I live in New Zealand, and like so many other countries it gives me a strange view of the USA. I’m familiar with so many things that are alien to my life. As a child I read of twinkies and home room. As a political blogger I read of primaries and supreme court appointments. But there’s much I don’t really understand. Sometimes that ignorance is a hinderence. There are things I’d genuinely like to know1 But sometimes this difference means I see things that people more immersed may miss.
On Womanist Musings Renee began a post: “The original sin of the United States is undoubtedly slavery.”2 It’s not true, the original sin, the origin sin, of the United States is colonisation. I’m not making an argument of primacy, or importance. Just of chronology. Statements such as this render colonialism, and native Americans, invisible. It invokes the idea of the colonial idea of Terra Nullis, where there were no people before colonisation, and no sin before slavery.
I read a lot of American feminist blogs, and I’m always surprised by the silence around colonialism (and I know Renee is Canadian, which makes this even stranger to me). On an intellectual level I understand the factors that tend to mean that American progressives spend less time thinking and talking about colonialism than New Zealand progressives do. But I don’t grok it – I can’t imagine it – I’ve no idea how it changes your political worldview. 3
So I thought I’d ask left-wing commenters from America and Canada, what role colonialism plays in their political analysis and understanding of their country and it’s history and racism.
Edited to Add: Just in case there was any doubt, I fully agree with Renee’s point about reparations for slavery in the post that I linked to. The line I quoted is the only line that I take issue with.
- like why aren’t the left doing a nut about the law and order-ness of the latest supreme court judge. It seems to me that the right threw a tantram about that female judge who didn’t get nominated and they got someone they liked more. Whereas the left says “Yay she’s a centrist.” Amp has tried to explain this to me, but I don’t understand [↩]
- Personally I’m not sure about the use of ‘original sin’ as a metaphor, not just for theological reasons (I don’t know enough about the theology of original sin), but that I think the personification of nations naturalises them in a way that is unhelpful. [↩]
- I say this not to say I’m a great example on Maori sovereignty, but just that it’s a thread that I can’t imagine politics without. [↩]
I’d say the origonal sin of the US was the fact that it was a colony because that was England/Germany/Spain’s doing. I’d say it was the conquest of the native americans.
I also noticed the “original sin” language in that post and thought of the extermination of the native population. But I also am not really up on my Bible and don’t really know what Renee meant by “original sin.” I think there is a concept of original sin as not necessarily just/primarily first in time but a permanent stain upon humanity. Although, the treatment of the native population at/around the founding of our country is that too.
In my understanding of original sin, it is something all people are born and live with, regardless of our actions after birth. It is a tendency towards sin, and possibly a collective guilt. In that sense, it seems to be a perfect metaphor for the legacy of colonialism, which the United States as a country inherited when we were born.
I think the reasons Americans don’t talk about colonialism much is because we have such a strung colonial narrative about ourselves. Rather than inheriting the sin, we believe we conquered it along with its perpetrator, England. WE were the colony, WE were oppressed by big, bad England, WE fought them to end the travesty. Since there are already a protagonist and an antagonist, native peoples are ignored as not integral to the story. (And once you’re ignoring them, might as well ignore all the actions the United States took after it gained its nationhood to oppress and push back native tribes.) The lure of that origin myth is very strong in American culture and leads to these passive, unexamined beliefs that colonialism is not part of our history.
(Just to be clear, I think this is a really interesting point and agree that colonialism should be more present in dialogue here in the US. My wife is from Canada, and finds it very strange and tragic the extent to which what she would call First Nations culture has been completely erased here.)
Hm, this is a really interesting question.
Speaking as a Canadian, I wonder if part of the reason for the focus on the impact of slavery on American society is simply a matter of population. The problems faced by African Americans, from the period of slavery through to the present, are more visible because they affect a larger number of people (a quick look at wikipedia suggests a US population of ~30 million African Americans vs. ~2.5 million Native Americans). Certainly in Toronto, it seems like there is greater focus, at least in the mainstream media, on the Black community than on the First Nations community, although I don’t think that’s the case in every Canadian city.
I also think that the major reason why we do not pay much attention to the impacts of colonization on our society, and particularly its impact on the First Nations, is that it is still glossed over in our mainstream education system. For example, when I was in elementary and high school (and I’m 25, so it wasn’t that long ago), we did one section on the Aztecs in 6th grade, and one section on “les Autochtones Canadiennes” in 8th grade, and that was the extent of our education on the non-European history of the Americas. Neither section discussed the period of colonization, or the devastation of European diseases, enslavement, and appropriation of land, or the “treaties” that were made with First Nations peoples. The section on Canadian indigenous people did not involve much in the way of specifics about different peoples (didn’t even note the distinction made between Metis, First Nations, and Inuit, for example), their early and late interactions with the French and English, or more contemporary issues such as the residential school system and the ongoing land claims. In short, we’ve erased this history for much of our society; I for one really only encountered it when I joined a university program that does discuss colonialism (and does not focus on First Nations). To me, it’s not that surprising that most non-First Nations Canadians simply don’t *see* the sin of colonization.
[It also strikes me that Canadians tolerate a much higher level of overt racism toward the First Nations than we do towards any other group (not to say that other racialized groups, and Black people in particular according to some recent studies, do not face racism as well). In particular, I’m thinking of the protests that are ongoing in Southern Ontario around the land claims in Caledonia, which has certain area residents saying they want to form a “militia” to protect themselves from the First Nations protesters who have been occupying a contested site, as well as the pervasive stereotypes about alcohol and drug use on reserves. I think that disconnect in our education about our history is why.]
1. “We liberals” tend to live more in the major cities. Black people and gay people and Hispanic people live in the cities with us — well, not RIGHT next to us, but close enough that we sometimes see them when we are shopping downtown. Native Americans live way the heck out in Oklahoma or New Mexico or one of those Dakotas. And even there, there’s likely a big difference between “the ghetto” and “the reservation,” in terms of interaction with the white liberals. Out of sight, out of mind.
2. Because they are not “here,” they do not apply for jobs here. Lots of problems today have to do with employment discrimination. When the New Haven fire department is putting together a test, and wants to make sure that it isn’t racist, it looks at how the black fire fighters do and how the Hispanic fire fighters do. Is there even a Native American on the force? If so, it is one or two, not enough to show up in the statistics.
3. Because of (1) and (2), the issues tend to not be individuals or corporations discriminating against Indians, but the government discriminating (mostly through malign neglect.) The Bureau of Indian Affairs is majorly FUBAR. Medical care on reservations is a major issue. But there never appears to be a good “villain,” just a bunch of well-intentioned incompetents, who are in an untenable situation. “The government is incompetent to handle the situation” is a good Conservative talking point, but it’s not the sort of point that Liberals feel comfortable hammering home, so they don’t. And without any specific event, you don’t get in the newspaper. A news story like “Millions of Indians still below poverty line” could be the headline every day, and because nothing has changed, it never is.
4. Casinos. While most Native Americans remain very, very poor, a small percentage have recently gotten very, very rich. In many places, the nearest Indian Casino is much closer than Atlantic City or Las Vegas, and no one goes to a reservation without a casino, so there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance between “Indians are very poor” and “Not the ones I’ve seen!”
5. Native American activist groups seemed to have peaked quickly in the 1970s and then quickly faded out. I have no idea why. But you don’t hear from them live you do from the NAACP. Out of news, out of mind.
tariqata: “I wonder if part of the reason for the focus on the impact of slavery on American society is simply a matter of population. The problems faced by African Americans, from the period of slavery through to the present, are more visible because they affect a larger number of people (a quick look at wikipedia suggests a US population of ~30 million African Americans vs. ~2.5 million Native Americans).”
Well, yeah, but we also have to take into account that the reason there are so few Native Americans is because the colonisers murdered so many of them. Weren’t there something like 50,000,000 killed in what’s now the US alone?
Of course, if what you meant was that the fact there are so few Native Americans relative to African Americans means that the rest of the popluation isn’t confronted by the issue very often, I agree, that probably is significant.
joe: “I’d say the origonal sin of the US was the fact that it was a colony because that was England/Germany/Spain’s doing.”
I can’t agree with this. This seems to say that present-day Americans of European descent aren’t connected to the colonisation because that was “someone else’s” doing. The entire reason there are European Americans is because of colonisation. You can’t simply divorce the two things simply because you don’t personally identify as European any more.
This is indeed what I meant, apologies if that wasn’t clear from my post!
I’m not sure who first used the phrase, but referring to slavery as the original sin of the United States has a history. I’ve heard it many times, and I don’t think it’s occurred to me until now to question why we use that term for slavery, why we don’t use it to refer to colonization and why we don’t think much about colonization.
Not that a Google search is the be all and end all of sociological research, but Googling “original sin slavery” comes up with tons of hits using it just as Renee did. Googling “original sin colonization” comes up with a lot of references to the religious beliefs of early American colonists, a few references to Israel and a few references that use the term in a way similar to the slavery references or the way you’re using it here.
I agree with Emily that original sin carries a connotation of a permanent stain or an ongoing contamination, and I think a lot of Americans (especially left-leaning ones) have a sense that the legacy of slavery continues to affect our society in really negative ways. We are born into this society with this legacy and we have to grapple with it, even if we ourselves didn’t do anything.
I think the way we get taught the history of native peoples/original European colonization/Westward expansion is that the history is a closed chapter. Native peoples got a really raw deal and lots of bad stuff was done, but they aren’t around anymore, so it’s a closed chapter, nothing to be done about it now. I’m white, and I knew kids growing up who were black, who were Latino, who were Asian – but I didn’t meet someone who was American Indian until I was 24. And when I first met this person, I just assumed he was Latino because even though I knew on an intellectual level that there still are native people in the United States, on a subconscious level, I thought of them as something from the past, from history books, from movies – not something still going on and with continued significance for this country.
I also think the way we are taught about the American Revolution leaves us seeing ourselves (white Americans) as the colonized and the Europeans as the colonizers. We threw off colonial oppression. I don’t get the impression that’s how Australians and New Zealanders see themselves. I don’t think their history and the way they became independent would lend itself to that sort of narrative. Is that right?
Reparations in the US has absolutely no chance of happening.
Adolph Reed makes the case against the idea:
http://educationright.tripod.com/id266.htm
I would agree with that.
Speaking as a kiwi woman that has lived in the US for almost 8 years now (going home permanently in a few months tho!), I have to agree with Maia on this conundrum (hell, I was discussing this after class yesterday afternoon with one of my african-american undergrad students). Namely, that the race paradigm in the US is not the same race paradigm that I grew up with, and I do have to check myself often in remembering such.
For a start off, one major difference is that white New Zealanders actually have a word for ourselves as white New Zealanders; pakeha. White Americans don’t really have a name for themselves in the same way; they operate very much more so as the unnamed, and hence hegemonic, default (this is not to say that Pakehas aren’t also hegemonic in NZ, but it operates differently … naming has real power).
But I think chingona touches on another thing going on … Americans (particularly white Americans) see their history as beginning with the War of Independence. There is not a continuous historical line in the collective white consciousness back to colonisation (you see this in westerns and the like, which are almost treated likes stories of another culture in US popular media), and so whites do not really see themselves as connected to the same degree as they do to the slavery eras (naturally, this is stupid, but it’s nonetheless there).
Whereas New Zealanders, Canadians (and to a far lesser extent, Australians) do have that constant historical connection to our colonial past. While white NZ’ers do very much see themselves as NZ’ers, our connections to the commonwealth and hence Britain, are still very much in place (you can see this still in the cultural practice of the coming-of-age rite of “The Big OE” (Overseas Experience), where NZ youth (late teens, early 20’s) are kinda expected to spend a considerable amount of time living in England, and tripping around Europe).
I’ve really noticed that here in the US when lecturing on race issues, I have Native American students come up to me after class with looks of thanks on their faces, because they are so used to just be mentioned in passing, if that, when it comes to questions of race. Their genocide has been forgotten in the US, even as they still feel the pain.
Slavery was fairly straightforward: First there was no, or very little, black slavery in the U.S. Then there was, and there was a lot of it. Then there wasn’t (legally) after the civil war, though there was a lot of other harm related to race. But slavery was an easily identifiable harm and an easily identifiable time period. Moreover, all aspects of slavery are now acknowledged to be harmful and inappropriate in the modern age.
OTOH, colonization and the effects on the native residents of the country were more of a “death by small cuts” kind of thing. The time period is longer and is more difficult to define. Making matters more complex, there are elements of colonization which when viewed in isolation are not obviously problematic. Many individual land transactions or individual settlements are not in and of themselves necessarily identifiable as wrongdoing, even when they served as part of a greater whole which caused a larger problem. (Buying Manhattan was not necessarily bad in isolation. Buying Manhattan in the context of driving off or killing most of the Northeast native residents is obviously bad. That makes it harder to analyze because you can’t just say “look, this is bad!” the way you can with slavery.)
There are certain things which were identifiably wrong in isolation–treaties being broken, slaughters of innocents, and the like. those things are more obvious to talk about and in fact they’re a more obvious part of our history teachings.
Similarly, slavery, while obviously practiced by a variety of countries, is directly attributable to the U.S. Once we were established as a nation we had the complete ability to stop slavery, and we didn’t–so there’s no question that “we” as a country were complicit.
The U.S. was also quite complicit in colonization, though arguably more so for the midwest and western states. But some of the U.S. land was acquired from third parties after the initial killing or driving out of the native population had already been accomplished. This doesn’t mean that the colonization stuff was OK of course, but it partially explains why people tend not to view (for example) the actions of the French or Spanish or British as being “U.S. history” to the same degree as they do the actions of the U.S. government.
Sarah, I used to know a woman from NZ who was also white and she said that she had been taught to feel that Maori culture was also part of her culture and she identified with it to a certain extent. I didn’t get the chance to really talk to her in depth about this, but I’ve always wondered about it. Was this also part of your experience?
Maia, sorry, but I can’t find authors’ bios here (am I looking straight at them without seeing?), so I’m not sure how you identify. If my question also applies to you as well, I’d be grateful if you’d respond too.
Crys –
Honestly? Yes … I tear up far more for the Maori language version of the National Anthem, Maori words pop into mind often in reference to things (like ‘kai’ for food), and ‘kia-ora’ is everywhere back home as a greeting. I expect Maori ceremonial openings for political and national events, and feel their absence here, and the special connection to the land.
To me, Maori culture is a part of who I am as a New Zealander, because of being a part of NZ. However, I am also quite aware that I don’t own or have any right to Maori culture, given I have no Maori ancestry (seriously, I’m of Welsh, English and Dutch ethnicities … any more white and I’d be transparent). I cannot make any claim to Maori culture, even though it is a part of making me who I am as a Pakeha (I do wish more white kiwis would get this).
Another part of this is that in NZ there aren’t the same taboos against interracial dating like there are in the US (which are less in the Pacific states, but in the midwest, south, and east, outside of the urban areas, the taboo is very strongly present), so many people in NZ, while being Pakeha, will have some Maori ancestry (that was some racial policing I experienced here in the US, as me being open to dating women of colour was considered something to be quite often remarked upon by others, whereas I hadn’t thought twice about it). Hence, despite being white, many Pakeha recognise a connection to Maori history.
It’s a little different for those of us who live in American states with big Native populations and Native political presence – I live, for instance, one neighborhood over from the densest urban Native population in the US, the home of the American Indian Movement, in a region where political maneuverings between tribal governments and state governments are pretty constant. White people here are aware of Native issues, even if they wouldn’t use the word colonialism.
My home town has Fort in the name because it was a front in the Dakota wars; my grandparents farmed land taken directly from Native people and given to Northern European immigrants; one of our nearby elementary schools teaches Anishanaabe language and culture.
And in that context I’d say – colonialism is a huge part of my political consciousness, but it’s very hard to talk about because it’s an ongoing process. It’s not over, the way slavery is – it’s evolving and being contested all the time, the way racism is. It’s also, in an economic sense rather than a cultural sense, something the settler-culture towns in rural areas suffer in relationship to the cities and coastal areas of the US.
The other thing that makes it harder to talk about is that it’s not a binary history. with one European colonizer and one Native group – there were several sets of colonizers and many Native nations. I don’t know if that was true in New Zealand.
I think the “do white people appropriate other cultures because they have no culture of their own?” question that comes up a lot in American left circles is definitely a colonialism question, though it is striking how little that word is used, now that I think of it.
part of this overlooking the US’ colonial past might be an instinctive defense of the national identity as a nation of immigrants. colonizing isn’t exactly the same as immigrating, of course, but the phenomena are similar enough that criticizing one might bleed over into criticizing the other — and being a nation of immigrants is, after all, one of the USA’s genuinely good sides, on balance at least.
or that might be my immigrant-to-the-USA self viewing things through an overly personal lens, i suppose.
As a white urban Canadian, the only time the First Nations enter the political dialogue is when they take to the streets with guns, more or less. There’s an occasional mention whenever some developer starts turning First Nations land into a golf course – usually framed in terms of the First Nations obstructing some supposedly reasonable action. My history course did talk a very little bit about the people who were here before the Europeans arrived, but a couple of weeks of a crummy history course was hardly effective in making us understand the destructive history. That said, the North is largely still Native land (since the Europeans didn’t and don’t want it), and there aren’t the same casinos, so the situation is a little different here too. From the little I know, the poverty is the same.
On the other hand, the aftermath of slavery is also felt very differently here. This is mostly because there aren’t very many black people here, and most of them are relatively recent immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean. We certainly still have racism, but the parts I see (as a white middle-class woman) are mostly anti-immigrant sentiment (whipped up by the government for political reasons). And people who immigrated from Ethiopia, the Ivory Coast, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo are in a rather different cultural situation than people whose grandparents were slaves here in North America.
Even the anti-immigrant sentiment I see takes a rather different form from that I see from the US. I think this is largely because our immigration policies generally can control who immigrates – for purely geographic reasons, we don’t have the thousands upon thousands of people sneaking across our borders and trying to live without papers that the US does.
“We liberals” tend to live more in the major cities. Black people and gay people and Hispanic people live in the cities with us — well, not RIGHT next to us, but close enough that we sometimes see them when we are shopping downtown.
Actually, I live in a major Canadian city and people of all different types, including black people, gay people, and first nations people do indeed live RIGHT next to me. Within a block.
And, as a midwesterner (originally from the Detroit area), I can say that almost all the “black” and “white” people I grew up with had native ancestry somewhere in their families. I think a lot of America’s natives intermarried with European and African Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and subsequently “disappeared” – particularly in the south, east, and midwest, where there was far less flat-out war with native tribes than in the west.
Chingona said “I agree with Emily that original sin carries a connotation of a permanent stain or an ongoing contamination, and I think a lot of Americans (especially left-leaning ones) have a sense that the legacy of slavery continues to affect our society in really negative ways. We are born into this society with this legacy and we have to grapple with it, even if we ourselves didn’t do anything.”
I feel that sense for colonialism (I’m Australian). Colonialism colours interactions with all the other nations we trade with in Asia/Oceania, as well as domestic interactions with indigenous people. It’s not possible to divorce ourselves from the fact that we stole an entire continent and were implicit (as Europeans) in the subjugation or oppression of other cultures around the region.
I notice when there’s no acknowledgement of the traditional owners of the land at events here in Australia and especially when overseas, and it’s noticeable how much the notion of colonialism is absent from US politics compared to ours.
I wish that Australia integrated the teaching of native cultures and peoples into its school curriculum the way that NZ does. It seems to me that’s a vital step towards true reconciliation.
Slavery as the “original sin” of the United States goes back even to the 1840s, while slavery was still legal. I think this is for several reasons:
(1) The United States often is seen as a kind of legalistic construction. We do not have an ethnic identity or shared culture or really even a shared language. The country was made by its Constitution. That Constitution referred to the existence of persons who were, in a sense, considered only “three-fifths” of a person, and (less well known) provided for them to be recaptured if they attempted to escape servitude. (Art. IV, Sec. 2: “No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, But shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.”)
The Constitution treats Native Americans (or as they’re called in the document, “Indians”) as essentially foreigners to the United States. Congress is given the power to regulate commerce with the sovereign Indian tribes; “Indians not taxed” (I assume meaning Indians who are living on reservations and therefore under tribal law) are not counted for the purposes of determining Congressional representation. This held true even with the great alterations made to the Constitution by the Civil War Amendments; the 14th Amendment gets rid of the 3/5 thing but still says, “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.”
So our founding document contains within it the administration of slavery, but does not provide for colonization, and indeed if you were relying solely on the Constitution, you would have no reason to believe that Native Americans were treated as subhuman and targeted for genocide. Hey, they’re treated as sovereign! They get to decide whether they want to participate in the U.S. or remain separate! Gorgeous B.S.
(2) A large and powerful group of white Americans had it in their interests to portray slavery — and particularly, those who owned slaves — as extremely wicked, whereas no white American had it in his interests to portray colonialism and the colonists that way. While abolitionists never constituted a majority of the Yankee population (and by no means was the Union army made up entirely of people desperate to end slavery), during the course of the Civil War and Reconstruction, it was politically necessary to propagandize (I use the word in a non-pejorative, descriptive sense) about what a great cleansing thing it would be stop the spread of slavery; and later in the war, to stop slavery entirely; and during Reconstruction, to punish those wicked slave-owning Southerners.
Of course, all of these Yankees were living on land taken from Native Americans. Those new territories that they were happy to settle but didn’t want to have slaves upon were made up of land taken from Native Americans by force or fraud. In whose interest was it to make a big deal about that?
(3) To this day, it makes us feel better to think of slavery as the “original sin” because we have repented of it. We nearly crucified our country to end it in the Civil War (if you believe in this infantile interpretation of why the Civil War began). You even have appalling asses like David Horowitz claiming that slavery really did people of African descent a favor, because they’d be so much worse off if they still were in Africa.
We’ve done something between jack and shit to repent of colonizing the continent. That’s sort of discomforting for non-Native Americans. Our legal system has been uncomfortable with the fact of how Native Americans were treated, and occasionally has had attempts at providing some justice, as with Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. (6 Pet.) 515 (1832), the case to which President Andrew Jackson supposedly said “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”
Thanks for the comments. I had no idea that slavery as the original sin had a history.
Sylvia – the AMerican myth about itself was something that I hadn’t thought of (I was thinking more in terms of the other issues brought up in this thread, the physical presence of descendents of slaves in most parts of the country, and the physical absense of indigenous people).
Sarah and Chingona – the stretch back to independence is interesting, but presumably as Sylvia says in order for that myth to be sustained an awful lot of ignrorance needs to be held onto. I know much less about 19th C Ameican history than 20th, but the Ingalls family were participating in the colonial project. Colonialism wasn’t nearly done in the 18th Century.
Crys T – I am Pakeha – I don’t think I’d express it quite like that, but I know what the woman means. I would say that for me familiarity with Maori culture, and knowing how to take part when it’s appropriate is quite common part of Pakeha New Zealanders culture. Powhiri (Maori welcomes) are part of all sorts of events – we’d have several a year at my high school. Even if you haven’t done any particular study of Maori language or culture, you know enough to take part and be respectful. Part of the powhiri is a waiata (song) and a random group of mostly pakeha activists from all over the country would have a couple of waiata that htey all knew that they could choose to sing. To me that’s pretty normal. I think aspects of this can become problematic both in obvious ways, such as the drunk people doing the haka in London as if it was there’s, and in more subtle ways. As I understand it the powhiri that are done outside Marae within Pakeha institutions miss much of the key features of the powhiri.
I think this has other effects than culture. I think it’s much harder for NZers to forget that we are standing on stolen land, even if you don’t express it like that.
Rosa – Thanks for your perspective. What you say sounds familiar to my understanding of colonialism. It makes sense In New Zealand there were many iwi (tribes), each of which had different histories of colonisation, but only one colonising force for much of the time (although even that was complicated, because there were competing interests – the church was colonising for its own reasons, and settlers and the government didn’t necessarily agree with how to go about colonising).
PG – those ideas are really interesting – and to take it a little bit further – it would be impossible to repent for colonisation, because that would involve giving the land back. The demand and thei mplications of that demand, is unthinkable.
I was trying to ask some other questions that I don’t think came through. I don’t know how to even ask them except in a really provocative way – to identify parts of my politics that I see as part of understanding colonialism and going “Don’t you have this?”
For people who live in colonial countries where that doesn’t come up very much how/does land figure in your political analysis?
I can’t even express this as a question – but it seems to me that American analyses of racism often seem disconnected from racism’s material basis. I wonder sometimes if that’s at least partly because the history of colonialism is so hidden (but it doesn’t make sense because clearly slavery also had a material basis).
Right. But we don’t think of that as colonialism. And thinking that way does involve a lot of willful ignoring of history. Even for me, I have to think to think of it as colonialism. If you just say “colonialism,” I think of the British. I mean, it’s there on an intellectual level, but not in a quick association kind of way. Manifest Destiny – the idea that the United States should stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific, that it should occupy the territory it currently occupies – is, I think, extremely naturalized to us.
As for how not having that affects my political outlook, I think that’s pretty hard to answer. If I’m understanding you correctly when you talk about racism’s material basis (looking at who benefits materially from racism? is that what you mean?), I would agree that we don’t think of racism like that very much and I think there’s a lot of resistance to looking at it that way. Slavery was material, but I think it was so blatantly material that it almost makes it easier to not see the materialism in other types of racism (kind of like the Holocaust becomes the, uh, gold standard for genocide, and there are people who will insist something is not genocide if you don’t actually have gas chambers). I feel like in an American context, if you were to talk about racism’s material basis, a lot of people would think you were accusing them of being deliberately racist and that would not be a productive conversation. I don’t know. Or maybe I’m misunderstanding you.
Just looking at the reparations question, there is tremendous resistance to seeing slavery as having contributed to the total overall wealth of the country. To talk about the land itself … like you said, it’s unthinkable.
I now live in a part of the country that has a large native population, and compared to places where I grew up where Indians were romanticized and exoticized, there’s a lot of hostility and defensiveness to any suggestion they are owed something. I’ve heard any number of variations of “Hey, they lost a war. They need to get over it” or “If they don’t like it, maybe they should have fought harder” or, conversely, “If they had been willing to share the land, it wouldn’t have gone down like that.”
Maybe you should go ahead and be provocative and give the examples and ask why we don’t have this or that in our political thought.
It’s also in part due to the US’s reliance on the lens of individualism … racism is seen as acts of the individual, whether they be the perpetrator, or the victim. Conceptualising it as part of a system, and hence a connection to a material basis, is something that is actively resisted.
Furthermore, by viewing everything through this lens of individualism, it allows people to say “well, I don’t do X” as a way of denying connection to racism, and hence, not having to evaluate and change their social milieu, which they do tend to be highly invested in. This also explains the high degree of the persistence of institutionalised racism in the US, because of the lack of willingness to address it at the societal level.
Not to mention, solutions’ also then tend to be articulated at the individual level, which can be contrasted with more collective approaches, such as in Canada and NZ, where ideas such as reparations have been more easily embraced.
That’s interesting – we’re seeing more and more ceremonial recognition of First Nations here in British Columbia (Canada’s westernmost/Pacific province). This is very much a good thing, and stemming in large part IMO from the fact that most land in BC is unceded by any treaty of any kind, unlike the rest of Canada, and recently we have made landmark “modern” treaties that actually restore a certain amount of self-governance to some nations (Nisga’a).
We also have the Assembly of First Nations, with an elected Grand Chief and some political clout. Aboriginal people have increasingly been on the federal political radar. Manning the barricades has been a part, as has growing organization/politicization by Aboriginal peoples, but so has the sheer growing numbers IMO – Saskatchewan, the prairie province in middle of the continent, will double its Aboriginal population by 2017 (to 20% total pop).
So here, specifically First Nations issues are more on the table. (As noted, we have 3 designations of Aboriginal heritage: First Nations, Inuit, & Metis – stemming historically from mixed European/Aboriginal marriages). Also, BC has had a long history of showing Aboriginal art in its public places and in public life generally (see the Vancouver Canucks symbol). That does not actually mean a lot of visibility for actual Aboriginal people, other than the Downtown Eastside (soi-disant ‘bad,’ drug user area of town) which in the press and mainstream mind is the only place Aboriginal people exist.
It’s a funny contrast in fact between Vancouver, which is such a multi-cultural place, with Aboriginal cultural imagery everywhere, but low actual Aboriginal people seen on the street – and in Saskatchewan you see Aboriginal people a lot more. But very little cultural imagery, etc.
And as for an actual (Maori I assume) non-English word for Europeans, how fabulous! How powerful it must be, to have a common term that is in referent to a subject that is not Whites but actually the indigenous population! Wow, wow. Though since what is now Canada is built on hundreds of countries, it would be hard to adopt one term.
The best we do is call non-Aboriginal people “newcomers,” which I use extensively in my university classes (History & Women’s Studies) – the good thing about that one is it acknowledges the people of colour who are also immigrants and non-Aboriginal, for they also share in the fruits of colonization, in terms of how we’re all living on “native land.” That’s important, I think, because Aboriginal issues can get lost under ‘multiculturalism’ (which very oddly almost never means Aboriginal people) and discussions of racism, which again often do not take Aboriginal people into account or look to their input. A very interesting (is that the word?) situation…
(It’s just getting too much for me lately to sing the national anthem: “O Canada, our home and native land” – I know the original author did not mean it to read exactly how it reads: our home, on native land. But it is precisely true.)
So there’s some progress, but in the life of “average Joe or Jane” seems mostly symbolic, a shoe-horning of culture without real engagement with people, some growth in ceremonial acknowledgements, and some political news beyond barricades.
Despite some large-scale strategizing like the 2005 Kelowna Accord (that went down when the party in power was booted) we’re still far from real change, and a real end to colonialism.
chingona – thanks for that it makes a lot of sense to me. For example, it would never have occurred to me that colonialism in America means pre-revolution. What I meant by material? Just that I believe that racism serves a purpose. I believe this is a historian as well as a radical. If you study the ideology of race (or gender, or bodies or all sorts of htings), you see that ideas change to uphold society. So racism against Maori, and hte form that takes, has a very clear relationship with the need to claim land, and different sorts of land as colonialism continues (see I’m sounding like a Marxist again).
What you say about reparations is fascinating – because if slavery wasn’t to increase the wealth of the nation then what was its purpose? Why would they bother with an economic system (and the ideology that it required) that wasn’t beneficial to the economy? Particularly as risky a one as slavery, with the possibility of slave revolts (I’m not asking these questions of you – I’m not suggesting you hold these beliefs – just those are the questions that spring to mind when I read those ideas).
But sometimes this sort of analysis is common – or at least accepted. People draw lines between islamaphobia, and the US’s desire to control the Middle East beccause it wants to extract the resources (although I’m guessing htose would be the people who support reparations and acknowledge the economic benefits of slavery).
I guess often when I read American material it’s not clear whether they believe that or believe that racism just kind of hangs there, and has no origin. I have a friend who labels that sort of untethered analysis “abstract bad things” – and sometimes it seems to me as if American writing
Sarah in Chicago – The stuff about individualism is really interesting to me. Because in NZ you get a wide range of individualist vs collective responses. What seems interesting about America is not just that collective responses aren’t common, but their possibility is shut out. I think that’s a real problem in the feminist blogsphere, as American feminists predominate and see the world through their glasses.
Minerva – that stuff about Canada is really interesting. Although I’m not sure it’s possible to end colonialism. There’s no going back. But I think there is a possibility of self-determination.
I do think it’s true that the interaction between indigenious people and non-dominant immigrant groups is complicated. As an immigrant (we came to NZ from Britain when I was 5) I often feel uncomfortable with the designation for ‘european New Zealander’ that I can adopt instantly. Whereas 6th generation Chinese New Zealanders are called “Chinese New Zealanders”. Which isn’t to say it doesn’t have a purpose. Just to point out that it’s not uncomplicated
Thanks, Sarah & Maia: some really good food for thought.
Also, kind of related to what chingona said about people thinking of the word “colonialism” as an era, not a process: Due to the way the Revolution is taught in schools, doesn’t it make it seem as if the British were the cruel, repressive colonisers while the (white) Americans were the brave, native freedom fighters who defeated colonialism?
I think, missing from this discussion, is the fact that slavery in the US was a direct result (or perhaps a better word is mode) of colonialism in Africa. I don’t think we can separate colonialism from slavery as if they are separate things. Slavery was the colonialism of African people that occurred concomitantly with the colonialism of African soil. Furthermore, although the vast majority of slaves in North America were African/of African decent, there was a large slave trade in Indigenous peoples of North, South, and Central America – most heavily on the latter two – during the period of time when the land we call USA was a British Territory, and much of South/Central America were Spanish and French colonies. A combination of genocide and slavery was the modus operandi of European colonialism. However when we are taught American history, all we are taught of the pre-revolution can be summed up as: Plymouth Rock, Maize, The First Thanksgiving, Nina Pinta and Santa Maria, and possibly, if you live in a “progressive” school district, Pocahontas.
*nods* it shocked me quite a lot when I first arrived here … collectivist or systemic approaches are screamed as “socialist!” or the like, the moment they are even hinted at (witness the current Republican insanity regarding possibly public help in the American medical system, even though every other developed nation on the planet has some form of public provision as the primary health care model).
And yet, unlike back in NZ, religions are given considerably more public deference and credence than they deserve, even with atrocious irrationalities.
If there is one thing I have learnt as a kiwi woman living in the US, it has to be the cultural differences are larger than most people think. The superficial similarities between the countries mask and lull lots of people to think the cultural differences aren’t as large as they are. Don’t get me wrong, there certainly are similarities, and after nearly a decade here I have a huge emotional connection to this country and it’s people, but that doesn’t blind me to the differences.
So, I’m not surprised you find yourself occasionally stopping, pausing and realising there are some major things one doesn’t think of when it comes to national cultural reactions here in the US.
I am looking forward to coming home to NZ permanently come September :)
Maia,
Most of us obviously went in the direction of why we focus on/talk more about slavery than colonization, and I understand that wasn’t quite what you were getting at.
Are you asking or suggesting or wondering if the general lack of analysis looking at a material basis for racism (as opposed to personal racism) stems from or is a result of ignoring colonization? That if we talked about colonization more and understood ourselves, as you say most NZers do, to be standing on stolen land, that we might have more front-and-center the material basis for all types of racism?
Or are you just noting that this seems to be one more way we don’t look at material causes among many other instances where we don’t look at them?
Because this:
I pretty much agree with, and I feel like a lot of liberal/left-leaning/progressive/etc. folks would agree with. I feel like a fair amount of the history I studied in college included that kind of analysis – though just about none of the history I studied in high school or earlier did. As for why you don’t see that reflected in how we respond to things like racism … Certainly we have a very individualist orientation, and I think even people who are inclined to a more collective approach know they’re operating in a political culture where that is very much an uphill battle so that shapes how we frame things, too.
Fascinating discussion; thanks to all who contributed. A minor detail: the phrase is Terra Nullius, not Nullis.