Impotent Rage
I was interested in reading the Emerald’s article about yesterday’s anti-Columbus Day protest held in the EMU Amphitheatre by the Native American Student Union (NASU). In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past fifteen or twenty years, there’s been a somewhat high-profile effort nationally to end the celebration of Columbus Day because of the centuries-long decimation of peoples indigenous to the Western Hemisphere that happened in the wake of Columbus’ “discovery” of the Americas.
Personally, I don’t much care one way or another. It’s sad to see the anti-Columbus effort employing such shopworn and one-dimensional stereotypes as “imperialism” and “genocide” rather than acknowledging that the history of interactions between native peoples and whites was, tragic as the results were, far more complex than they’d have us believe. On the other hand, I have no special attachment to Columbus Day and would spend exactly zero time mourning its passing were it to be abolished.
That said, I found the protest to be, if not distasteful, then at least unhelpful and counterproductive. As the Emerald article notes, most of the signage on display was along the lines of “Christopher Columbus: America’s 1st Terrorist”, “Custer got what he deserved”, and “For America to Live, Columbus Must Die.”
The NASU also chose to reprise last year’s controversial “Native American Travel Agency” which offered (white) people the chance to get on a plane departing from Plymouth Rock and, to put it bluntly, go back to where they came from. Perhaps in recognition of the trouble they got in over the “Travel Agency” last year (it earned them a visit from the storied “Bias Response Team”), the “travel desk” was decorated with a sign that I believe read “If you can take our land, you can take a joke,” or something to that effect (the sign was partially obscured when I was passing by, so the actual words may have been slightly different). This year, they also chose to only offer “tickets” to European countries, since last year’s brouhaha was the result of offering “tickets” to a more diverse range of locations, including Africa, and thereby offending someone not of European descent.
Rather than trying to educate people or give them a more balanced view of the aftermath of Columbus’ voyages, then, the NASU apparently settled on “whitey go home” as a more appropriate and effective way of getting their message out. One scarcely needs to imagine what the reaction on campus would be if similar sentiments were expressed about, say, Latinos. In any case, juxtaposed with these militant slogans were Carina Miller’s plaintive remarks expressing hope that people understand the struggles of Native Americans, which reveals both the traditional victimhood/outrage duality one so commonly finds at campus protest events as well as a certain tone-deafness regarding outreach strategy among the people who organized the protest. Alas, despite having the word “solidarity” in the name, “Indigenous Solidarity Day” seems to have been conceived as an exclusive, rather than inclusive, event.
The Emerald story also included comments by one Robert Haskett, a professor in the Department of History. He is quoted as saying of Columbus,
Some of the students come in with a more nuanced understanding of who Columbus was from lower grades. Some still come in with a view of him as a hero.
One wonders how Dr. Haskett believes students should view Columbus. As a villain? A genocidaire? A harbinger of a corrupt civilization come to wreak havoc on a more pure and innocent people? Perhaps when he says “nuanced” he means just that. I haven’t taken any of Dr. Haskett’s classes, so I can’t say. But can’t Columbus’ historic voyages and worthy legacy to European civilization be held up and admired while at the same time acknowledging the tragic events that followed in the wake of 1492? Or are we morally obligated to ignore everything good about Columbus because he was responsible, directly and indirectly, for tragedy?
Or, to put it another way, one doesn’t have to rhetorically turn Christopher Columbus into Adolf Hitler in order to have a more balanced understanding of the history of the Americas.
Sadly, the NASU kids appear to be more interested in trading in victimhood and outrage than education and outreach. That should come as little surprise; if there are students who have been taught to view Columbus as nothing less than a hero for the ages, there are certainly just as many students who uncritically mouth the mantras they’ve been taught about Western Civilization representing nothing but bloodshed, racism, and oppression. Nevertheless, it’s disappointing.
At any rate, the next time Columbus Day “Indigenous Solidarity Day” rolls around, NASU might do well to keep in mind that I was born in this country, too. So was my father, and his father, and his father’s father. And so were an awful lot of other people who NASU and their intellectual fellow travelers apparently prefer to think of as little more than imperial occupiers and the scions of racism and genocide. Trucking in such anger might make them feel better in the short term — indeed, it might even serve to provide the true believers among them with careers in activism once they’ve put in their time long enough to walk out of here with a degree — but in the end, it’s an impotent rage. Americans of European — and Asian, and African — stock have as much right to live here as anyone else, and they’re not going to magically go away in any case.
Those who can trace their lineage back to the original inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere have a lot to be rightfully proud of: long histories, rich and interesting cultures, and perseverance in the face of disease, discrimination, and, not infrequently, ghastly atrocities. One thing they shouldn’t be proud of, though, was what was on display in the EMU Amphitheatre yesterday, which was cheap and vulgar at best.
OR, they are concluding that non-white people CANNOT be racially biased.
The literature that rather bizarrely claims that racism “requires” power, and therefore those without “power” (read: anyone who isn’t white) can’t be racist is grounded in a mentality that privileges victimhood above all else.
As long as a person or group can claim to be the victim of oppression – racial, sexual, religious, etc. – then the actions of the members of this abstracted and homogenized group* are excused as “natural” or at least “understandable” “reaction” to said oppression.
You can see this in the efforts of many to rationalize Palestinians setting off nail bombs on buses and delis: the Palestinians have been granted “victimhood” and consequently whatever atrocities they might commit are automatically viewed through the rather distorted lens of “resistance.”**
NASU’s lack of concern about offending the sensibilities of their white fellow citizens is drawing, in an admittedly much less extreme and (obviously) non-violent way, from the same well. It’s not so much that they think only whites can “take a joke,” it’s that they simply don’t care whether they’re trading in reductionist stereotypes because they conceive of themselves as “victims” and therefore whatever offense they may cause is justified by their historical grievances.
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* I say “abstracted and homogenized” because identity groups are, by their very nature, abstract collectives of individuals with necessarily different ambitions and beliefs who are being treated as one undifferentiated group – “whites”, “African Americans”, “Native Americans”, “LGBTQA”, “women,” etc.
** Another tendency at work here is the proclivity to view victim-identity groups as merely reactive. If a Palestinian sets of bombs because an Israeli visits the Temple Mount, that Palestinian is reacting. When gay-rights activists rioted in California after the passing of Proposition 8, they were reacting.
In a sense this is to deprive individuals of the faculty of choice, which also, in a way, absolves them of responsibility: a suicide bomber does not choose to murder people on a bus, the Israelis forced him to react that way.
In another sense, though, this reduces victim groups to the status of unthinking masses with no sense of right or wrong. It treats a given reaction (riots, bombings, etc.) as the only conceivable outcome. If the faculty of free choice were, in fact, attributed to designated victim groups, then said groups could then be held accountable for making the choice to engage in violence or held responsible for their rhetoric. As I’ve mentioned above, the entire point of the exercise is to absolve victims of that responsibility, or at least rhetorically shift its burden to a different actor.
Wow, that was insightful and interesting. Thanks for the great read Vincent.
“OR, they are concluding that non-white people CANNOT be racially biased. ”
DING DING DING! This is the MCC manifesto in a nutshell. I wonder if Diego Hernandez will be so kind as to grace us white folk with another “taste of his rage”.
I’d also recommend Uncertain Encounters by Nathan Douthat. It’s subtitled “Indians and Whites at Peace and War in Southern Oregon 1820’s – 1860’s” and covers the period before and immediately after the Rogue River Indian Wars.
It was brought to my attention as a source for a project I’m working on, and I found it to be a fairly interesting read. Douthat’s central premise is that, far from the stereotypes that we hear about whites simply moving in, exterminating natives, and stealing land, relations between the two were mostly characterized by attempts to find “middle ground”.
It’s a more subtle interpretation of events than you’ll find in the literature and slogans of the “Columbus must die” contingent, but I think it’s probably rather more reflective of the way people of different (and often hostile) cultures tend to interact when they’re forced together.
One wonders how Dr. Haskett believes students should view Columbus. As a villain? A genocidaire? A harbinger of a corrupt civilization come to wreak havoc on a more pure and innocent people? Perhaps when he says
This year, they also chose to only offer