioning of his project.
It became evident that Peck was not trying to make a traditional and chronological historical documentary. The leaps across time are part of his point. Following Michel-Rolph Trouillot, one of the film’s intellectual inspirations, Peck is trying to show the ongoing effects of slavery and genocide and the fact that it is only through our present concerns that we enter into a relationship with the past. He’s also making a visual argument in addition to the essay narration that’s running over the top. Peck’s careful selection and creation of images are speaking in multiple ways—like his use of racist scenes from past Hollywood films. Contra Rick Santorum who claimed that there was “nothing here” in the U.S. before European settlers, the film’s powerful visual presentation of Indigenous languages and treaties testifies to the opposite. Even the leaps to Germany and Hitler, which at first seem to risk fulfilling “Godwin's law,” end up feeling appropriate given the history of racial science and Peck’s own filmmaking education in Berlin.
Peck’s decision to connect the legacy of Nazi Germany to the history of colonialism reminded me of another Caribbean intellectual. In the 1955 edition of Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire wrote:
Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the "coolies" of India, and the "niggers" of Africa.
This documentary answers Césaire’s call.
Exterminate All the Brutes has a fictionalized scene depicting white slaves that may shock people because it reverses what many of us expect to see. This scene made me think of an important point made my Nell Irvin Painter in The History of White People:
The race narrative ignores early European slavery and the mixing it entailed, leading today’s readers to find the idea of white slavery far-fetched. But in the land we now call Europe, most slaves were white, and that fact was unremarkable.
With modern racism, slavery became associated with blackness. But there was plenty of white slavery in the past. This is not an argument for “It’s all the same!” or “Whites are just as oppressed as Blacks!” If anything, it’s further indictment of slavery itself—of those who took this specific system of human degradation that many white people didn’t want to bear (hence the love of “Freedom”) and applied it only to a specific group of people.
Because of the layers in Exterminate All the Brutes and the way it worked on me over time, I think I’ll have to watch it again. I should share here that Bartolomé de las Casas does make a very brief appearance in Episode 2! Peck’s treatment of Las Casas is fair and incorporates a scene from La controverse de Valladolid, a French film about Las Casas. At different points in time, the importance of Las Casas’ story in the history of colonialism has been recognized internationally. Less so in the United States. I’ll have more to say about that later.
What I’m Writing
I published The Internet’s Unofficial Patron Saint for The Revealer.
I sometimes feel that the internet turns me into a drugged-up lab rat who constantly scrolls and checks in throughout the day, sorting through random heaps of texts and images as if it were my job, except I’m not currently employed to do this for any company. On an intellectual level, I can understand documentaries like The Social Dilemma, which explain how the technology I use was built to be addictive. But I don’t want to miss breaking news or some crucial piece of information. So I jump on the wheel and I spin.
Read the full essay here.
Writing Life Tip
“Should I write for free?”
I’ve been asked this question several times. Some people suggest ALWAYS getting paid for writing while others preach the importance of “exposure.” My opinion: It depends! For writers just starting out, it might be helpful to build experience and “clips” (samples of your writing) that you can then show to publications that will pay you. For example, you can write a polished blog post and write it as if a well-funded publication had commissioned you for it. You have to start somewhere! But I totally understand the need to get compensated. So each person has to negotiate this reality for themselves.
I’ve written for free, for $10 flat, and for as much as a dollar per word. With very rare exceptions, I no longer write anything for free. But it took time and effort before I got to this point. And even then, the increasing returns are modest. So you have to love this! For more resources, I recommend checking out rates on Who Pays Writers. Sonia Weiser has a good newsletter for freelance opportunities. And the book Scratch is an awesome anthology of successful writers sharing transparently about finances not only when it comes to freelancing but also book writing.
What I’m Reading
Prophets by Brandon Taylor
Low-Skill Workers Aren’t a Problem to Be Fixed by Annie Lowrey
'This is America. We Speak American Here!' by Young Richard Kim
On making work that matters by Ada Limón
The Historian Annette Gordon-Reed Gets Personal in ‘On Juneteenth’ by Jennifer Szalai
Book: The Order of Time by Carlo Rovell
Song I Love
Susana Baca (ft. Calle 13) - Plena y Bomba