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[NOTE: The Journal's support of the Bar's Cultural Competency Program begins with the following article by Dr. Theresa Martinez. The Bar commissioned this article as part of
its effort to increase lawyers' awareness of diverse cultures. Dr. Martinez's article has stories that are hard to hear. But the stories were harder for their tellers to
recount, and most harsh to have been lived by those who originally recounted them. By understanding the past as seen by others, we better understand how they see the present.
The cultural heritage we each bring to the table affects the way we see each other. Also, as we understand the past, we see that past social norms have been unjust and gain
the ability to look critically at our own views. If social injustice has been socially accepted in the past, do we now have some of the same blindness?]
Introduction
"I can't believe we did this, Professor Martinez. I had no idea we could be like this." These statements, which are a direct quote from a student who took my Ethnic
Minorities in America class in the Winter of 1994, were made after a lecture and discussion on the history of American Indians. In particular, we were discussing one of the
required texts, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown.1 This student's response was hardly new to me, nor was it the last of its kind. I have been teaching for over thirteen years at the university level - three as a graduate student, and ten as a university professor, all in the discipline of Sociology - and I can recall many many times that my students have been non-plussed, shocked, and appalled at a version of the American past they somehow never heard in high school history classes or anywhere else. The tale need not have been about American Indians but could have been about Chicanas/os, African Americans, Asian Americans or women. This essay recounts some of the stories I tell in my classroom about race, ethnicity, and gender. It is a thoughtful and brief telling, really, of our American past, but this time, the center is shifted from European and European American men to some of our most neglected histories - people of color and women in U.S. society. It is a discussion of the past that was thoroughly lacking in the educational curricula available to the great majority of my students here at the University of Utah. I will also add, lest anyone should judge this to be a Utah phenomenon, that similar statements were made in one way or another by students in classes I taught at the University of New Mexico before I ever came to Utah. But let us start with the beginning.
Before the Mayflower
When it comes to American Indians, my students usually have some sense of the wrongs perpetrated against this very diverse group. However, their understanding is essentially
and sadly superficial. I tell them the story of the Cherokee. By the 1790s, the Cherokee, who lived in the tri-state region of Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina, had
decided to end conflict with their European brethren after years of constant warfare. They decided to embark on a campaign of active assimilation; that is, they changed their
entire way of life. They transformed their economy to one based on agriculture and commerce and began to open blacksmith shops and saw mills. They adopted implements of
European invention including the plow and the spinning wheel. In 1821, one of their number, Sequoya, invented a phonetic syllabary notation system - an alphabet - for the
Cherokee language. By 1824 almost the entire population of Cherokee were literate in this language, and by 1828 the Cherokee had their own newspaper as well as their own
written constitution and code of laws. This was a remarkable change in forty years since the end of violent struggle with European Americans. 2
Meanwhile, it must be noted that larger forces were at play in this era. In 1828, the newly elected President Andrew Jackson "was a frontiersman and Indian hater, and the
change boded no good to the Cherokee."3 Legislation in Georgia after his election was to have ominous implications for the Cherokee and their Chief, John Ross, but first we must explore the story of some American Board missionaries.
It seems a Supreme Court case, one of many court cases initiated on the part of John Ross and his people who opted to fight for Cherokee sovereignty and rights to their land
holdings, became pivotal in 1832. Worcester v. Georgia was a case that involved Georgia state law and American Board missionaries who had been arrested for passing onto
Cherokee land to preach the gospel in defiance of a Georgia law that prohibited "any white person" from entering the territory of the Cherokee without applying for a
Georgia residence permit and swearing an oath of allegiance to Georgia.4 The missionaries objected to this law - one intended to discourage support and ensure harassment of the Cherokee - on the principle that the Cherokee were a sovereign nation. It also violated their belief that state politics should not dictate missionary work. The case was heard and John Marshall's Court ruled against Georgia stating that Georgia's laws were unconstitutional not only because they violated the authority of the federal government but also the political rights of the Cherokee Nation. However, while Marshall ruled on the side of Cherokee sovereignty, he "refused to describe Indian nations as foreign nations." He simply wrote that U.S. protection of Cherokee sovereignty as a "weaker state" did not "imply the destruction of the protected."5
Unfortunately for the Cherokee, neither the Governor of Georgia nor the President of the United States was prepared to enforce the decision of the Marshall Court. Governor
Lumpkin refused to free the missionaries or enforce the decision. This was a time, in addition, when "law governing federal judicial and executive power over the states
was unclear . . . As a result, technical legal issues provided a smokescreen for President Jackson, who invoked them as his reason for not enforcing the Court's decision in
Worcester . . . Jackson was known to be pleased by the Court's inability to Ôcoerce Georgia.'"6
What happened next was typical of Jackson's administration at this time. He simply allowed his representative, one Rev. Shermerhorn, to negotiate with dissidents in the
Cherokee ranks who signed a treaty which was to be repudiated by John Ross and the actual Cherokee council. When Ross was then jailed, by the Georgia Guard, Schermerhorn
scheduled a new council and "carrying the hoax to its conclusion, obtained seventy-five Cherokee signatures - in a nation of 17,000 citizens - and declared that the
Cherokee people had legally ratified a treaty of removal."7
What follows is well-known
in history though the story preceding it is not often told. "In all, about 17,000 Cherokee were forced into . . . temporary stockades and subsequently marched west.
Demographers speculate that as many as 8,000 deaths may have occurred among the Cherokee as a result of the 800-mile journey and the immediate effects (illness, scarcity of
food, exposure, trauma) of resettlement."8 This was, of course, the infamous "Trail of Tears." My question to my students has become, "What did they do to deserve this fate?"
The Legacy of African Slavery
The story of the Cherokee is unlike the story of the capture and treatment of African slaves. Slaves were taken from their homelands far away across the ocean, not simply
removed to places in the same country. I would like to focus on the story of slavery from its African beginnings to Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address.
To most of my students, the answer to the question, "What is the middle passage?" is "I have no idea." Sadly, our American history courses once again
neglect to tell most of the story. Africans were often force-marched from the interior of Africa to the coast where they were branded in the name of the company that owned
them and then loaded onto ships. The middle passage refers to the terrible journey of Africans chained by neck and legs within the hold of ships which were already filthy even
without human "cargo." "Slaves were positioned with their heads between the legs of other slaves, where they were forced to suffer through urine, feces, and a
lack of breathable air"9 Millions of people were transported in this indescribably horrific way.10 In the film, "Amistad,"11 it is no wonder that the Portuguese sailors cover their mouths and noses before they enter the hold of the ship to feed the people meager rations. One gets barely a sense from this film of the type of horror involved - the rape of women, the brutal whippings of defiant ones, and the option of suicide for some Africans too overwhelmed by the depravity, the degradation, the extraordinary inhumanity of this shipboard journey.
Toni Morrison evokes visions of the middle passage in her book, Beloved.12 Passages in the book linked to the character, Beloved, are marked for their opacity. It is as if the character is remembering piles of dead bodies in a dark, cramped place. She sees dead faces near her, and shackles as well. The "men without skin" - a seeming allusion to white faces - are the ones who come down into the dark place from the light above. These men have the power to pick and choose when they will feed the people down in the dark place where Beloved is, people who only wish to abandon the horror their bodies are experiencing. Morrison writes in one such passage,
I am always crouching the man on my face is dead his face is not mine his mouth smells sweet but his eyes are locked . . . I do not eat
the men without skin bring us their morning water to drink daylight comes through the cracks and I can see his locked eyes I am not big small rats do not wait for us to sleep someone is thrashing but there is no room to do it in if we had more to drink we could make tears . . . we are all trying to leave our bodies behind.13
In my many experiences as a diversity trainer, it was truly with police trainings that I began to understand the horror of the middle passage. After one of the trainings, I was
approached by an officer who told me he was impressed by this particular story. He wanted me to tell the other police something else besides. He said, "Don't just tell
them that. It is good but there's more. If you want them to relate to this, tell them to remember the dead body that they sat with all night. Tell them to remember the smell.
Tell them that smell was in the hold of the ships." It was a revelation to me and I have not forgotten to complete the tale with this hard, cold reality ever since.
Once landing on the shores of the New World, Africans met the auction block where they were bought and sold like so many heads of beef. Relationships were strained beyond the
breaking point by slave life. Marriage, no matter how desirable to these unfortunates, was not sanctioned unless by the whim of masters. I often try to bring this reality home
to my students by helping them imagine a world in which "sacred" or significant unions between two people are impossible without the sanction of one's
"owner." It starts to have an effect on them when they ponder their own wedding day or day of union with a beloved man or woman. This is only slightly less horrific
than the thought that one's own children could be taken at any moment from birth on depending once again on a master's whim.14 I don't think students realize the imponderable effects of slavery because they are not truly made real to them in high school and sad to say even in their university experience.
One of the most damning documents I have ever read with regard to slavery was written by President Abraham Lincoln in his March 4, 1865, Second Inaugural Address. In his poem,
"The Negro Speaks of Rivers," Langston Hughes15 writes, "I heard the singing of
the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans . . ."16 Lincoln, who had seen auction blocks in New Orleans as a young man, had obviously felt their effect. In his Second Inaugural 17 Lincoln raises some of the most telling issues of the Civil War and for that matter the
entire antebellum era. He states unequivocally that slavery was the cause of the war:
One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar
and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.18
Moreover, Lincoln suggests, both sides in this terrible war "read the same Bible, and pray to the same God," and he finds it "strange that any men should dare to
ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces."19 While he notes the strangeness of the "peculiar institution" of slavery, he admonishes, "let us judge not that we be not judged."20 However, later in the speech, Lincoln leaves admonishment behind. He states for the record that American slavery is an offence in the eyes of God for which certain woe will be the result. And in a ringing denouncement of the injustice of the systematic ownership of other human beings he states,
Fondly do we hope - fervently do we pray - that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills it to continue until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's
two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said
three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether."21
Lincoln heartily reminds us of something often left unsaid in history classes. He believes that the Civil War - which meant the death of hundreds of thousands of people - was a
just recompense from a righteous God for the sin of slavery.
The Chicanas/os: Strangers in Our Own Land
The majority of students has no notion whatsoever of the Mexican American War. They generally have some notion that the southwestern U.S. did not get handed to the American
government "on a plate," if you will; however, their history is decidedly vague. The story of the San Patricios is not remarked in history texts with very few
exceptions. I will comment on it here.
As the story goes, Mexico owned the southwestern states of California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, most of Utah, southern Colorado, and all of Texas, before the war began.
Conflicts in Texas (of "remember the Alamo" fame), where the fighting all began, lead to the invasion of Mexico by the American army.22 Not everyone was uncritically accepting of the Mexican War. I would like to point out that during this time period, Abraham Lincoln, a young congressman from Illinois, spoke out in opposition to the Mexican War and said, "the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying against it."23 Lincoln was especially critical of then President Polk's motives for entering into the war. Former President Ulysses S. Grant was quite critical of Polk's involvement in the war. Grant, as quoted in Price,24 saw the occupation and annexation of Texas as part of a conspiracy and noted that the Mexican War itself was "Ôone of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.'"25 Grant wrote in his memoirs that he had a horror of the Mexican War but didn't have the moral courage to stand up for his beliefs. Moreover, Henry David Thoreau also refused to pay taxes to the government engaged in the Mexican War. In fact, Thoreau referred to the Mexican War as an "immoral action." 26
The invading American army in the Mexican American war was lead by General Zachary Taylor. Taylor's volunteers were not overly fond of Mexicans. In fact, it is well known even
by their own accounts that they brutalized the Mexicans; Taylor's men were known for ruthlessness, rape, and general sacrilege. Some of these men were documented as having
ridden into Catholic churches, roping crucifixes on the altar, and dragging them into the public plaza, beating helpless clergy in the meantime.27
Enter the Irishmen. Irishmen were part of the invading American force in the Mexican American War. These men and others were largely Catholics and were horrified by what they
witnessed at the hands of their fellow volunteers. Led by Captain John Riley of County Galway, these men along with others deserted and joined the Mexican side during the war.
These defectors, more than 500 in number, made up what was called the San Patricios or St. Patrick's Battalion. Out of 500, approximately 50 were caught and hanged,
representing the largest execution in military history.28
The Mexican American War and its aftermath left a brutal and tangible memory for many Mexicans. Many lost their lives; many suffered rape and lynching; many lost their land
grants to the invaders. The injustices Mexicans suffered at the hands of European Americans in Texas are a significant core issue for Gloria Anzaldœa, a Chicana feminist
author and poet. I often read Anzaldœa's poem "We Call Them Greasers" to my students.29 It is a poem that speaks from the standpoint of the Texan mercenary. While this is not necessarily a personal story, the reader can't help flinching at the brutal imagery Anzaldœa creates in the poem. In the Texan's voice she speaks of the contempt European Americans often had for Mexicans when they came to Mexican territory, and how whites "waved" a fraying piece of paper at families to convince them that they hadn't paid taxes and were required to leave - a nasty deceptive device. The white Texan voice mocks those Mexicans who attempt to fight the frayed piece of paper in court. "It was a laughing stock/them not even knowing English. Still some refused to budge, even after we burned them out."30 Sociologist David Montejano31 notes that an English lady who spent time on a Texas ranch in the 1880s, wrote in her journal "that it was difficult to convince Texans that Mexicans were human . . .[The Mexican] is treated like a dog, or, perhaps, not so well.'"32
Japanese Americans
It might surprise many people to know that the story of Japanese internment is unknown to most of my students. These are young people, largely from middle class homes,
university juniors and seniors, most of whom have not the slightest notion what internment was or what it meant to so many. The early history of Japanese in America and the
events following American entrance into the Second World War are nothing short of a tragedy. I try to share with students this story.
Japanese immigrants faced strong anti-Japanese sentiment in their adopted country, faced stereotypes, were restricted in their immigration patterns, and faced ineligibility for
citizenship. Japanese were excluded from union membership and certain occupations and referred to as the "yellow peril" in some quarters. The Gentlemen's and Ladies'
Agreements of 1908 and 1920 barred most Japanese from entering the country. And in the 1922 Ozawa case, the Supreme Court declared that a Japanese person was not a
"white" person and so was ineligible for citizenship.33 But the event that most shocks my students was called at the time a "military necessity."34
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, approximately 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans were rounded up and sent to what were called relocation centers
which turned out to be akin to concentration camps with barbed wire and armed guards in towers.35 According to most accounts of camp life, there were severe hardships related to food, shelter, and sanitation. Yoshiko Uchida recounts awful privation and suffering, first, at the Tanforan racetrack, and then later at Topaz in Utah.36
None of us felt well during our incarceration in Topaz. We all caught frequent colds during the harsh winter months and had frequent stomach upsets . . . Much of our energy
simply went into keeping our room dusted, swept, and mopped to be rid of the constant accumulation of dust, and in trying to do laundry when the water was running. We had no
idea when the water would be turned on, for its appearance had no predictable pattern.37
The suffering of these Japanese and Japanese Americans was acknowledged by the U.S. government after a commission of inquiry and compensation was finally made for one of the
"most egregious mistakes" in our country's history.38
I recall having the retired Judge Raymond Uno speak to the class about his experiences in one particular internment camp. I asked him if his mother had decorated their portion
of the stable. He recalled that she had used colored cloth and paper and that she had tried to start a flower garden. I distinctly remember a young student looking puzzled by
the question. I then explained to this largely middle class audience of students, most of whom had never seen any kind of hardship and many of whom relegate "women's
decoration" to triviality, that it shows remarkable courage for a human being to attempt to create any beauty whatsoever under such conditions, and I was impressed that
Judge Uno's mother, like so many Japanese women I had read about, was such a courageous woman.
Women and Women of Color
While the discussion of gender identity and gender roles as conceptual tools is useful for my students - by way of learning how we socially construct gender, I find that
talking about the diverse history of American women is in many ways the most enlightening material for them. I often speak of the history of European American women first and
then lead into the history of women of color in the United States - two very different stories.
The history of European American women leads to discussion of so many limitations in women's rights in our early history, so many of which my students are often unaware.
European American women at this time, "gained social recognition primarily through their membership in families, their personal rights were few and privileges were
subject to the will of the male head of household"39 who could easily and legally circumscribe his wife's choices in life. As quoted in Zinn, Julia Spruill notes that
The husband's control over the wife's person extended to the right of giving her chastisement . . . But he was not entitled to inflict permanent injury or death on his wife . .
. Besides absolute possession of his wife's personal property and life estate in her lands, the husband took any other income that might be hers. He collected wages earned by
her labor.40
Women could not vote, attend universities, and were relegated to the domestic sphere. It took incredibly difficult struggles over time - the suffrage movement and the women's
rights movement - to even give women these, seemingly taken-for-granted rights. Many women paved the way, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Susan B. Anthony.
But when discussing these changes and struggles, we are also including women of color, right? Partly right. Like European American women, women of color face sexism; however,
unlike them, we do not share the privilege of their race. Like Mexican women during the Mexican American war or African slave women, we are "beasts of burden," along
with our men, as well as sex objects.41
Anzaldœa speaks to this differential experience in terms of race and gender. We left Anzaldœa's poem, "We Call Them Greasers," at the point where the Texan mercenary
describes the despoiling of Mexican property. At this point the poem takes an even more ruthless turn as the mercenary and his men single out a particular couple who wouldn't
"budge" and tells in graphic language the violence with which they visited them. In the poem we read the mercenary's own account of raping the woman and having her
husband lynched. The woman whom he rapes becomes for him in the poem an object of racist derision - a dirty Mexican; and an object to be sexually violated - a woman. Through
his eyes, we see her race and her gender - elements toward which he vents a violent hatred.
She lay under me whimpering/I plowed into her hard/ kept thrusting and thrusting/felt him watching from the mesquite tree/heard him keening like a wild animal/in that instant I
felt such contempt for her/round face and beady black eyes like an Indian's./Afterwards I sat on her face until her arms stopped flailing,/ didn't want to waste a bullet on
her . . . I walked up to where I had tied her man to the tree/and spat in his face. Lynch him, I told the boys.42
But perhaps no words capture the unique experience of women of color better than those of Sojourner Truth at an 1851 women's rights convention. Truth clarifies the immense
differences between European American and Black women:
Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles or gives me any best place. And ain't I a woman. Look at my arm! I have plowed, and planted, and gathered into barns,
and no man could head me. And ain't I a woman? . . . I have borne thirteen children and seen em most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none
but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?43
Because we face different issues, women of color chose to break from European American women in struggle. We recognized, as many of them at first did not in the early feminist
movement, that we faced unique issues. While this is coming to be understood in Women's Studies programs today, there are still issues with regard to our very different
feminisms.44 Race/ethnicity plus gender have become our lot as we are judged in a society where racism and sexism are not footnotes in history.
Conclusion
In over thirteen years of teaching and five of doing diversity trainings, I have learned that a faithful portrayal of American history is "more beautiful and more terrible"45 than any shared with most of my students and trainees in high school. And, if I fail to share it with them, they may never learn it at any other time. If we must learn from history to avoid repetition of our past misdeeds, how much more essential, then, must it be to faithfully recapture that history in its bedlam and in its glory, in its days of horror and in its moments of transcendence.
Footnotes
1 Brown, Dee. 1970/1991. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. New York: Henry Hold & Company.
2 Mooney, James. 1900/1995. Myths of the Cherokee. New York: Dover Publications, Inc.
3 Ibid, p. 117.
4 Norgren, Jill. 1996. The Cherokee Cases: The Confrontation of Law and Politics. New York: McGraw-Hill.
5 Ibid, p. 119.
6 Ibid, p. 123.
7 Ibid, p. 136.
8 Ibid, p. 143.
9 Johnson, Charles, Patricia Smith, and WGBH Series Research Team.
1998. Africans in America: Americas Journey Through Slavery. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, p. 71.
10 Zinn, Howard. 1980. A People's History of the United States. New York: HarperPerennial.
11 Spielberg, Steven. 1998. "Amistad," Universal City, California: DreamWorks LLC.
12 Morrison, Toni. 1987. Beloved. New York: Penguin Books.
13 Ibid, p. 210.
14 Ibid. See also Zinn, p. 34.
15 Hughes, Langston. 1959. Selected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Vintage Classics.
16 Ibid, p. 4.
17 Basler, Roy P. 1946. Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings. New York: De Capo Press.
18 Ibid, p. 792.
19 Ibid, p. 793.
20 Ibid, p. 793.
21 Ibid, p. 793.
22 Martinez, Orlando. 1975. The Great Landgrab: The Mexican American War 1846-1848. London: Quartet Books.
23 Ibid, p. 8.
24 Price, Glenn W. 1967. Origins of the War with Mexico. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press.
25 Ibid, p. 95.
26 Martinez, p. 8.
27 Acu–a, Rodolfo. 1999. Occupied America. 3rd ed. New York: Addison Wesley.
28 Day, Mark R. 1996. The San Patricios. Alta Vista, California: San Patricio Productions.
29 Anzaldœa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
30 Ibid, p. 134.
31 Montejano, David. 1987. Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986. Austin,
Texas: University of Texas Press.
32 Ibid, p. 83.
33 Fujiwara, Lynn H. and
Dana Y. Takagi. 1999. "Japanese Americans: Stories About Race in America," in The Minority Report: An Introduction to Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Relations, 3rd ed.,
edited by Anthony Gary Dworkin and Rosalind J. Dworkin. New York: Harcourt Brace Publishers.
34 Ibid, p. 305.
35 Weglyn, Michi. 1976. Years of Infamy. New York: Quill Paperbacks. See also, Feeley, Francis McCollum. 1999. America's
Concentration Camps During WWII: Social Science and the Japanese American Internment. University Press of the South.
36 Uchida,
Yoshiko. 1982/1998. Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese-American Family. Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press.
37 Ibid, p. 114.
38 Ibid, p. 146.
39 Dill, Bonnie
Thornton. 1988. "Our Mothers' Grief: Racial-Ethnic Women and the Maintenance of Families." Journal of Family History, 13: 415-31.
40 Zinn, p. 105.
41 See Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldœa. 1984. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by
Radical Women of Color. San Francisco: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press. See also Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the
Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge.
42 Anzaldœa. 1987, p. 135.
43+ Zinn, p. 122.
44 Sandoval, Chela. 1998. "Mestizaje as Method: Feminists-of-Color Challenge the
Canon," in Living Chicana Theory, edited by Carla Trujillo. Berkeley, California: Third Woman Press.
45 Baldwin, James.
1988. "A Talk to Teachers." In Multicultural Literacy, edited by Rick Simonson and Scott Walker. St. Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, p. 11.
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