3:47am October 14, 2013

➸ Seriously, USA?: Why I don't buy "They're just ignorant" as an absolving statement, ever.

adelene-dawner:

clatterbane:

girljanitor:

I took a Native American History class online about a year ago. It was more or less full of white people ages 17-23ish, who’d grown up in this area, and therefore had little to no contact with any people of color because that’s how this area works.

The class had five required textbooks, “lectures” that were indigestible bricks of text, quizzes twice a week, a written assignment each week, and online video miniseries, “We Shall Remain“ which runs about 8 hours total. Even I found it slightly challenging but I really enjoyed it.

The entirety of colonization, purposeful smallpox infection, impeding on sovereignty, forced marches and the Indian Removal Act, the obliteration of the Huron-Wendat, boarding schools, missions in the Southwest, forced conversions, slavery, and massacres were all covered. By the end of the class, no one could say they were ignorant. Many of the students commented in the (required) discussion forums, “Oh my god, I never knew!”, “It’s so horrible to think that…”, “what an awful travesty…” et cetera.

The very last discussion topic was this:

“Most of Onondaga County is disputed land, which legally belongs to the Onondaga Nation. It has been held illegally by New York State for hundreds of years, despite the Treaty of Fort Stanwix which means that the Onondaga Nation is the legal owner. Do you think the land should be given back to its legal owners?”

Here are the comments that followed:

"No! Why should they get the land my house is on? They didn’t work for it!”

“Indians already get too many advantages! Did you know they even get free textbooks??”

"I work on the rez, and I can never get promoted because I’m not an Indian! That’s racist!”

“This is America and everyone has to pay the same taxes! Why should they get special rights?”

“It gets me so mad that they think they’re entitled to my house! They already are all rich from their casinos!”

“This just proves that minorities have too many rights.”

Actually, this just proves that white people can pay all the lip service they want to “all that is in the past” and “you can’t blame me for what my ancestors did”, but will in a nanosecond defend it with their last breath.

White people love genocide. They turn rabid at the very thought of having to give up anything “earned” by the “hard work” of murdering and enslaving people of color. They turn rabid at the thought of paying their property taxes to people of color, instead of their precious white government-at the thought of enriching Native People instead of passing on their stolen birthright to their pallid grublike progeny.

This is what white people say when they can’t see a brown face, and actually state their real opinions because their whole lives have been lived in white-only spaces, so they assume that all spaces are there to solicit their horrific opinions.

Also, I think a lot of these folks really do automatically assume that if the rightful owners get title to their land back, it’ll be all enslavement and genocide all over again with the tables turned. Dealing with any group of people who their ancestors did very badly. (Similar with some anti-immigrant sentiment, both in the US and UK that I know of firsthand.)

When you have been raised to assume that this is normal/inevitable human behavior, that frightens me. Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecies… :-|

It’s bad enough how a lot of these Totally Non-Racist folks will argue to your face that you don’t really exist, when their magical colonial racist eyeballing powers fail them (i.e., when you don’t look like Hollywood’s version of an indigenous person or, say, live in a tipi in the Eastern Woodlands.) When somebody would obviously rather pretend that you’re dead than look at some of the consequences of the continuing bad behavior of a group they identify with, there’s something bad wrong.

…oh.

I actually don’t even think they’re thinking enslavement and genocide. I think they’re just thinking ‘I will have to move, and that’s a major hassle, and if everybody who lives here has to move, where the heck are we all going to go?’. Because that’s, y’know, the standard definition of owning a piece of land, is that other people can’t be there without prior permission. That’s definitely what I’d been thinking, reading about this stuff: Sure, ideally it would be great to be able to give that land back, but in practice, where would I go if I wasn’t allowed to be here any more?

If we’re talking about things on the level of who the property taxes go to and who gets to make the laws, that’s a heck of a lot easier to swallow - at this point I’d actually be interested in that even if there wasn’t a prior legal claim, because the US government is pretty much getting more absurdly dysfunctional by the day at this point. But phrasing it in terms of ownership of the land doesn’t make it clear at all that that’s what you’re talking about.

Yeah, I was snarkily thinking on the extreme end of oppressive behavior there, alongside the too-common insistence that being made uncomfortable is exactly the same thing. :/ Sorry if the snarl factor wasn’t totally clear there.
Though that doesn’t even appear as exaggerated as it should when it comes to some people’s ideas about being overrun by non-White immigrants who obviously want to force them to speak a different language and cram other religious beliefs and laws down their throats. Kinda scarily reflects what they would expect to be doing, were the tables turned.
But, yeah, the idea of disruption is what mostly (and semi-understandably) brings out some nasty reactions (not so cool) when anyone points out that so much land was illegally taken. (That does not explain some of the trollish reactions to people actually buying chunks back, however, which is pretty much the only way Easterners in particular are ever getting use of it again.) When most of what people have actually suggested in practice would be on the level of paying property taxes to a different government, *not* just chucking them off the land in question.