ANGLO-SUPERIORITY: JOEL SPRING, DECULTURALIZATION,
CHAPS 1 AND 2
First, we need to understand the terms ethnic
group and race. This is basic vocabulary.
The meaning of the term ethnic group has
changed over many decades. The meaning of the word race has also
changed over decades and centuries.
An ethnic
group is usually defined as a large
group of people classed or classified or categorized according to
common racial, national, tribal, religious, linguistic, or cultural
origin or background (a paraphrase of ethnic, from Merriam-Webster's
Collegiate Dictionary). Ethnic group is related to
nationality, from the Latin natio, which pertains to
birth, and people who are related to each other by birth or a common
place of birth. Hence the word nation to describe the people who live
in a given country (though it becomes more complex than that). Ethnic
group actually comes from the Greek word ethnos, which means "nation"
or "country" in the "pristine" sense of a group of people (such as a
tribe) who are related to each other by real or imagined blood
relationships because they share real (or imagined) common ancestry.
In the West, in the 1700s and 1800s and
down until about 1920, people routinely referred to an Irish race, a
Polish race, an Anglo-Saxon race, a French race, a Japanese race. By
the 1920s, however, in the United States, the IDEA of race was
compounded with color, and simplified into great branches of humanity
or sub-species. In general, for centuries, scholars have debated
whether there are three or four or five races:
Negroid,
Caucasoid [or Caucasian],
Mongoloid [or Mongolian/east Asiatic],
Malay {such as Malaysians, Indonesians, Thais, Filipinos, south Asians},
American Indians.
The indigenous people of Australia and New
Guinea are black in color, but genetically closer to southeast Asians.
It is likely that the ancestors of the black people in Australia-New
Guinea migrated out of Africa more than 60,000 years ago. Should they
still be considered "Africans" after 60,000 years?
In American thinking, by World War II, Americans equated race with color, and noticed a white
race, a black race, a yellow race (with "slanted eyes") and a "red"
race.
As the idea of race as color became more
pronounced, the term ethnic group came to be applied to groups such as
the Italians, Irish, Poles, Russians, Greeks, Serbs; or the Japanese,
Chinese, Koreans, or Yoruba, Igbo, Ashanti, Zulu, Xhosa.
Yet these typologies still were murky.
Is there a Semitic "race?" Are Arabs and Jews white? Or Turks,
Iranians, Afghans? What about racially mixed groups, such as Egyptians,
Moroccans, Ethiopians, Yemenis?
And bear in mind that actually there is
only one race, one human race, one human species, homo
sapiens. Race is really an idea and a label.
The Holocaust gave ideas of race a "bad
name," and showed how racialist thinking most often leads to prejudice,
discrimination, persecution and violence.
Most groups that share a place of ancestral origin are ethnic groups.
In America, however, a peculiar blindness developed. The English Americans or Anglo-Americans scrambled
onto the top of the pile in the colonial period. The English vanquished
the French (in Canada), and the Dutch (in New York), and eventually the
Spanish (in Florida). The Dutch had previously moved in and taken over
the Swedes and Finns in Delaware. The
Anglo-Americans became the "Founders," the Founding Fathers, who
"established" the country. Therefore the Anglo-Americans, and Scots
Americans, perceived other groups (newcomers), such as the Germans,
Danes, Norwegians, Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews as
"immigrants," as if the English, Scots and
Welsh had not been immigrants too. Furthermore, the
Anglo-Americans, Scots Americans and Welsh Americans often do not see
that they too are ethnic groups. In other words, the English are an
ethnic group too. English and Scottish ethnicity became the American
"norm," that was taken for granted. It became the measuring stick, the
standard against which everything else in America was measured.
Precisely because it was so dominant, and "taken for granted," and
"second nature," it became invisible. Anthropology is one way to try to
render visible that which is often "invisible" (we don't notice it).
ETHNOCENTRISM
It is also the unfortunate case that most of human history is a story
of conflict, warfare; the law of the jungle; the food chain; the big
fish eat the little fish. Life is competitive, and there are winners
and losers, and those who have power will usually use their power to
get what they want or take what they want. It is unfair, but it is the
reality of life. (paraphrasing Thomas Hobbes, 1588-1679).
American society has been ethnocentric
just like most other societies. This ethnocentrism became complicated
by a process of conquest and colonialism, and the importation of
enslaved workers from overseas, and a continual process of new
immigration that resulted in a hierarchy among the different ethnic and
racial groups.
THE EMERGENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS OF BEING
"WHITE" IN COLONIAL AMERICA
We should remember that the US began as a colony (in fact colonies)
of Britain, with Britain (the United Kingdom of England
(including Wales), and Scotland as the mother country. The first
permanent English colony in North America was Virginia (May 1607).
Therefore English became the language of the US. (since Britain was the
mother country). If we study the laws in colonial Virginia, initially
(until the 1680s) they say things like "If any Englishmen or freeborn
person or Christian. They assumed that Europeans were "white" and
"Christian," and so initially the
terms Christian and European were used interchangeably. Africans
were regarded as heathens or pagans. When they began to convert to
Christianity (especially the children who were born here), it could no
longer be assumed that European and Christian were the same thing (now
there were black African Christians too). In reality, Ethiopia (which
is in Africa) had converted to Christianity in the 300s AD, at the same
time that Christianity was gaining strength in Roman Europe, and
Ethiopia has remained Christian ever since, but most Europeans and
Americans did not know that. The idea that all Africans were "pagans"
or heathens or Moslems was a reflection of the ignorance of the
Europeans who knew so little about the wider world.
It became cumbersome to say something like
"If any Englishman or Scot or Dutchman or Irishman or other European…"
Therefore the Anglo-Americans developed a "shorthand" term that
embraced multiple European ethnicities. The word was "white." What they
meant by "white" was "Europeans." In early colonial Anglo-America, the
connotation of the word white was a British, English-speaking
Protestant. The subconscious assumption was that, in
America, to be white was to be "Anglo," or "British American." By
the 1660s the British won the Dutch colony of New Holland (renamed New
York), and Delaware (which the Dutch had taken over from the Swedes and
Finns* [Finns come from Finland, which before the Napoleonic Wars was
ruled by Sweden]). William Penn encouraged German Protestants (such as
the Amish and Moravians) and the Protestant Irish to settle in
Pennsylvania, and by the eve of the Revolution one third of the
population of PA was German and one third was "Scots-Irish."
(Protestant). The Germans (mostly Lutherans) had their own religious
schools, and their own German language newspapers in the colonial
period.
THE ENGLISH SENSE OF SUPERIORITY
Basically what happened was that the English
regarded their culture as superior to all others. Winthrop
Jordan suggests that they considered their language superior. And the
English Protestants fought numerous wars with Catholic Spain and
Catholic France, and therefore the English and the Anglo-Americans saw
the Catholics as enemies. The English sense of superiority in the 1600s
and 1700s and thereafter celebrated the English color, language and
religion; the Parliamentary form of government (a limited
constitutional monarchy after 1688); and the superiority of the British
navy. The English in America shared many of these ideas.
THE CHALLENGE OF DIVERSITY: ASSIMILATION
The English in America were faced with ethnic
diversity and pluralism. The response was to attempt to assimilate
the non-English Europeans. In the mind of the English and the
Anglo-Americans, they were white. In the eyes of the
Anglo-Americans, whiteness was not just a color, but a
matter of language and culture. Other European groups could
become white, in the eyes of the dominant Anglo-American group, IF they would assimilate to become like the Anglo-Americans.
If you could not tell the difference between an Anglo-American and a
person of another ethnic group, then that person had assimilated and
become "white." To be "truly" white was to become culturally assimilated, like the
Anglo-Americans; to speak English; to emulate Anglo-American
manners; and to be a Protestant. This was the norm or standard of
measure (the yardstick) against which whiteness was judged or measured.
Assimilation means to digest, absorb or
incorporate. If A assimilates B, then B is assimilated into A. B gets
or becomes assimilated. Assimilation can involve giving up
or losing one culture, religion, language, tradition and replacing it with another. In other words, one is
substituted for another.
The Dutch in NY and the Swedes and
Finns in Delaware learned English, and they were Protestants, and they
could and did easily assimilate. The Protestant Irish assimilated
easily, and Andrew Jackson became president in 1828. But Anglo
prejudice and greed and exploitation had led to the conquest of Ireland
by the English. The English regarded the Irish, especially the Irish
Catholics, as an alien and inferior "race." The Irish in America fought
to preserve their own customs, traditions and culture, and religion,
and refused to forsake their Catholicism and convert. They were
numerous, and became an important constituency within the Democratic
party in the North before the Civil War. They used this political
resource to advantage. In time, the Irish pushed their way into being
accepted by the Anglo-Americans as "white."
Each European ethnic group would have
to confront this issue of Anglicization and assimilation. Those that
were northern European and Protestant could assimilate more easily and
rise more quickly. Those that were not northern European and not
Protestant had a more difficult time. This was especially true for the
Poles, Russians, Italians, and Jews.
GENOCIDE
One
approach to consolidating the dominant position of the Anglo culture
was to assimilate Europeans culturally and linguistically. A
second approach was to unleash genocide on groups that did not
cooperate or that were "in the way." The people who suffered genocide
in America, to an incalculable degree, were the indigenous Native
Americans. The fundamental problem was that the settlers wanted their
land, and the so-called Indians were in the way. The colonizers,
whether English or French or Spanish, developed propaganda that defined
the Native Americans as savages, and inferior, with a heathen religion.
This ideology if Indian inferiority and savagery was then used by the
settlers to "justify" the settlers (in their minds) in fighting with
the Indians and taking their land or whatever the settlers wanted from
them. In 1763 Chief Pontiac and the Ottawa Indians
rebelled against British rule. A coalition of Native Americans besieged
the British and Americans at Fort Pitt, now Pittsburgh. When a
delegation of two Indian chiefs met with the British commanders to
negotiate, Captain Simeon Ecuyer
(a Swiss mercenary) gave them supposed gifts of blankets and
handkerchiefs from the sick ward where British soldiers with smallpox
were being treated. This was a deliberate and intentional act, and the
British knew exactly what they were doing. An
epidemic of smallpox broke out among the Indians and swept through the
midwest and down the Mississippi Valley. Written correspondence
between Lord Jeffrey Amherst (commander of the british forces in
North america) and Colonel Henry Bouquet (leading the relief expedition
to Fort Pitt) in 1763 also dicusses the use of smallpox
to infect and exterminate the Indians.
The story of the rise of the United States is the story of the conquest
of North America. Conquest is warfare. The Indians fought back, but
they lost. Practically all of North America was taken from the Indians
by the English and French, with the Spanish as the colonizers in the
south and west (California). The Native Americans had their entire
continent taken away from them, and then they were left with some
desolate reservations in the desert and on some mountains that the
colonizers didn't want. America was built on and over the ruins of the
defeated Indians, in a colossal act of robbery and theft.
FORMS OF GENOCIDE
In the 1830s the states of Georgia and
Alabama, and the United States Army, rounded up the Cherokees,
Choctaws, Creeks, and Chickasaws in most of the south and forcibly
relocated them west of the Miss. River in what is now Oklahoma.
Millions of acres of land were then taken by white settlers. This is
called the Trail of Tears. Only 2,000 Cherokees obeyed the order to
relocate; in 1838 the other 15,000 had to be rounded up at gunpoint. In
some instance the homes had to be burned to force the people out. The
Seminoles in Florida refused to go, and fought for years before they
were defeated and relocated. The Lakota, Apaches, Comanches and other
nations resisted into the 1860s and right down to the 1890s.
Joel Spring describes the efforts of the federal government, through the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to assimilate the Native Americans and use schools to de-culturalize the Indians: in other words, to strip them of their language and culture and assimilate them. The purpose of this policy was to erase the culture of the Indians and replace it with Anglo Christian culture and the English language. This process involved destroying and annihilating the traditional Indian cultures. This is a project of cultural imperialism, monoculturalism, and monolingualism. Spring, who is Choctaw, regards these efforts to consolidate the dominant Anglo culture as cultural genocide and linguistic genocide. In order to "save the Indian," from himself, he had to be rescued from his inferior culture and purged of it. This was especially pronounced at boarding schools, where the Indian children were away from their families and could be indoctrinated. The process of assimilation would teach the students to despise their cultures as inferior and backward. They would have to learn to sleep in a bed and not in a sleeping bag or on the floor; not to wear their traditional moccasins and buckskin; or their traditional hair styles or braids. They were not permitted to speak their indigenous languages at school, and were punished if they did so. All of this was seen as "civilizing" the Indians. Not until the Merriam Report of 1928 (written by Louis Merriam, as The Problem of Indian Administration) would these policies be re-examined. In the 1930s a more enlightened policy would attempt to revive respect for Native American culture.