Yesterday's post about the campus thought police and ISIS lead to a discussion about white supremacist thought in the formative years of the European settlement of the New World. Commenter Ilion pointed out that feelings of group supremacy were pretty much universal, yet only the Europeans are singled out as vile racists. I'd suggest the feelings of superiority hardly mattered.
In reading journals of explorers and historical figures of the time, I don't recall their motivations being racial. Again borrowing from Ilion, they were much more likely to be nationalist than racist. After all, everyone knows the British are better than the French, right? Well, depending on which side of the Channel you were born.
If it didn't matter all that much to them, who are we to turn it into a litmus test? As far as I can tell, the British would have colonized New England whether the natives looked like them or looked like Mohicans or looked like Martians. It wasn't about skin color, it was about escaping poverty and finding new opportunities.
Carrying it one step further, going 200 years into the future, instead of being obsessed with race and sex, what if historians are obsessed with shoes? What can we expect when our fashionably dressed wear things like this?
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| Forget Shakespeare as a dead, white, imperialist male, 200 years from now no one will read the works of Maya Angelou because our footwear crimes disqualify us all. |
When the "If it didn't matter all that much to them, who are we to turn it into a litmus test? As far as I can tell, the British would have colonized New England whether the natives looked like them or looked like Mohicans or looked like Martians. It wasn't about skin color, it was about escaping poverty and finding new opportunities."
ReplyDeleteIndeed, they would have.
When the English began to colonize the Eastern Seaboard, the whole continent had been vastly depopulated (*) during the previous century by various Old World diseases working their way through the native populations. Moreover, the North American Indians didn't have settled states as Europeans understood the concept. So, when they looked at the
(*) In similar manner, when British and (later) Americans began moving into the Ohio Territory (i.e. the Old Northwest), the land was only just beginning to be repopulated by Indian tribes. The depopulation if the Ohio Territory had two causes: first, the Old World diseases which had affected the entire continent in the 16th century, and then the deliberate policy of genocide by the Iroquois Confederaton against all other tribes living in this region of the continent during the "Beaver Wars" of the 17th century.
[let's complete that previous post]
ReplyDelete[So, when they looked at the] New World and saw a land without cities, a land without organized States and governments, they saw a land without owners.
I don't think anyone can accuse the British of not being multi-cultural...
ReplyDeleteBe it so. [If t]his burning of widows is your custom, prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.
--- General Sir Charles James Napier, GCB
Of course, today's Progressives would #hashtag such violence.
ReplyDeleteN.B. The end of British colonialism has been a boon to Zimbabwe. I hear the Venezuelans, no longer oppressed by the Spanish, are going to start importing Zimbabwean dollars to supplement the Bolivarian toilet paper shortage.
"In reading journals of explorers and historical figures of the time, I don't recall their motivations being racial. Again borrowing from Ilion, they were much more likely to be nationalist than racist."
ReplyDeleteI was not aware that being nationalist and being racist were mutually exclusive.
I also read a lot of stuff from the late 1800s/early 1900s[1], and it always looked to me like they were uniformly, casually racist, to the point where nobody even argued the point and it would just bubble up in casual conversation as an "of course" sort of thing. The casual nationalism was mixed in with that.
That said, while I can't speak for anyone else, I'm certainly not using this as any sort of "litmus test". I just don't think we should be sugar-coating things, from either side. Yes, omelettes were made. Eggs were broken. And while in many ways they are fine omelettes, I see no reason why we should expect the broken eggs to be happy about it, or willing to just forget about it.
[1] Project Gutenberg has a tremendous amount of stuff from that era.
"I don't think anyone can accuse the British of not being multi-cultural..."
ReplyDeleteHere is another amusement of multi-culturalism ... and the whole "whites (except us leftists) are racists" mindset --
The legal institution of slavery in the English colonies in North America (that is, colonial USA) *began* as an early exercise in British multi-culturalism ... and of legislation by judges, rather than by legislators. The very first "owner" of a slave in colonial America was a black man (*), and he was given the "right" to "own" another human being by the courts via an early version of the same mult-culti rationale that is subjecting parts of Britain (and America) to the abomination of 'sharia' "law" -- "his cultural traditions are different than ours, and far be it from us to expect that he live among us by our traditions and laws".
At the time America was first colonized, English/British law did not recognize slavery as a legal state to which a person could be lawfully subjected. From the founding of Jamestown in 1607 until this court ruling in 1655, there were no slaves in America. For a few years after that court ruling, blacks could "own" other blacks. It was only in [1661 or 1670 (the sources I had found differ)] that the "right" to "own" another person as a slave was extended to whites.
(*) This man, Anthony Johnson, was brought to the colonies against his will by Europeans; that is, he was sold as a slave in Africa by other Africans to Europeans and transported hence by ship. But, as English law did not recognize slavery, after the slave-ship had transported him to Virginia, his legal status became 'indentured servant'. And when the term of his indenture was up, his legal status became 'free man'. However, some years later, when it was time for him to release one of his own (black) indentured servants, a man named John Castor, he successfully petitioned the court to recognize John Castor as his slave.
ReplyDeleteTE: I was not aware that being nationalist and being racist were mutually exclusive.
So what? Who said they were "mutually exclusive"?
"So what? Who said they were "mutually exclusive"? "
ReplyDeleteAt the same time, I believe we all know who says they are mutually exhaustive.
Hint for those who don't know: "anti-racists" (which is to say, anti-white racists) and other leftists
TW: I don't know about you, but when I say that something is "more likely to be X than Y", then I'm stating exclusive alternatives, like "this spider species is more likely to be yellow than white". If the alternatives aren't exclusive, then you get things like "today is more likely to be rainy than to be Tuesday", which just sounds weird.
ReplyDeleteThat said, the general tone of what KT was writing did seem to be assuming that racism and nationalism were alternatives to each other, and not variations on the same general idea.
I don't think they were exclusive, but I would argue that the racial distinctions we speak of today were tertiary causes in, say, the 1700s. Expansion by the British and French, both what we would lump into the "white" category today, into North America were chess moves against each other. The writings of the time are quite explicit on that point. The domination of the depleted Indians, which we obsess over, was a side effect.
ReplyDeleteIn the subsequent post, I found some facts about the Catawba of North Carolina, the resting place of the late Maya Angelou. The "racism" and "imperialism" we detest in the "whites" is present in spades in the Catawba. Dittos for the Apaches. Certainly for the Apaches vs. the Mexicans and possibly for the Catawba against their enemies du jour, the only thing preventing them from turning the land into an abbatoir was their utter inability to master anything but the most rudimentary tools.
The late Davis Yeagley, who was half Comanche, never made excuses for what his people were like (nor would abide any for his people nor for Indians in general) before they were tamed by the US Army.
ReplyDelete