I just came across the Washington State Historical Society website today. This is a great resource, with some really cool digital collections and interactive pages on Lewis and Clark and Washington Indian Treaties, among others.
Well worth a look:
http://www.wshs.org/
Thursday, May 16, 2013
Thursday, May 2, 2013
A (Very) Short History of (Local) Racism, Part 1
I recently completed a research paper on racism in video games, and it got me thinking about local racism. Arguably, our historical struggle with racism is one of (if not the) defining characteristics of our nation.
We all know the stories -- some of the names and dates -- but I think there's a tendency to resign these things to the past, and to think of us now as a "post-racism" society. The research I did on current racist images and symbols in popular culture strongly disagrees, but that's a discussion for another blog (or, I strongly encourage you to look into it for yourself) ..
In any case, although this region was "founded" on imperialist ideals, I think there's a strong tendency to imaginatively isolate ourselves from the rest of the country. The Pacific Northwest as we know it was born as a "hinterland" -- a bit separate and different from other parts of the nation -- and I think we collectively hold onto that. In my experience, Everett is a very caring town, and very inclusive and accepting of diversity (mind you, I say this as a privileged white male who's never actually experienced discrimination) ... the actions of our local institutions in modern decades in its attempts to honor and include diverse viewpoints is something to be proud of.
So even though, obviously, a history of oppression and discrimination lurks below the surface of our history, we don't like to look at it.
Personally, I was shocked to read passages like this in our official History of Snohomish County (William Whitfield, 1926):
"All students and writers seem to agree, however, that the aboriginees of the Pacific Northwest represented a much lower stage of intellectual development than those of other regions of the continent."
"Owing to the fact that nature provided here in season a wonderful and ample, and unfailing bounty of food and other material to gratify all the human wants of a primitive people, there was no incentive to break away from the simple habits and arts of the fathers and experiment with strange things with a view to progress." (817)
Whitfield also points out the Natives' lack of knowledge about metals and smelting, or the value of thrift or hard work. He paints them as a people of "leisure," gluttons devoted to sport and gambling, whose prime ambition was to amass property to give away at the "big hiyu potlach" (817). Of course we can now see here the seeds of persistent racial stereotypes.
You can almost feel the shock of white culture in Whitfield's writing that these people didn't want to know how to exploit the land, or devote their lives to making a profit and working towards American conceptions of "progress." By taking the time to look at Native culture and histories with an eye for embracing and understanding differences, we can see that these types of white American ideals were completely foreign to the Native worldview -- not a result of laziness or ineptitude.
Whitfield does also go out of his way to dispel (apparently popular) myths by providing evidence that the Natives here "were not barbarians" (by this he meant cannibals) and not "warlike" (815-816).
Really, I don't think Whitfield's comments about the Native peoples come from a place of hatred, but rather, are the natural extension of white imperialism. In his excellent and insightful book, Racism: A Short History, Standford History professor George M. Fredrickson points out that racism is not at the heart of the imperialist ideology, but a rather a symptom of it. Although the belief in "the superiority of 'civilized' white males over 'barbarous' or 'savage' people" is an "essential rationale" behind imperialism, many believed in the capacity of these peoples to be "civilized," or tamed and assimilated into mainstream (white) American culture (as was attempted here through the Indian Boarding School and allotment farming).
In this way, the grab for power and resources can be justified to those within the empire as an act of philanthropy, as a regional improvement project.
We can also say that Whitfield's comments were written in 1926, a time before Hitler, WWII, the Cold War, and the Civil Rights (and American Indian Rights) Movement de-legitimized racist speech and the scientific idea of eugenics. But that doesn't make them any less racist.
You might be saying, "So what? This all happened so long ago. I wasn't a part of it. Let it go..."
Well, my best answer to that (and why digging up and talking about history is important) is best articulated by Derrick Jensen in his epic treatise on racism and imperialism, The Culture of Make Believe :
"I leave it to black people to interpret their experience of living in our culture, and to Indians their experience, and women theirs. Instead it falls to me -- and others of my race and gender -- to explore and articulate -- and thus, I hope, help to halt -- the white male experience of hatred: How did we come to enslave our continent, significantly depopulate another, and work our will on all of the others? How, in short, have we come to conquer the world? Why have we wanted to do it in the first place? And can we stop wanting it?
Although the . . . movements of history can be interesting, in and of themselves they are meaningless. Any exploration of them must return to the personal, to the particular, because that's all we've got.
If we wish to stop the atrocities, we will need to understand and change the social and economic conditions that cause them." (preface, xi-xii).
Revisiting the past and charting new maps is part of this process. I can't think of anything more personal and particular than the place you live, work, grew up in .. the streets you drive and walk everyday, and the parks you take your kids to play in.
(To be Continued ...)
(Also, I highly recommend everybody in the area visit the Hibulb Cultural Center in Tulalip. There is a fascinating (and horrifying) exhibit on local racism there.
We all know the stories -- some of the names and dates -- but I think there's a tendency to resign these things to the past, and to think of us now as a "post-racism" society. The research I did on current racist images and symbols in popular culture strongly disagrees, but that's a discussion for another blog (or, I strongly encourage you to look into it for yourself) ..
In any case, although this region was "founded" on imperialist ideals, I think there's a strong tendency to imaginatively isolate ourselves from the rest of the country. The Pacific Northwest as we know it was born as a "hinterland" -- a bit separate and different from other parts of the nation -- and I think we collectively hold onto that. In my experience, Everett is a very caring town, and very inclusive and accepting of diversity (mind you, I say this as a privileged white male who's never actually experienced discrimination) ... the actions of our local institutions in modern decades in its attempts to honor and include diverse viewpoints is something to be proud of.
So even though, obviously, a history of oppression and discrimination lurks below the surface of our history, we don't like to look at it.
Personally, I was shocked to read passages like this in our official History of Snohomish County (William Whitfield, 1926):
"All students and writers seem to agree, however, that the aboriginees of the Pacific Northwest represented a much lower stage of intellectual development than those of other regions of the continent."
"Owing to the fact that nature provided here in season a wonderful and ample, and unfailing bounty of food and other material to gratify all the human wants of a primitive people, there was no incentive to break away from the simple habits and arts of the fathers and experiment with strange things with a view to progress." (817)
Whitfield also points out the Natives' lack of knowledge about metals and smelting, or the value of thrift or hard work. He paints them as a people of "leisure," gluttons devoted to sport and gambling, whose prime ambition was to amass property to give away at the "big hiyu potlach" (817). Of course we can now see here the seeds of persistent racial stereotypes.
You can almost feel the shock of white culture in Whitfield's writing that these people didn't want to know how to exploit the land, or devote their lives to making a profit and working towards American conceptions of "progress." By taking the time to look at Native culture and histories with an eye for embracing and understanding differences, we can see that these types of white American ideals were completely foreign to the Native worldview -- not a result of laziness or ineptitude.
Whitfield does also go out of his way to dispel (apparently popular) myths by providing evidence that the Natives here "were not barbarians" (by this he meant cannibals) and not "warlike" (815-816).
Really, I don't think Whitfield's comments about the Native peoples come from a place of hatred, but rather, are the natural extension of white imperialism. In his excellent and insightful book, Racism: A Short History, Standford History professor George M. Fredrickson points out that racism is not at the heart of the imperialist ideology, but a rather a symptom of it. Although the belief in "the superiority of 'civilized' white males over 'barbarous' or 'savage' people" is an "essential rationale" behind imperialism, many believed in the capacity of these peoples to be "civilized," or tamed and assimilated into mainstream (white) American culture (as was attempted here through the Indian Boarding School and allotment farming).
In this way, the grab for power and resources can be justified to those within the empire as an act of philanthropy, as a regional improvement project.
We can also say that Whitfield's comments were written in 1926, a time before Hitler, WWII, the Cold War, and the Civil Rights (and American Indian Rights) Movement de-legitimized racist speech and the scientific idea of eugenics. But that doesn't make them any less racist.
You might be saying, "So what? This all happened so long ago. I wasn't a part of it. Let it go..."
Well, my best answer to that (and why digging up and talking about history is important) is best articulated by Derrick Jensen in his epic treatise on racism and imperialism, The Culture of Make Believe :
"I leave it to black people to interpret their experience of living in our culture, and to Indians their experience, and women theirs. Instead it falls to me -- and others of my race and gender -- to explore and articulate -- and thus, I hope, help to halt -- the white male experience of hatred: How did we come to enslave our continent, significantly depopulate another, and work our will on all of the others? How, in short, have we come to conquer the world? Why have we wanted to do it in the first place? And can we stop wanting it?
Although the . . . movements of history can be interesting, in and of themselves they are meaningless. Any exploration of them must return to the personal, to the particular, because that's all we've got.
If we wish to stop the atrocities, we will need to understand and change the social and economic conditions that cause them." (preface, xi-xii).
Revisiting the past and charting new maps is part of this process. I can't think of anything more personal and particular than the place you live, work, grew up in .. the streets you drive and walk everyday, and the parks you take your kids to play in.
(To be Continued ...)
(Also, I highly recommend everybody in the area visit the Hibulb Cultural Center in Tulalip. There is a fascinating (and horrifying) exhibit on local racism there.
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