Many US suburban people of my age, heck even kids from the burbs today, are often taught a very white-washed version of history. When we do finally get access or have alternative versions brought to our attention, once we get past the shock and sense of guilt for our ignorance, some of us become hungry for the other sides of these stories.
I teach a class called US Multicultural History, as well as English and other classes, and I am fascinated by finding versions of history that challenge the official versions, as are many of my students. I am still privileged to be an American and appreciate that as a middle class white American I have access to clean water, food, education and other basics that 80% of the world's population do not. I would just like to see a more honest version or versions of our histories taught, because the struggles continue and we all need to heal- oppressed and oppressors- if we are ever to get past our very racist and violent history. Sure we have a lot to celebrate, yet when we congratulate ourselves too much we continue to practice what the ancient Greeks called "hubris" -overbearing pride.
Most countries, governments, people, groups want to show their best side when writing or recounting their histories, yet I believe we owe it to ourselves and our descendants to be honest about how this country was created, what we've done since and how we need to continue to work to make this place the one our long standing ideals point to, as seen in the Great Law of Peace of the Iroquois Nations and as listed in the Bill of Rights and other key documents. In joining the on-going work towards these ideals, I offer a stripped down version of US history, as an exercise of what was not meaningfully taught in any history class I attended until I got to college.
If the USA was a house, here is my version of what it would be, although it seems so simple I am sure others have said/thought it before me:
The first steps in our House of Racism are the land and the foundations: how many ways can you describe murdering people, stealing their lands, lying to them, repeatedly forcing them from their homes, more killing and on and on?
While trying to distract some people with your talk of liberty and equality for all, you legally codify racism throughout all areas of society. The people whose land you are taking getting treaty after broken treaty, while you continue a campaign that eventually kills 90% of their pre-European contact populations. Enslaved African-Americans are only 3/5's of a person, and that concession is only to give white slave owners more votes in government. Along with other privileges only "free white person's" are allowed to become citizens. These and the "psychological wages of racism", including the illusion of superiority, help the average white person ignore/deny/justify the cultural genocide and the buying and selling of human beings. These foundations built on land soaked in blood lead to the building of the structure of our House of Racism.
This analogy is getting complicated as it seems everything from the land through the foundations are also part of the framing. Well, let's say the framework for the walls are all proceeding laws, continuing oppression of Native Americans and African Americans, adding oppressing most anyone else who came here in large enough numbers to get attention (even people like the Irish, who would eventually be considered white), and using racism as a way to divide and conquer people (especially white people) from voting and working for their class interests.
Our House of Racism building project is repeatedly and nearly constantly being challenged by non-white people, which occassionally cause some changes to be made, yet these often changed one bad set of laws and traditions for another. The ending of slavery was one, African Americans were no longer being bought, sold and owned, yet this was replaced by Jim Crow laws, the rise of the first KKK clans and later to the Eugenics Movement. The Eugenics Movement used pseudo-science to try and prove white people were superior to everyone else. Eugenics was popular in all parts of the US, even taught in schools and universities, until Hitler used Eugenics as part of his argument for killing Jews, then suddenly Americans dropped it like a hot potato.
Meanwhile, back to the people of the First Nations, once the majority of indigenous groups were bound by treaties and left with small percentages of their orginal lands on reservations, whites were taught they no longer existed and/or were not out problem. Scholars call this "The Myth of the Vanishing Race" or the "Vanishing Race Myth", and it can be seen in imagery we use, as well as implied in our history books, movies and other media outlets. Seattle is considered to be one the major players in this, using not only the name of Chief Seattle (Anglicized though it may be), yet also Native art and imagery to sell itself, while at the same time one of their first laws when the city formed was to make it illegal for Natives to live in Seattle City limits. While many Americans continued to go on with their lives, forgetting or trying to forget whose land they were living on, government officials, doctors, educators and religious folk continued interacting with Natives in ways that most often point to a continuing policy of cultural genocide, and these were people supposedly put there "to help." Alright, this post it getting too long, so I apologize for moving on when there is so much to say here, yet others have said it better, so I will let them do so.
The crowning achievement on our House of Racism is the roof, known as "The Civil Rights Movement" and "Civil Rights Laws". This roof provides great cover and comfort for some, definite gains for some, and has generated a whole lot of denial in many parts of our society. I am amused/frustrated by white people pointing to Civil Rights as proof that we are no longer racist. While I was born in 1966, so I do not personally remember that time, I've seen enough pictures, documentaries and history books to know that it was not white people doing that work.
White people did NOT stand up and say "Wow, we have been so racist, we are truly sorry, what can we do to make amends?" The way I have read/seen it most often is that African Americans in the South agitated for their civil rights, which the whites reacted to violently, and it shocked white people living elsewhere when it came on the news to see how African Americans/their fellow citizens were being treated. However it seems nothing was seriously done about it until it went on the international news, then many history books/documentaries say that white Americans were so embarassed that their stated liberty and freedom for all was such a lie, that then they insisted something done by the feds. The way it reads to me is that whites were forced/embarassed into the civil rights, and when you read primary sources from history, you can see it has usually been that way for most of the anti-racist gains made in this country.
A side note to this is that Seattle has an earlier and much more diverse civil rights story, check out this site created by a UW professor and his students: http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/
"Seattle has a unique civil rights history that challenges the way we think about race, civil rights, and the Pacific Northwest. Civil rights movements in Seattle started well before the celebrated struggles in the South in the 1950s and 1960s, and they relied not just on African American activists but also on Filipino Americans, Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, Jews, Latinos, and Native Americans."
Alright, so that is my version of the House of Racism, not the only one, yet here it is. What trips me out is how do we make things right? How do you make a society built on so much pain and oppression into one that is free and fair for all? How do you get some of the people to see that the benefits and privileges they enjoy are not always enjoyed by their fellow citizens? How do you get some people to understand that after 500 years of oppression, you can't just pass a few laws and say now, can't we all get along? How do we all heal, if so many can't see they/we and our institutions are still sick?
I teach a class called US Multicultural History, as well as English and other classes, and I am fascinated by finding versions of history that challenge the official versions, as are many of my students. I am still privileged to be an American and appreciate that as a middle class white American I have access to clean water, food, education and other basics that 80% of the world's population do not. I would just like to see a more honest version or versions of our histories taught, because the struggles continue and we all need to heal- oppressed and oppressors- if we are ever to get past our very racist and violent history. Sure we have a lot to celebrate, yet when we congratulate ourselves too much we continue to practice what the ancient Greeks called "hubris" -overbearing pride.
Most countries, governments, people, groups want to show their best side when writing or recounting their histories, yet I believe we owe it to ourselves and our descendants to be honest about how this country was created, what we've done since and how we need to continue to work to make this place the one our long standing ideals point to, as seen in the Great Law of Peace of the Iroquois Nations and as listed in the Bill of Rights and other key documents. In joining the on-going work towards these ideals, I offer a stripped down version of US history, as an exercise of what was not meaningfully taught in any history class I attended until I got to college.
If the USA was a house, here is my version of what it would be, although it seems so simple I am sure others have said/thought it before me:
The first steps in our House of Racism are the land and the foundations: how many ways can you describe murdering people, stealing their lands, lying to them, repeatedly forcing them from their homes, more killing and on and on?
While trying to distract some people with your talk of liberty and equality for all, you legally codify racism throughout all areas of society. The people whose land you are taking getting treaty after broken treaty, while you continue a campaign that eventually kills 90% of their pre-European contact populations. Enslaved African-Americans are only 3/5's of a person, and that concession is only to give white slave owners more votes in government. Along with other privileges only "free white person's" are allowed to become citizens. These and the "psychological wages of racism", including the illusion of superiority, help the average white person ignore/deny/justify the cultural genocide and the buying and selling of human beings. These foundations built on land soaked in blood lead to the building of the structure of our House of Racism.
This analogy is getting complicated as it seems everything from the land through the foundations are also part of the framing. Well, let's say the framework for the walls are all proceeding laws, continuing oppression of Native Americans and African Americans, adding oppressing most anyone else who came here in large enough numbers to get attention (even people like the Irish, who would eventually be considered white), and using racism as a way to divide and conquer people (especially white people) from voting and working for their class interests.
Our House of Racism building project is repeatedly and nearly constantly being challenged by non-white people, which occassionally cause some changes to be made, yet these often changed one bad set of laws and traditions for another. The ending of slavery was one, African Americans were no longer being bought, sold and owned, yet this was replaced by Jim Crow laws, the rise of the first KKK clans and later to the Eugenics Movement. The Eugenics Movement used pseudo-science to try and prove white people were superior to everyone else. Eugenics was popular in all parts of the US, even taught in schools and universities, until Hitler used Eugenics as part of his argument for killing Jews, then suddenly Americans dropped it like a hot potato.
Meanwhile, back to the people of the First Nations, once the majority of indigenous groups were bound by treaties and left with small percentages of their orginal lands on reservations, whites were taught they no longer existed and/or were not out problem. Scholars call this "The Myth of the Vanishing Race" or the "Vanishing Race Myth", and it can be seen in imagery we use, as well as implied in our history books, movies and other media outlets. Seattle is considered to be one the major players in this, using not only the name of Chief Seattle (Anglicized though it may be), yet also Native art and imagery to sell itself, while at the same time one of their first laws when the city formed was to make it illegal for Natives to live in Seattle City limits. While many Americans continued to go on with their lives, forgetting or trying to forget whose land they were living on, government officials, doctors, educators and religious folk continued interacting with Natives in ways that most often point to a continuing policy of cultural genocide, and these were people supposedly put there "to help." Alright, this post it getting too long, so I apologize for moving on when there is so much to say here, yet others have said it better, so I will let them do so.
The crowning achievement on our House of Racism is the roof, known as "The Civil Rights Movement" and "Civil Rights Laws". This roof provides great cover and comfort for some, definite gains for some, and has generated a whole lot of denial in many parts of our society. I am amused/frustrated by white people pointing to Civil Rights as proof that we are no longer racist. While I was born in 1966, so I do not personally remember that time, I've seen enough pictures, documentaries and history books to know that it was not white people doing that work.
White people did NOT stand up and say "Wow, we have been so racist, we are truly sorry, what can we do to make amends?" The way I have read/seen it most often is that African Americans in the South agitated for their civil rights, which the whites reacted to violently, and it shocked white people living elsewhere when it came on the news to see how African Americans/their fellow citizens were being treated. However it seems nothing was seriously done about it until it went on the international news, then many history books/documentaries say that white Americans were so embarassed that their stated liberty and freedom for all was such a lie, that then they insisted something done by the feds. The way it reads to me is that whites were forced/embarassed into the civil rights, and when you read primary sources from history, you can see it has usually been that way for most of the anti-racist gains made in this country.
A side note to this is that Seattle has an earlier and much more diverse civil rights story, check out this site created by a UW professor and his students: http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/
"Seattle has a unique civil rights history that challenges the way we think about race, civil rights, and the Pacific Northwest. Civil rights movements in Seattle started well before the celebrated struggles in the South in the 1950s and 1960s, and they relied not just on African American activists but also on Filipino Americans, Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, Jews, Latinos, and Native Americans."
Alright, so that is my version of the House of Racism, not the only one, yet here it is. What trips me out is how do we make things right? How do you make a society built on so much pain and oppression into one that is free and fair for all? How do you get some of the people to see that the benefits and privileges they enjoy are not always enjoyed by their fellow citizens? How do you get some people to understand that after 500 years of oppression, you can't just pass a few laws and say now, can't we all get along? How do we all heal, if so many can't see they/we and our institutions are still sick?
I think, commenting on your last statement, that trying to built on such pain in a bad idea. Instead of building, we almost have to recreate bonds with everyone because so many have been broken before. It's not our fault for that oppression but we can start the process of ending it. There isn't an easy way to do that but the idea of "can't we all just get along?" doesn't mean forget everything that has been done and instead make something new. If that makes sense.
ReplyDeleteIt does make sense and in a good way, to me at least.
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of recreating bonds. I would add that part of how we do that is educating ourselves and then working to continue to end various forms of oppression. As the Matrix of Oppression handout talked about, we can be both oppressor and oppressed depending on things like race, class, gender, age, etc. and some of us have more points towards the oppressor side.
I do think we do need to work on institutionalized racism throughout our society. Some people think it ends with whether or not they are a racist,civil rights laws and OBama getting elected, yet as many have pointed out, it is much bigger, deeper and more complicated than that.
Thanks for continuing this conversation.
I need to get going so I can make it to my office hours, see you soon.
I think this is the first time I'm really taking a look at the racism and diversity in the Seattle area. Well, actually as a whole! When you said, "most countries, governments, people, groups want to show their best side when writing or recounting their histories," it made me remember when i learned about the Pearl Harbor Bombing in WW2. When I learned about it in Japan they blamed the Americans for making them make the move, but when I learned about it here in the U.S. they blamed the Japanese. Until reading your post I never really connected my experiences and the fact that we are probably only taught what makes us look good. It really made me interested in learning about what really happened, not a watered-down version of the story.
ReplyDeleteGreat example about Japan. It makes sense if you think about it, even as individuals we want to put our best foot forward. However there are too many idioms about the problems of not remembering history for us to accept that we can't change it.
ReplyDeleteAt the end of the day I imagine whatever evidence there is and however we interpret events, they were probably more complex than we can see from where we are, yet if you can find primary sources- such as newspapers of the time, letters from individuals, stories/songs from that time- you can get insights not available in most secondary textbooks or things created long after the events.
If you are talking about learning more about Pearl Harbor, you could start with the online Historical New York Times that we saw in the library last week. It would be cool if you could compare US news sources of the time with Japanese ones. What were they telling themselves about themselves and each other at that time?