The Reading: From Confusion to Shock
“Racism is, and always has been, the way America has sorted and ranked its people in a bitterly divisive, humanity-robbing system.”
Yep. And they have constantly changed the definitions as they went along, based on what was convenient at the time. Even some white-skinned immigrants were not “among the white” when they first arrived. Until it became more convenient (or maybe “less INconvenient”?) for them to be so.
The Study Question
The late historian Ronald Takakai referred to the history taught in American schools as The Master Narrative, the version of history told by Americans of Anglo descent. Think about what you did not study. Did you learn about Lincoln’s views on enslaved black people?
Yes. And it was very clear to me that the Emancipation Proclamation was not an act of integrity or morality but a political maneuver designed to bolster flagging support for “Mr. Lincoln’s War.” Lincoln fought to preserve the union as a pragmatic measure. He freed slaves from the same pragmatic place. And though abolitionists were gaining ground, it was clear that slavery wasn’t seen as a universal evil – going all the way back to the slaves in the Bible.
Slaves weren’t always black. Before the African slave trade, they were whatever “other” was convenient. Conquered nations, rival tribes, other religions. And even in this country, “black” didn’t always mean “African.” Early censuses only listed black and white – Native Americans were not-white and therefore “black.” And some of them, too, were slaves. Dad theorized that this might be among the reasons for the Cherokees’ broad acceptance of freedmen (it would be many years before I heard the other side of that story, in which the Cherokee Nation worked to exclude freedmen).
Anti-immigration laws of the nineteenth century?
Some of them. The Chinese exclusion act, for example, was contrasted with the welcomed influx of “coolie” laborers for the railroads, though it was never out-and-out labeled as hypocrisy, just “contradictions” in how they were treated.
America’s laws regarding who could and could not gain citizenship?
I didn’t hear a lot about this, other than views on the federal government’s heavy-handed control over who tribes could recognize.
The Native Americans who had once lived on your town’s or school’s land?
I was never in one place long enough for that, but did hear some things about the natives – Cherokee and Osage, mostly – where my father’s father grew up.