Ibram X. Kendi\u2019s book, Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, is an exhaustive catalog of religious, social, and economic attitudes and policies that began with the importation of African slaves and continue to this day. The number of actors and authors he sites in telling the story of racists, assimilationists, and antiracists and their multi-layered beliefs is mind-boggling. The way he weaves the three belief poles through US history\u2014and especially the difficult journey of Black people themselves, but also the journeys of White abolitionists, politicians, and scholars\u2014is a vivid and important telling.<\/p>\n
Kendi\u2019s treatment of Indians is sketchy at best. Weaving American Indians into the narrative of racism would have doubled the page count, and maybe he has done his job and it is up to others to tell the stories of European, mostly Anglo, settlers\u2019 assumption of racial superiority over the misnamed Indian inhabitants, imported African slaves, and later immigrants from Ireland, Eastern Europe, and Asia.<\/p>\n
Kendi\u2019s anti-Black racism story parallels the story of Indians and White racism in many ways, complicated by one huge and overwhelming factor: land. Indians had it and Whites wanted\u2014needed\u2014it in advancing a potpourri of their own visions of developing a new country. From plantation to Jefferson\u2019s yeoman farmer, settlement of invited immigrants to establishment of Land Grant universities, White America has needed Indian lands. And took them\u2014by war, honest and (mostly) dishonest treaty, and just plain squatting on them. People squatted, but so did the government itself, rural Indian lands being the right and easy places for bombing ranges and nuclear bomb-building.<\/p>\n
Racism and assimilation were part of the Indian picture even before 1619 and the importation of African Americans. Columbus\u2019s original killing and enslavement of Indians are now well documented and admitted. Wars against and treaties with Indians always assumed White superiority. And \u201cseparate but equal occurred\u201d on reservations as it did in Southern schools; send them back to Africa or move them to Indian Territory. Assimilate them\u2014make them white with religion and boarding schools, or with Black colleges and Euro-White curriculum. Kendi calls assimilation \u201cuplift suasion,\u201c and notes that Blacks who achieved\u2014and still achieve\u2014some success were and are evaluated on how White-like that success is.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s much more to be said about the parallels of assimilation and racism with Indians and Blacks over centuries\u2014it\u2019s worth a book. But for one minute let\u2019s look at the post WW 2 period, 1945 into the 50s. Indians and Blacks both served in WW II; Blacks were segregated and Indians gained some notoriety as Code-Talkers. Blacks and Indians served honorably and received the praise of their services\u2014until they got home.<\/p>\n
We know that Black veterans were disregarded, threatened, and occasionally lynched when they tried to parlay their patriotic service into voting or education or housing. Blacks moved North and West, voting with their feet, only to find that the promise of the G.I. Bill\u2019s housing provision could not be exercised in neighborhoods deemed \u201cunsafe\u201d for lenders. Cities were \u201credlined\u201d and Blacks shuttled to poorer neighborhoods which became poorer without means of getting mortgages.<\/p>\n
Similarly, The G.I. Bill\u2019s housing provisions could not be applied on reservations, because banks would not loan money for houses to Indians on reservations. Indian reservations were lands held in trust by the federal government, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs would not sign a waiver granting title to the veterans. Without this waiver, there was no way to secure a loan, even under the GI Bill.<\/p>\n
Black veterans wanted to eat in restaurants and travel freely after the War; Indians wanted to have a drink\u2014as they had been able to do while in the service. It wasn\u2019t until 1951, that the Oregon State Legislature removed the ban on the sale of alcohol to Indians and the prohibition of intermarriage with Indians.<\/p>\n
And if voting for Black veterans in the South was still subject to the rules of Jim Crow\u2014literacy tests, poll taxes, etc., Indian veterans\u2014in fact no Indians\u2014could vote in Arizona and New Mexico until 1948, and until 1957 in Utah.<\/p>\n
Kendi talks about Blacks pursuit of Whiteness with hair products, marrying lighter, and college and professions in the White world. Successful Blacks and social and government programs pushed along in this uplift suasion. For Indians, do-gooders had long held that the only way to \u201csave the man\u201d was to \u201ckill the Indian\u201d in him. Nineteenth century land allotment programs, boarding schools, and the outright banning of languages and ceremony had not been totally successful in stamping out Indian culture, and Indians still clung to some tribal lands. So in the post-war years the Eisenhower administration mounted two drastic assimilation programs to finally solve the nation\u2019s \u201cIndian Problem.\u201d \u00a0The \u201cTermination\u201d program would buy out reservations and make the lands available to Whites and white-run companies. The \u201cRelocation\u201d program would give young reservation Indians a bus ticket to the city\u2014with the possibility of training or work at the other end. It would certainly get more Indians off their land and striving white in the urban world.<\/p>\n
The huge \u201cstimulus package\u201d to integrate American veterans back into society, was, as one author called it, \u201cthe most massive piece of affirmative legislation in U.S. history.\u201d Some say the GI Bill created the middle class in America. Kendi shows, and Black Americans and Indians know, that it created the White Middle Class in America. It did finally make the Irish, Poles, Greeks, and Jews of European stock White\u2014but that is another story.<\/p>\n
# # #<\/p>\n
Ibram X. Kendi\u2019s book, Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, is an exhaustive catalog of religious, social, and economic attitudes and policies that began with the importation of African slaves and continue to this day. The number of actors and authors he sites in telling the story of racists, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[290,487,1255,1268,286,1279,1277,601,1280],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34766"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34766\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}