“Racism wasn’t about this person or that, this upset or that, this community or that; racism is, and always has been, the way America has sorted and ranked its people in a bitterly divisive, humanity-robbing system.”
I suppose everyone needs a hero, and I suspect everyone wants to be a hero. This chapter explores the idea that we can want to resolve terrible issues in our culture and in our world, and we can even attempt to do so—all while being completely unware of what we’re doing and why.
There’s an impulse to do good when we think we see a problem and we think we see the solution. “I can do that!” and we proceed to do just “that.”
Unfortunately, often “that” fails, because “that” wasn’t really the solution to the problem, because the problem was never discovered. Only the symptoms were viewed, and so only the symptoms were treated.
Like a headache and cancer both might get the same initial treatment, only one is a problem where the underlying issue might respond well—and safely—to an analgesic. When I have a headache and I take an aspirin, usually it’s enough to have that, and a chance to close my eyes in a cool, dark place for 5-10 minutes. Then I’m fine.
Were I to have cancer and have a similar pain, aspirin would not resolve the problem, but only the symptoms, and even that is a perhaps and only in the early stages. We treat cancer aggressively because we know that it takes nearly everything to resolve it and bring healing to the sufferer.
It is similar with racism, I think. It is not enough to say the nice words or do the nice things. We must have the courage and the will to dive into it, all the way down, and to discover the place where racism dwells in us.
Questions
The late historian Ronald Takaki 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?
I did not learn very much about Lincoln’s views during my primary and secondary schooling. Somewhere between high school graduation and my first attempts at college I started reading more extensively, and I recall having access to a big book on the American Civil War (at the time, I thought it was unique to have a book that thick and that full of information that was just about a single war in America.) I recall the feeling somewhere around 1862 in the war that it was pointless in one sense because there were still three bloody years ahead of carnage and destruction, and in the end the inevitable would happen: the South’s stupid attempt at upholding white enslavers would fail, and in burning down the South they were burning down their own homes to spite the North. The book was a large form “hardback” with a white nubby cloth cover, and I have looked in vain to find it since. It was so well put-together that I’ve wished I could have it for my own collection.
That book had some information about Lincoln, but I wasn’t really paying attention to his views on the enslaved black Africans.
Somehow I did widen my reading, maybe in my first year of college, and I began to understand that Lincoln’s views on slavery, abolition, and white slavers & black freedom were complex and evolving. He wasn’t a moral crusader against enslavement as much as a moral crusader for Union, and as he explicitly stated, he’d take enslavement or abolition if it would mean the Union would be saved.
My opinions since then have deepened, and I think, along with a few others scholars, that Lincoln incorporated abolition as a way to add a moral justification for a political, civil war. The recent movie “Lincoln” gives a good summary of the view with his interview with the couple from Ohio. They were loyal to Lincoln, loyal to the Union, and willing to support abolition. But abolition didn’t drive them, and they personally were not encouraging full emancipation and equality for black Africans enslaved by white slavers. Yeah, it’s a movie, but that was a fair summary.
Anti-immigration laws of the nineteenth century?
I’m not as clear on this. I do know that while we encouraged men from the Far East (China, Japan) to come to the west coast to build the railroads in the 1860s-1880s, we did so with the idea that they were simply hired bodies, to be disposed of and displaced when their purpose was done. And on the East Coast, there was consternation over Irish and German immigrants feeling starvation and political turmoil. (“Little Women,” I believe, has some allusions to the “German question” as well as other Europeans—Hungarians, IIRC. Black people do not make much of an appearance in a novel set during the time of the Civil War, IIRC.) The second half of the 1800s saw the creation and rise of the Ku Klux Klan, which focused on blacks, Catholics, and immigrants, but I’m not clear on what actual laws there were regarding immigrants.
America’s laws regarding who could and could not gain citizenship?
Totally not sure on this even now. I assume that the status quo was that only males had full voting rights after the Civil War, even though in the South it was white males who were free to vote; black Southerners were largely blocked from voting after the end of Reconstruction. Women of any race were not enfranchised, and Native Americans were not given the vote until the mid-20s. The enfranchisement of black American citizens didn’t start to become widespread until 1965, after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, and as far as I can tell, Native Americans have always had a difficult time casting a ballot.
As far as citizenship, I believe that born-on-this-soil citizenship wasn’t completely out of the question, but IIRC there was a famous case about a man of Chinese descent on the west coast who appealed for residency, but there was a question about the legitimacy of his citizenship claim. (Note: I just looked it up. U.S. vs. Wong Kim Ark, decided in Ark’s favor. Chief Justice Fuller and Justice Harlan dissenting.)
Holding: The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment must be interpreted in light of English common law, and thus it grants U.S. citizenship to all children born to alien parents on American soil, with only a limited set of exceptions.
The Native Americans who had once lived on your town’s or school’s land?
I grew up in Southern California, and we had a unit on California history 2 or 3 times in grade school and I think once each in junior high and high school. The gist of it was that Father Junípero Serra set up a benign dictatorship of missions that brought prosperity to California, but I never learned about the indigenous—it was centered on the Spaniards, and later the Mexicans and Anglos.
I now live in Washington state, and I do not think we teach much about our own displaced and disappeared indigenous. I’m glad to see that Washington indigenous have their reservations within the cities, and I know a few people of native extraction here in my town & consider them my friends, but there really isn’t a discussion about what it means to be native. When we had a kerfuffle here recently over the use of the falls, the religious claims of the natives were simply dismissed; I can’t think of a Christian church getting such short shrift over a similar issue.
- For context on this series, see my kick-off post here:
To follow along with the others, see also:
Di Brown “Nixie” at https://dianabrown.net/blog-challenge-waking-up-white/
This chapter: http://dianabrown.net/waking-up-white-chapter-6/
Dawn Claflin at https://dawnclaflin.wordpress.com/
I had a similar experience…I know I “learned” some of this, but can’t always remember when. Also, I took her specific questions to be examples, and didn’t answer them directly. Thank you for doing so!