Cali Pitchel McCullough is a Ph.D student in American history at Arizona State University. For earlier posts in this series click here. –JF
I helped lead another discussion this week. It’s a task I really enjoy (even if it means I need to sacrifice 200 pages of David Potter’s 580-page The Impending Crisis in preparation for the discussion).
In the United States survey course this week the students read Jackson’s Second Annual Address to Congress, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and a petition from the Cherokee Indians resisting the removal policies. I strolled up and down the stairs in the lecture hall, drifting from group to group and asking for reactions to Jackson’s “benevolence.” Not surprisingly, many of the students were shocked by Jackson’s cavalier rhetoric regarding his “civilizing” mission. One student in particular criticized the federal government’s inability to make good on Indian treaties. Another dolefully acknowledged the disgraceful past of U.S.—Indian relations.
Admittedly, my more particular knowledge of American history stops right around the American Revolution so I too read Jackson’s address for the first time. It just so happened that the Jackson sources meshed well with my own reading. This week’s reading in my “Race and History” course included Edmund Morgan’s Slavery and Freedom: An American Paradox, Nicholas Guyatt’s “’The Outskirts of Our Happiness’:Race and the Lure of Colonization in the Early Republic,” and David Roediger’s How Race Survived U.S.History.
I was familiar with Morgan’s thesis. In fact, I had read parts of American Slavery, American Freedom as an undergraduate (thanks, Dr. Fea!). As a college junior, Morgan’s book disarranged my neat and tidy understanding of race relations in America, which I thought was assuaged in the wake of New Deal liberalism and the Civil Rights movement.
Not quite.
According to Roediger, the legacy of white superiority and racism in the U.S. survives in the unlikeliest of places. Racism has an uncanny ability to recreate and reimage itself according to time and place. Guyatt further illuminates the sad history of race in America through his analysis of its historical development. He points to a significant change in attitudes concerning colonization in the 1840s from one of cultural chauvinism and white prejudice to racial inferiority and hierarchy.
After reading Guyatt’s essay and paging through Roediger’s book, I felt really uncomfortable. This is my legacy. As a white middle-class female I’ve inherited a knapsack of white privilege. I’m the benefactor of a racial hierarchy that was imagined in colonial Virginia and remade in violent and subtle ways over the past 300 years. Although we may never be able to transcend race, as a (future) historian I am obligated to tell the often-uncomfortable truth of the past and consider its ramifications for the present.
How do historians teach the bitter truths? How do they gently expose students to a past that almost always conflicts with the spoon-fed telling of the Founding Fathers, Betsy Ross, or Davy Crockett? There is something deflating about learning the harsh realities of the American legacy.
Last week, for example, I read Greg Gandin’s Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Jungle City. Why didn’t I ever learn that Henry Ford was an idiosyncratic bigot with an aversion to cow’s milk? Maybe not every student will learn about Henry Ford’s temperament or dietary habits, but there are some things that should not be left out of history books. Until the long, ugly past of racism and white privilege is told, we will continue to watch those evils reproduce themselves, even in a nation where citizens chose to elect an African American man to the highest office.
Everybody knows we screwed the Indians. Even Glenn Beck.