"Strike against war, for without you no
battles can be fought! Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and
all other tools of murder! Strike against preparedness that means death and
misery to millions of human beings! Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of
destruction! Be heroes in an army of construction!" - Helen
Keller
Lies My Teacher Told Me:
Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
by James W. Loewen. Simon & Schuster, 1995.
| "After Col. Henry Bouquet defeated the Ohio Indians at Bushy Run in 1763, he demanded the release of all white captives. Most of them, especially the children, had to be "bound hand and foot" and forcibly returned to white society" . |
"Indeed, Native American ideas may be partly responsible for our democratic institutions. We have seen how Native ideas of liberty, fraternity, and equality found their way to Europe to influence social philosophers such as Thomas More, Locke, Montaigne, Montesquieu, and Rousseau... Through 150 years of colonial contact, the Iroquois League stood before the colonies as an object lesson in how to govern a large domain democratically" (111).
"Both the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention referred openly to Iroquois ideas and imagery... As a symbol of the new United States, Americans chose the eagle clutching a bundle of arrows. They knew that both the eagle and the arrows were symbols of the Iroquois League... John Mohawk has argued that American Indians are directly or indirectly responsible for the public-meeting tradition, free speech, democracy, and "all those things which got attached to the Bill of Rights." Without the Native example, "do you really believe that all those ideas would have found birth among a people who had spent a millennium butchering other people because of intolerance of questions of religion?"" (111-112).
"For a hundred years after our Revolution, Americans credited Native Americans as a source of their democratic institutions... When colonists took action to oppose unjust authority, as in the Boston Tea Party.. they chose to dress as Indians, not to blame Indians for the demonstrations but to appropriate a symbol identified with liberty" (112).
"Indian warfare absorbed 80 percent of the entire federal budget during George Washington's administration and dogged his successors for a century as a major issue and expense... [in many cases] the settlers were Native American, the scalpers white" (116).
"All the textbooks tell how Jefferson "doubled the size of the United States by buying Louisiana from France." Not one points out that it was not France's land to sell--it was Indian land... Indeed, France did not really sell Louisiana for $15,000,000. France merely sold its claim to the territory... Equally Eurocentric are the maps textbooks use to show the Lewis and Clark expedition. They make Native American invisible, implying that the United States bought vacant land from the French... [Textbooks imply that the Indians were naive about land ownership, but] the problem lay in whites' not abiding by accepted concepts of land ownership" (123).
"The most important cause of the War of 1812.. was land-- Indian land... The United States fought five of the seven major land battles of the War of 1812 primarily against Native Americans... [a] result of the War of 1812 was the loss of part of our history. A century of learning [from Native Americans] was coming to a close... until 1815 the word Americans had generally been used to refer to Native Americans; after 1815 it meant European Americans... Carleton Beals has written that "our acquiescence in Indian dispossession has molded the American character." ... destroyed our national idealism. From 1815 on, instead of spreading democracy, we exported the ideology of white supremacy. Gradually we sought American hegemony over Mexico, the Philippines, much of the Caribbean basin, and, indirectly, over other nations... We also have to admit that Adolf Hitler displayed more knowledge of how we treated Native Americans than American high schoolers who rely on their textbooks. Hitler admired our concentration camps for Indians in the west "and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination--by starvation and uneven combat" as the model for his extermination of Jews and Gypsies" (123-126).
Yet we "still stereotype Native Americans as roaming primitive hunting folk, unfortunate victims of progress" (132).
For more on this topic, read Helen Hunt Jackson's famous indictment of Native American policies, A Century of Dishonor.
Also, see her fictional account of the racism Mexicans and Indians both endured at the hands of White and Mexican settlers, Ramona.
Invisibility of Racism
"Americans seem perpetually startled at slavery. Children are shocked to learn that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves... Very few adults today realize that our society has been slave much longer than it has been free.. The first colony to legalize slavery was not Virginia but Massachusetts.. Wall Street was the marketplace where owners could hire out their slaves by the day or week" (142).
"Textbooks canonize Patrick Henry for his "Give me liberty or give me death" speech. Not one tells us that eight months after delivering the speech he ordered "diligent patrols" to keep Virginia slaves from accepting the British offer of freedom to those who would join their side" (146).
"..slavery and its concomitant ideas, which legitimated hierarchy and dominance, saped our Revolutionary idealism. Most textbooks never hint at this clash of ideas, let alone at its impact on our foreign policy" (149).
"For our first seventy years as a nation.. slavery made our foreign policy more sympathetic with imperialism than with self-determination" (152).
"Slavery was also perhaps the key factor in the Texas War (1835-36). The freedom for which Davy Crockett, James Bowie, and the rest fought for at the Alamo was the freedom to own slaves!" (151).
Racism became dominant in the United States between 1890 and 1920 "when African Americans were again put back into second-class citizenship... In the 1880s and 1890s minstrel shows featuring bumbling, mislocuting whites in blackface grew wildly popular from New England to California. By presenting heavily caricatured images of African Americans who were happy on the plantation and lost and incompetent off it, these shows demeaned black ability" (160-164).
"In politics, the white electorate had become so racist by 1892 that the Democratic candidate, Grover Cleveland, won the White House partly by tarring Republicans with their attempts to guarantee civil rights to African Americans" (164).
"Aided by Birth of a Nation, which opened in 1915, the Ku Klux Klan rose to its zenith, boasting over a million members. The KKK openly dominated the state government of Indiana for a time, and it proudly inducted Pres. Warren G. Harding as a member in a White House ceremony... the 1921 riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which whites dropped dynamite from an airplane onto a black ghetto, killing more than 75 people and destroying more than 1,100 homes.. Some small communities in the Midwest and West became "sundown" towns, informally threatening African Americans with death if they remained overnight" (165). [I got an email from Rachel Chinnock, who wished to clarify the facts about the Tulsa riots. Here is what she said: "I lived in Tulsa and did a bit of research on this tragic event and wish to make only one correction to your current text. The area upon which white supremacists and KKK members dropped dynamite was not a “black ghetto” but rather one of the most sophisticated black areas at that time (and, arguably, the most sophisticated community in the state of Oklahoma at that time) known as “Black Wall Street” or now the “Greenwood District.” Here, they were well-dressed, highly-educated, wealthy, and mannerly. Business flourished, with black-owned stores, cinemas, pharmacies, airport, banks, libraries, schools, etc."]
"..race relations in the United States systematically worsened for almost half a century." Most textbooks state that "Jackie Robinson was "the first black baseball player ever allowed in the major leagues."" But he wasn't. Students are given "the unmistakable [impression] of generally uninterrupted progress to the present" (167).
"The notion of progress suffuses textbook treatments of black-white relations, implying that race relations have somehow steadily improved on their own. This cheery optimism only compounds the problem, because whites can infer that racism is over" (169)...........Paradigm pyrolysis..........this is a new area for grad students!!!!!!!! , duh, I cant think of a thesis? Then live in the antithesis...........
from wiki Noun: paradigm shift point of view to a new one, necessitate d when new scientific discoveries produce anomalies in the current paradigm. ...
social conflict paradigm
Noun: en | noun | head social conflict paradigm a theory of society based on conflict and change.
.................................keep fighting the good fight, with your minds as weapons!!................
.......................................kosmicdebris............
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