“One of the most powerful tools of racism is stories.”

More broadly, all history is stories, sometimes told in a Domesday Book, sometimes told in a slide deck. We have to pick and choose what we think matters in history—the world every instant is crammed full of events and meaning, of people and actions. No one thing at an instant is “the one thing” of the instant. History is shaped by what we want to remember. That my mother was expelled from Ukraine in 1933 is just as much a matter of history that Hitler came to power in Germany, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco started construction, and it was 31 degrees below zero one day in Texas.

We construct the story of how things came to be, and we do so with ourselves—the construct of ourselves, of how we see ourselves and how we wish to present ourselves—as the centers and the interpreters of the stories we tell and the stories we believe. My mother’s journey at 8 years old is important to me, so I’ll take her story and meld it into mine and into the story of a family grafted together from American and European parts. I’ll pick the elements that I think explain the journey, but where I start, how I shape the story, and where I end it comes from my own attempts to focus on what does this mean to me?

Ms. Irving makes the point that our stories of racism are controlled by our beliefs about racism—and she goes on to say that then our beliefs about racism control the stories we tell and believe about racism. It is not a chicken-and-egg problem as much as a  cycle that feeds upon itself because it fits in with how we believe things just should be. White people are the original inhabitants of America, innocent, free, and good. The indigenous are background noises, the African enslaved are the supporting cast who are of interest but nameless, and the Hispanic civilization to the South is a threat and not a partner. It fits our story, and we fit ourselves to the story.

“True, false, or somewhere in between, [stories] are narratives we use to entertain and/or instruct ourselves.”

The point here is, I think, that it’s too easy to say that a story is wrong or right based upon our initial discoveries. “Columbus discovered America” is wrong in that, of course, the indigenous were here and certainly knew that the land was here. But if we dig into what “discover” meant, that the Christian teachings of Northern and Western Europe said “if a land has no Christians, you can claim it for yourself as a Christian,” then, yeah, Columbus “discovered” America. With that understanding of history, the story is changed, but it is true, even though we think it is revolting that a man could simply take over sovereign lands and sovereign people because “God told him it was okay.”

We use the stories, Ms. Irving says, to give us pleasure, to confirm our biases and beliefs, and to inculcate the biases and beliefs more deeply and more firmly. We re-tell the Pilgrim’s Story every Thanksgiving as a sign of the bounty of God and the blessings of thankfulness and the grace of community—but do not investigate deeply what happened before or after, or even question why English settlers thought they could just come in and plop down houses and cropland on indigenous territory. Stolen lands, meals prepared by usurpers proud that their thievery was in the service to their God—that story isn’t told because it’s not self-affirming, but it seems to be just as likely to be true as the one of the peaceful Indians and the grateful Pilgrims sitting down to turkey and gravy.

“[Stories are] human-constructed narratives used to describe people, values, places, eras, and events. Stories are a primary way we connect to those around us and before us.”

It’s important to realize, I think, that the stories are not so much true or false, but that they are constructed from pieces of the events in order to tell us something we think is valuable. How did I get here, beyond the physical fact of being born in a hospital to the mother of four children living in a brand-spanking new white suburb of Los Angeles? I can trace the movements of my family’s branches across Europe and across America before we all arrived in California—but the how and why are harder to put together. Why California in my generation? Why Germany in my mother’s generation? Why Virginia in the first landing of the family from England? Why the founding of the German colonies in Ukraine in 18th and 19th centuries? All these go into the making of my story, and I’ve constructed the story to give me peace and to give me meaning—but I’ve constructed from bits and pieces, some legend, some verbal tales, some from historical research into family archives and other documents. But it is certainly not the entire story.

“The story of race is at the center of racism’s entanglement. The very idea that the world’s many peoples could be categorized by something called “race” is a story, one that has created a system of dominance for its storytellers.”

This is a good point, that race itself is a constructed story. Prior to the invention of race (by white guys explaining why we white people are naturally and divinely superior), there was no story of race. Those from different lands might look different and be treated as strange and exotic, and even uncivilized, but depending upon the nation-state, the presence of these exo-ethnics was not a matter of divine judgment about worth. That was the story that race created, to put people of diverse appearance into artificial groups based upon that appearance, and then to assign human value to them according to their group. It makes us white people feel good to have a story that affirms our goodness and confirms our beliefs that non-whiteness is non-goodness.

“As long as the dominant culture holds fast to a story of white as right, the possibility of hearing other truths gets shut out, and the cycle continues: white folks experience people of color’s versions of events as incongruent and therefore inadmissible.”

It is very hard for us dominant white people to listen—really listen—to people of other races. Sure, we can listen to data. But to listen to them, as they talk about their very selves, we white people have to do an enormous amount of translating. And frankly, we don’t do a very good job of it. We rush to conclusions because we want to skip past the hard part of understanding another soul and understanding their griefs and their pains and their frustrations, and even their joys and their happiness. If we can assign them a place that matches an understanding in our narrative, we don’t have to really listen anymore, and we can just revert to shallow conversations that are typical of our own carefree assumptions about our own white lives. We all know what we mean as white people, and we don’t have to do any heavy lifting for understanding.

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Questions

Think of a historical event in American history, perhaps the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the arrival of the Statue of Liberty, or any one of the wars Americans have fought.

What is the event?

The Oklahoma land rush of 1889.

Where have you learned what you know about this event?

From the play “Oklahoma!”, primarily. Also a little from school history.

Whose perspective did you learn?

The white settlers and the government press. It was a time when this wide-open land was available for anyone with the will to rush and settle a plot of free, open land. Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act in 1862, granting 160 acres if you settled and improved the land, and Benjamin Harrison signed the Indian Appropriation Act of 1889 that opened up the “best, unoccupied public land in the United States.”

If you went in search of a fuller story, whose viewpoint would you seek?

The history of the “unoccupied land” before it was staked out as belonging to the white public of the United States. I’d want to know a lot more of how the Cherokee Indians from Florida were squeezed into the lands that would become Oklahoma, and how their tribal lands were gradually erased until the entire Oklahoma Territory became a state.

I’d want to learn more about the Spanish/Mexican presence (if any), given that there were extensive settlements in Texas and New Mexico to the south and west.

I’d want to see the story from the points of view of those who might have settled the land before, but not as prosperous, indulged white Americans. I’d want to hear the story from the freed black Americans who were not given the same opportunities of the Homestead Act that white settlers received. (Freed black enslaved people in the South were originally promised “40 acres and a mule” in Georgia, I think, but even that was rescinded.)

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For context on this series, see my kick-off post here:

http://stephenmatlock.com/2019/01/if-i-love-you-i-have-to-make-you-conscious-of-the-things-you-dont-see/

To follow along with the others, see also:

Di Brown “Nixie” at https://dianabrown.net/blog-challenge-waking-up-white/

This chapter: https://dianabrown.net/waking-up-white-chapter-15/

Dawn Claflin at https://dawnclaflin.wordpress.com/

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