What I was not taught about American history

Here are some of the things in American history I was taught little to nothing about at American high school. I post this as a way to compare notes and get ideas for future posts. It is hard to know what you do not know, so comments  and suggestions about what I left out are welcomed!

Note: I will not count anything after 1965 since the school year would always seem to end just before the Vietnam War! Also note that while some of these did not take place on American soil, they are still important for understanding American history, like the English Civil War or Caribbean slavery. 

In no particular order:

1. Delaware Indians – who used to own the land the high school stood on
2. W.E.B. DuBois
3. Medgar Evers
4. Malcolm X
5. slave patrols
6. Nat Turner
7. Denmark Vesey
8. Stono Rebellion
9. Toussaint Louverture
10. Abolition of the Transatlantic slave trade
11. The Middle Passage
12. Indian boarding schools
13. Indian reservations
14. Lincoln’s racism
15. Sally Hemings
16. The Map of Stolen Indian Land (those not gained through treaty)
17. Korematsu v United States
18. George Washington and Native Americans
19. Pequot Indians
20. Bartolome de Las Casas
21. Indian slaves
22. The Hispaniola genocide
23. The Nadir of American race relations (1890-1940)
24. Chinese Exclusion Act
25. FHA loans
26. GI Bill
27. White racism – except as an invisible frame through which everything was taught
28. The Third Englargement of Whiteness – or any of the other enlargements or even the idea that “white” could even change
29. Madison Grant
30. Ota Benga
31. Franz Boas
32. minstrel show
33. blackface
34. Racial stereotypes
35. The Seminole wars
36. Black Indians
37. Multiracial societies
38. Caribbean slavery
39. Brazilian slavery
40. The Great Awakening
41. Ida B. Wells
42. Bessie Coleman
43. Philippine-American War
44. David Fagen
45. Wovoka
46. The Indian Wars
47. Freedom Riders
48. SNCC
49. NAACP
50. Mormons
51. Utah statehood
52. Indian rights – or lack thereof
53. Tsien Hsue-Shen
54. Hollywood blacklist
55. Kingdom of Hawaii
56. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show – and how it shaped stereotypes about Indians
57. Miscegenation laws
58. American communism
59. Homestead Act – how it shut out blacks
60. Tuskegee Experiment
61. Tuskegee Airmen
62. Liberia
63. Fordlândia
64. United Brands
65. Racial wealth gap
66. Chinese Americans – except for building the railroads
67. Japanese Americans – covered, but not well
68. African Americans – covered, but not well
69. Italian Americans
70. Jewish Americans
71. Puerto Ricans
72. Dominican Americans
73. Chicanos
74. French Americans
75. Polish Americans
76. Irish Americans - except for the potato famine
77. Scotch-Irish Americans
78. Native Americans – before 1492 and after 1890
79. German Americans
80. David Walker’s Appeal
81. Harlem Renaissance
82. English Civil War
83. Choctaw Indians
84. Removal of the Cheyenne
85. redlining
86. blockbusting
87. white flight
88. white suburbia
89. black ghetto
90. The Great Migration
91. Immigration Acts
92. Selma
93. Martin Luther King, Jr’s anti-racism
94. Little Rock school integration
95. Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
96. American exceptionalism - except as an invisible frame
97. 1904 St Louis World’s Fair
98. American Canadians
99. American Empire
100. Cointelpro
101. California – covered, but not well
102. The genocide of Native Americans
103. Crazy Horse
104. multinational corporations
105. Black Codes
106. Rape of black slave women
107. Tulsa Riot of 1921
108. Harlem Riot of 1943
109. Rosewood massacre
110. Indian Appropriation Acts
111. sundown towns
112. Emmett Till
113. Bacon’s Rebellion
114. racial steering
115. Housing segregation
116. Critical Race Theory
117. The history of black history
118. Reconstruction – covered, but not well
119. American Museum of Natural History
120. National Geographic
121. Time magazine
122. television news
123. prisons

See also:

Programming #23

Till further notice, I will post every day at 20.09 GMT. That is currently 4:09 pm New York time. (I was going to make it 17.00, but then I found this picture of a 24-hour watch. How could I pass it up?)

Medgar Evers

Medgar Evers (1925-1963), a martyr of the American civil rights movement, died 50 years ago today on June 12th 1963. He was the head of the NAACP in Mississippi, the most racist state in the nation.

When he was boy growing up in Mississippi a friend of the family was lynched. His bloody clothes hung on a fence for a year. No one said a word about it – not in the newspapers, not at church, nowhere. On Saturday nights whites would try to run down blacks with their cars for sport or go through town beating them up.

At 17 Evers left high school to join the army. He fought for America in the Second World War against the racist Nazis to free France and Germany.

When he and his brother came back from war, they registered to vote. But on voting day 200 armed whites blocked their way. Evers knew that if he did nothing, there would be no better world for his children. So he joined the NAACP. He got his high school and college degrees and by 1954 he was the head of the NAACP for the whole state.

The NAACP took the quiet, slow lawyerly approach of fighting for equal rights for blacks by doing it in court. So when James Meredith, for example, could not get into the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) because he was black, Evers arranged to fight it in court with the help of Thurgood Marshall.

But Evers went beyond that approach. He staged protests to fight the Jim Crow laws that kept blacks out of restaurants, libraries and even parks. He staged boycotts of white businesses that supported Jim Crow. He pushed to get as many blacks registered to vote as possible despite the laws whites passed to make it hard for them to vote.

His biggest enemy, though, was black fear, the fear that kept blacks from fighting for change. His biggest weapon was his own courage, courage that allowed him to stand up to whites despite all the death threats, despite the firebomb thrown at his house, despite being one of the blacks that whites in the Deep South most wanted dead.

On the evening of June 11th 1963 just before midnight Evers came back from a late-night meeting. He got out of his car carrying T-shirts that said, “Jim Crow Must Go”. In the bushes nearby someone shot him in the back. He fell forward. He crawled to the door, his keys still in his hand. His wife heard the shot and ran to the door. She found him at the steps, face down in blood. His three children shouted, “Daddy, get up!”

The neighbours came running. Some of them were white. When Mrs Evers saw her white neighbours, in that moment she wanted to take a machine gun and gun them all down.

And that was the turning point for Mississippi, the moment when anger overcame fear. In that moment change in Mississippi and throughout the Jim Crow South became unstoppable.

See also:

• Emmett Till
• Fannie Lou Hamer
• Selma
• The Help
• Jim Crow
• Aung San Suu Kyi
• other black leaders shot dead:
  • Malcolm X
  • Martin Luther King, Jr
  • Fred Hampton
• songs inspired by Medgar Evers’s death:
  • Bob Dylan: Only a Pawn in the Game
  • Nina Simone: Mississippi Goddamn

Are White Americans the good guys of history?

Are White Americans the good guys of history? There are two main answers to this:

1. No, of course not: Genocide, slavery, Jim Crow, wars of empire in Mexico, the Caribbean, Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq, etc. Overthrow of governments, support for cruel dictators. Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, drones. And so on. They are just another dirty, ugly empire.
2. Yes:  Whatever bad they have done, everyone does. What good they have done, few achieve. The Mongols wiped out more people, Brazil had more black slaves, Rome never freed its slaves, etc. White-dominated America has brought the world freedom, democracy and television. It freed and rebuilt western Europe. It has pretty much kept the world at peace for nearly 70 years, a peace that Churchill thought would not last much  more than 30 years, a peace that could have ended in the death and destruction of Europe and North America.

The truth is, like everyone else, White Americans are a mix of good and evil.

That said, they are nowhere nearly as good as they imagine. That for several reasons:

1. American exceptionalism. They see themselves as being above history, the shining city on the hill, a light to all the world, what the whole world wants to be like. God is on their side. This goes back to the Puritans. They thought God was on their side too – as they burned peaceful Pequot Indians alive. Little has changed.
2. Moral blindness. To maintain their self-image as Basically Good they do not face up to the evil they do – which makes them yet more evil.
3. They write the history books - as winners do. But, as if basking in their own whitewashed mythology was not good enough, they also believe in the Teflon Theory of History:  that anything bad that took place over 30 years ago is Ancient History – it has Absolutely No Effect on the present.
4. They control the world’s biggest media machine – meaning they live in a land filled with their own self-serving lies and point of view.

This is why I do not waste my breath saying much good about whites. They are already tooting their own horn, the biggest in history.

They rarely hear the voices of those they screw over. They have arranged life so that they live in the constant sound of their own praise. So much so that they can no longer tell the difference between criticism and hatred, between truth and feeling.

By and large they seem incapable of seeing themselves objectively in the third person. They cannot see the dirty, ugly empire they run. They cannot see themselves as history will see them, as yet another country, not as the Automatic Good Guys of History. They have no Thucydides.

After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington they said, “Why do they hate us?”, making plain the profound historical coma into which they have slipped. Their president answered, “They hate our freedoms.”

See also:

• The White Default
• moral blindness
• Basically Good
• reading while white: history and news
• The Vast Talking Machine
• Reading Thucydides
• Edward Said: Permission to Narrate

The term “native”

Men from Vanuatu in London, from the British television show, “Meet the Natives” (2007).

A native person is someone who was born in a place or whose people come from that place. It is acceptable when applied to whites, possibly racist when applied to others. Compare:

• native of England
• native of Kenya

That bad colonial smell comes mainly from the British Empire.

By the 1630s it meant “a non-white original inhabitant of a country” – in other words, the people whose lands whites were taking over, like the American Indians.

By the 1800s it gained a clear racist edge as white rule spread quickly across North America, Australia, the Pacific, Africa and Asia.

By 1950 it meant something like the following at its worst, as the “Oxford English Dictionary” informs us:

‘Native’ can be approximated … Greedy for beads … and alcoholic drinks. Suspect of cannibalism. Addicted to drumbeating and lewd dancing. More or less naked. Sporadically treacherous. Probably polygamous and simultaneously promiscuous. Picturesque. Comic when trying to speak English or otherwise ape white ways.

Stereotypes like these helped to excuse their dispossession by whites. As British world power sank after 1945, so did use of the word.

By the 1980s “indigenous peoples” had become more common than “native peoples”.

“Indigenous” means pretty much the same thing but it does not sound as racist since whites did not use it much in their skinhead glory days of the 1800s and early 1900s. But already in the 2010s “indigenous” sounds like a well-meaning white person’s way of saying “tribal”, meaning “not civilized”. Even worse, “indigenous” is applied to plants and animals but almost never to white people, which makes it seem like indigenous people are part of nature, not a part of human society with rights.

Enter “Native”: By the 1950s American Indians began reclaiming the word “native”, writing it with a capital N. Thus the term “Native American”. “Native” is now applied more generally to all peoples native to the lands of the present-day U.S. and Canada before the European Expansion: Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, etc.

Beyond North America the word seems less common. This is partly because other terms are used for pre-Expansion peoples in other countries:

• Australia: Aboriginal, Aborigine
• New Zealand: Maori
• Israel: Palestinians
• South Africa: black South Africans

In New Zealand and Israel natives belong to a single ethnic group; in South Africa, to the same (Western-defined) race. Thus no need to use a more general term. Many would not regard Palestinians or black South Africans as “indigenous” because they are seen as “civilized” (live in cities).

Does it make sense to have a common term for these people? Yes, because they all face issues of settler colonialism taking over their land and, in many cases, the education of their young. It is a process that goes back to Columbus and is still going on. “Indigenous” is already the wrong word. “Native” still sounds too racist, but that seems to be changing. Best would be a word that makes clear their cultural and land rights.

See also:

• Other terms:
  • tribe
  • ethnic
  • illegal immigrant
  • Indian
  • sub-Saharan Africa
  • Middle East
  • Europe
  • race
• Christopher Columbus
  • John Trudell: When Columbus Got Off The Boat
• Mighty Whitey
• Natives through the National Geographic lens - here “native” means non-Westerner
• Native Americans according to Western thought: a brief history

The Byrds: Turn! Turn! Turn!

Remarks:

This went to #1 on the American pop charts in 1965, #26 in Britain. It is a cover of a Pete Seeger song. The words come almost straight out of  the King James Bible, Ecclesiastes 3:1.

Lyrics:

To everything – turn, turn, turn
There is a season – turn, turn, turn
And a time for every purpose under heaven

A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep

To everything – turn, turn, turn
There is a season – turn, turn, turn
And a time for every purpose under heaven

A time to build up, a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time to cast away stones
A time to gather stones together

To everything – turn, turn, turn
There is a season – turn, turn, turn
And a time for every purpose under heaven

A time of war, a time of peace
A time of love, a time of hate
A time you may embrace
A time to refrain from embracing

To everything – turn, turn, turn
There is a season – turn, turn, turn
And a time for every purpose under heaven

A time to gain, a time to lose
A time to rend, a time to sew
A time to love, a time to hate
A time of peace, I swear it’s not too late!

The Anything But Racism argument

The Anything But Racism argument, common among White Americans, says that racism is so dead that it is the least likely cause of the races being unequal, like in housing, education, unemployment, police protection, banking, life expectancy, infant mortality, etc. There must be some Perfectly Logical Reason that has nothing to do with racism.

For example, in 2009 the New York Times reported that blacks in New York were four times more likely to be out of work than whites, much higher than a year before. The Times’s (white) reporters examined several possible causes – but racism was not one of them!

The logical reasoning goes like this:

1. Racism is pretty much dead. Only the Klan, skinheads and people who use the n-word are still racist.
2. Therefore a case of racial inequality must have some other cause.  Sure, there is still some racism, but it is so rare that it must be proved beyond the shadow of a doubt. Like murder or an appearance of the Blessed Virgin Mary (pictured).
3. Since it is not white people who are screwed up, it must be blacks.

But the emotional reasoning goes like this:

1. Holy crap!
2. White people are not racist! They are good people! No one I know is racist – well, except maybe my grandmother. This cannot be right. There must be some mistake.
3. There must be some Perfectly Logical Reason that has Absolutely Nothing To Do With Racism. What is it? Think, think, think.
4. I know, I can buy time by making them “prove” it was racism. Demand peer-reviewed articles, statistics, all of it. Buy more time by finding holes in those.
5. If all else fails, derail: “Blacks are the racist ones,”, etc.

This is not to say that the “It Must Racism” argument is any better. It is just as extreme.

But, given:

• that America has a violently racist past;
• that at least 80% of whites are still racist – not in a Klan way, but in what they assume about people;
• that whites still pretty much control stuff like the courts, police, press, schools, banks, labour market, housing market, etc,

The “It Could Be Racism” argument needs to be seriously and honestly considered. To dismiss it out of hand or not even consider it, like many whites do, is not level-headed.

The trouble is that a huge part of white people’s self-image is based on being white. But to maintain that image as something good requires heavy layers of duct tape called moral blindness. This argument is a piece of that duct tape.

The irony, of course, is that Anything But Racism is itself racist. Notice where the Presumption of Pathology lies: it is never white people who are screwed up but always black people, Latinos or whoever. Not that black people, say, are perfect, that they do not have issues of their own that have nothing to do with racism. They do. But white people are screwed up too – but they have the cultural power to make their pathologies seem “normal”.

See also:

• How to argue like a white racist
• colour blind racism: the four frames
• just world doctrine
• Basically Good
• moral blindness