Osama bin Laden is dead. A big win for the United States.

Kind of.

I say “kind of” for all sorts of reasons, both political — just how much of a threat was he anymore? — and moral — I have a hard time celebrating anyone’s death. But the main reason I say kind of is the racial overtones of the operation, which gave bin Laden the code name of Geronimo. Not Mussolini, not Franco, but Geronimo.

For those who do not know, Geronimo was an Apache who fought against the United States in the late 1800s because they were expanding into Apache territory. He was eventually captured and died as a prisoner of war.

Some might say that this choice of code names for bin Laden was arbitrary. They might just as easily, and maybe more appropriately, called him Harry Houdini. But they did not. They specifically chose a historical figure who had attacked the United States, in this case a Native American. Now, the question is why Geronimo? A list of murderous historical figures with anti-U.S. sentiments could just about fill this page, so why not one of them? Why not call him Hitler, or Pol Pot, or even Reagan, who arguably killed more Americans in the 1980s than most wars due to his AIDS policies — a policy of virtual inaction? Why Geronimo?

The short answer is we live in a country where it is still okay to demonize minorities, some more than others. I am not saying that whoever assigned bin Laden his code name was being intentionally racist. What I am saying is that he does not have to be, because the nature of this country is to inculcate a hierarchy of race that puts white Europeans on top and Native Americans pretty much on the bottom. His code name is evidence of this. It never even would have occurred to anyone to call him Manson or even Malcolm X because that would obviously be racist. But giving him the name of a Native American apparently is not.

I do not need to go into the long string of injustices done to Native Americans since Europeans ‘discovered’ the ‘New’ World. I will give two facts that are probably the most telling of U.S. feelings towards them, though: Native Americans, the people who have been here over 30,000 years, were not granted U.S. citizenship until 1924; and every treaty the U.S. has made with Native American groups up to the early 1990s has been broken. I think that this one could be added to that list.