A local university president recently asked members of the community to weigh in on how the university system can combat systemic racism. These are my initial thoughts:
Except to the willfully ignorant, it is now abundantly clear that American society is imbued with a pervasive, systemic racism that reaches back to the arrival of the first European settlers and that has continued to the present day. For most white people, the recent rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the demonstrations (and sometimes riots) that sprang from the brutal murder of George Floyd is the first time they have had to face the reality of systemic racism in this country, and it’s the first time they have come to understand the reality that black people live with every day. It is a system and a reality that is so deeply embedded in American culture, it will take a concerted and multi-generational effort to change it.
This effort has to begin with the schools. Only by teaching our kids, from kindergarten onward, the truth about our history and the truth about how people of color have been treated, can we hope to effect the change we know needs to happen.
American history has traditionally been taught from a Eurocentric point of view. This is a history couched in the immigrant experience, the frontier experience, the escape from political and religious persecution, the escape from poverty, and the hope for a better future. It is taught as a political revolution, the very idea that a government can be formed to serve the people instead of the other way around. It is taught as the contentious but generally successful blending of many cultures and languages into a single entity. These are important and valid points, but they are only part of the story.
The fact that there were people already living in the land before all these immigrants arrived is generally little more than a side note. They were perceived at the time as an impediment to the glorious establishment of a new nation, and unfortunately that is how most school history books have represented them.
To begin to address the roots and history of systemic racism, it is necessary to approach the teaching of American history from the perspective of both native Americans and African Americans. These perspectives should be required in the curriculum. They should be taught side by side with the Eurocentric perspective, and with equal weight.
First, native Americans. What history, culture, and religion informed their lives pre-invasion? What was their experience of seeing their ancestral homelands invaded, their freedom to roam the land denied, their people killed indiscriminately? How should they have responded, if not by fighting back? For truly, the history of America is rooted in genocide. The truth of this genocide must not be obscured by the prevailing Eurocentric narrative of “bravely taming a frontier.”
The roots of racism lie in the propensity of people with more advanced technology to view people with lesser technology as inferior. Certainly, that was the case with most European settlers, who viewed native Americans as “savages” because they did not build cities, or ships, or firearms. The concept of living in harmony with the land and not taking more than was necessary was as alien to the European invaders as was the European concept of “conquering” or “subduing” the land to native Americans. Those opposing viewpoints are perfectly expressed in the native American view that the land owned the people, whereas Europeans subscribed to the view that people owned the land.
(Side note: It is important to recognize that native Americans did not always treat the land with respect. Their arrival on the continent coincided with the disappearance of most of the existing megafauna, and although that correlation has not been proven to be rooted in causation, human incursion and overhunting is the most likely explanation. Nonetheless, by the time of the European invasion, native Americans had largely come to realize that their continued existence required a sensible use of resources.)
Defining native Americans as essentially inferior because they did not have the same technology or because they did not use the land as Europeans thought it should be used, made it easy to justify taking the land away from them. After that, forcing them onto ecologically impoverished lands, denying them basic rights, destroying their history and language and culture, and keeping them in poverty just reinforced the idea that they were inferior, an idea that obviously still exists in the mind of many white Americans today.
A similar attitude informs the way Africans were treated. Again, because of the pre-technological conditions in which they lived, and because of the cultural arrogance of Europeans at the time, it was easy for white people to think of them as savages, and thus it was easy to justify enslaving them. The African-American experience is discussed in some history texts, but it is still little more than a side note. (When I was in high school and college, the subject hardly got cursory attention.) Part of the reason may be the paucity of first person accounts, since most slaves were denied an education and thus were not able to read or write. But enough material exists that the African-American experience can be given the attention it deserves.
What was their experience of being forcefully removed from their homeland and delivered into bondage? What was their experience of having their own history, culture, ancestry, and language ripped from them?
Apart from native Americans, African Americans are, in a way, the only true Americans. For while most white or Latino Americans can point to their cultural ancestry (French, Norwegian, English, Honduran, Mexican, Irish, Italian, and so on, or some combination thereof), most African-Americans cannot. They only know that sometime in the past their ancestors were ripped from the continent of Africa and brought over as slaves, but of their ancestral country, culture, or language they know nothing. Even their surnames are the names of former slave owners. America is the only country they’ve ever known.
Even after emancipation, African-Americans were never given true freedom or the equality that derives from it. Jim Crow and segregation kept them down and ensured they were never given the opportunities afforded whites. The idea that African-Americans are somehow inferior to Caucasians has been promulgated down through the centuries and through generations of parents to their children and grandchildren. Even now, white Americans can look at the fact that so many black Americans live in poverty, that black families own a mere fraction of the wealth of white families, that so many inner cities consist of poor black American communities, and still think that shows they are somehow inferior.
What is missing from this self-serving attitude is that centuries of slavery, subjugation, oppression, and denial of opportunity – approved and abetted by the white majority – are the root cause of the situation. Any group of people subjected to the same systemic racism and oppressive treatment would be in the same position. Even when a group of African-Americans have managed to pull themselves out of the situation and create a level of prosperity for themselves, it was forcibly and violently removed by the white establishment (e.g., the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, or the introduction of crack cocaine to African American communities by the CIA in the 80s and the subsequent use of the “war on drugs” to destroy the Black Panther movement and justify the incarceration of so many blacks). It’s never been that black Americans can’t aspire to and reach the same level of economic prosperity and accomplishment as whites, it’s that they’ve never been allowed to do so by the prevailing white establishment.
As part and parcel of this sad picture, the concept of a “police force” was founded in the race patrols of the early south. At their very inception, police forces were imbued with the idea that African-Americans were inferior, that they must be controlled, that they must be kept down, and that the maintenance of law and order was dependent on it. This attitude has, like a cultural history, been passed down from generation to generation, with most police officers today likely unaware of its genesis.
To begin to address this systemic racism, all of this information needs to be included in school curricula, from elementary school though post-secondary education. We need to fully understand our history, not just the Eurocentric, Western-Civilization, sugar-coated version of it most of us are fed. Columbus was not an explorer, he was an opportunistic, greedy, genocidal racist, as were so many so-called “explorers” after him (e.g., Cortez, Pizarro). Equal blame must also go to the opportunistic, misguided, self-righteous, and racist “missionaries” who followed in the “explorers’” blood-soaked footsteps.
Until we all know the truth, it will be hard to make any progress. And it begins with educating the children. That is the only way the system will truly change for the better.
