Poll #1: Does race exist? By a vote of 22-5, say yes.

--Is race a scientific fact? Or a cultural one?

--If the latter, then is it so central to daily life in the United States that it should be treated as real?

--Or has it historically been so conflated with notions of racial superiority that it ought to be abandoned for some form of colorblindness?

Lecture #2: Debating the American Historical Narrative

What's at stake in the debate between defenders of the traditional narrative of American history and their multicultural critics over the American Historical narrative?

Is the purpose of a national historical narrative-- as defenders of the traditional narrative argue-- to promote the country's triumphs and strengths, to promote a common national identity complete with a single set of political ideals and values?

Or is it-- as advocates of multiculturalism argue-- to recognize the contributions to American society and the world of a broad range of peoples and cultural traditions and to teach a cautionary American history that emphasizes the inequalities and injustices of our national past?

Let's look at the arguments of each:

1. Defenders of the traditional narrative argue that efforts to include the histories of non-European peoples in the standards detract from a proper focus on the Western heritage as the basis for American democracy, constitutionalism, and free market capitalism.

For example, Nathan Glazer, a prominent Harvard sociologist and critic [at least until recently] of affirmative action, has written:

"One of the values that [multiculturalists] want to expose students to is tolerance and respect for others, but these qualities are hard to find in the practice of human sacrifice in Mayan and Aztec societies or the existence of anything like Democracy or constitutional rule in almost all non-Western societies before the impact of the West." Multiculturalists , he argues, "drag out of the murkiest recesses of history… the impressive accomplishments in stone sculpture or architecture [of non-European peoples] and they raise these up alongside the greatest most creative epochs of human history."

To Glazer and other critics of multiculturalism (including Allen Bloom, a University of Chicago Literature Professor and author of The Closing of the American Mind; Bloom passed away in 199?) the focus of the American history narrative has to be on the country's implementation of the western ideals of democracy, liberty, individualism, and freedom of conscience. For Glazer, the child of Jewish Immigrants, part of the genius of the traditional American historical narrative is that it makes the founding fathers available to him and other descendents of non-Anglo Americans as cultural and spiritual forefathers despite a lack of Anglo-American hereditary.

But is it so easy to reconcile the founders' commitment to democratic ideals with the expropriation of Indian lands and the continued growth of slavery in the first century of the new republic, particularly for those of us who are descended from the victims of these crimes?

To feel a part of the country, must we find someone like ourselves represented in history curricula of the country?

Or is Glazer right that ascriptive identities (race, gender, etc.) should be irrelevant to feeling a sense of identity with the people who founded and led the nation?

Does, as Glazer and others have argued, teaching a history that focuses as much on the unjust treatment of racial and ethnic minorities as on the country's democratic ideals encourage students to focus on their differences and grievances at the expense of a sense of national identity.

Or are advocates of multiculturalism right when they argue that racial and ethnic tensions and inequalities are pervasive in our society and therefore that it is more important-- and effective-- to provide students with an historical context for understanding those tensions and inequalities rather than to give them a sanitized history that they will reject as patriotic propaganda?

Can an African-American child learn the 300 year history of slavery and racial discrimination without learning to distrust whites? What about the descendants of Indian displacement and genocide, of the Japanese-American internment camps, of the Mexican immigrants who were forcibly repatriated during the Depression?

1. The roots of English colonial settlement in North America were in the desire for conquest and imperialism, not in establishing freedom and democracy

In Takaki's view, boundary drawing based on race was not an unforeseen and unfortunate by-product of the European age of exploration and colonialism but in fact a central concern of those who sought to expand European power and culture beyond the bounds of Europe.

Why make this point with a focus on Shakespeare's Tempest?

To Takaki, The Tempest was part of an 17^th century English conversation about the boundaries between civilization and savagery, a crucial boundary for a nation and culture embarking on a period of imperial expansion and colonization.

He finds this process of boundary drawing in the English colonization of Ireland. In order to assert their superiority over the Irish, the colonizers created a social order in which the benefits and privileges of Englishness were denied the Irish majority. But when the English used the language of race to distinguish themselves from the Irish, Takaki argues, they were using the older idea of people of different cultures, not the language of physical or biological difference that would emerge later. The English believed that the Irish could be "nurtured" into civilization and thus were not limited by their savagery.

Takaki then compares the English view of the Irish with their attempts to understand the peoples they encountered on the east coast of North America. To the English, both the Irish and the Indians appeared to be ruled by their bodily needs and desires-- a clear sign of their savagery and animal-like nature-- while the English believed their own ability to control their natural desires was evidence of their civilization. Despite evidence of Indian farming and social organization, the English saw the Indians as cultural inferiors bound by the physical needs of their bodies.

What remained unclear in the English mind was whether this savagery was cultural, a product of the Indians' lack of Christianity and therefore not permanent, or whether it was racial, an innate part of their bodies/beings, and therefore a permanent mark of inferiority.

2. It was in New England, Takaki believes, that the English settlers began to see Indian savagery as racialized, as an innate sign of that Indians were a demonic race that could not be assimilated into puritan society and Christianity.

In Takaki's view, Puritan leader John Winthrop's call for New England to be "a city upon a hill"-- a model society for the re-establishment of piety and righteousness in England-- demonstrates how the Puritans viewed the native inhabitants of New England as part of the local flora and fauna-- the wilderness that God had created for the Puritans to re-build the good society-- not as independent peoples with whom they would have to negotiate.

A City on the Hill: John Winthrop was the political and spiritual leader of the group of protestant dissenters from the Church of England who settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 and have come to be known as the Puritans.

Winthrop served as the colony’s first Governor. In a sermon entitled "A Modell of Christian Charity" that he wrote during the Atlantic passage, the Governor laid out a vision for the religious community that were about to found.

Winthrop’s vision was almost the complete opposite of the democratic and libertarian values that have come to define the American tradition-- a vision with more in common with the Islamic theocracy now established in Iran and Afghanistan.

The Colony was to be a collectivized and hierarchical community in which obedience and deference to the social order was seen as necessary to the creation and maintenance of a godly community.

Moreover, the goal of the settlers of Massachusetts was not simply to find a place in which they could worship as they please but to create a community that would demonstrate to the corrupt world they had left behind in England that it was possible to create a righteous society if only people would follow the Massachusetts model. Thus the purpose of New England was to reform Old England.

Winthrop’s most remembered words are these: "For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us." But the eyes that Winthrop was concerned with were European and the world he was seeking to change was European Christendom. To the Puritans, New England was an uninhabited wilderness which God has made available to a small group of pious Christians in order to reform the world. To Winthrop, the native residents of New England were little more than a part of the wilderness that had to be tamed along with the rest of the flora and fauna.

3. Takaki argues that over the course of the series of revolutions and counter-revolutions that took place in 17^th century England, there developed the idea that the English were, by reason of the race and culture, uniquely capable of democratic self-government, that they were possessed of certain natural rights by virtue of their Englishness, rights that could not be abridged by the King or any other government.

Eventually, political theorists like John Locke and Thomas Jefferson would eventually develop the idea of English rights into a theory of universal rights of 'all men'. But in its origins, the idea was the English birth and culture gave "men" certain inalienable rights, a set of rights that others (Indians, Africans, the Irish) lacked the capacity to use properly.

This contradiction is evident in Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. Much of what Jefferson wrote in the Declaration is fairly commonplace within the English tradition of protest against royal violations on the natural-born rights of Englishmen. Jefferson’s unique contribution, though, is that he did not talk about the rights of Englishmen, but rather of all men. "All men are created equal and are endowed with inalienable rights." In that simple phrase, Jefferson obliterated a boundary within the English republican tradition that had suggested only the English were capable of republican government. Jefferson took what had been thought as a trait of a specific group of people (what we would call an ethnic or a national group) and made it a natural right of everybody—or at least of all men.

But what exactly did Jefferson mean by "all men"? It is clear from the text of the Declaration that Jefferson’s "we" did not extend to the "merciless Indian savages" whom he charged King George of allowing to attack America's North American colonists.

DeLoria's thesis is that (white) Americans have, since the Colonial era, used images and masquerades of Indian-ness in order to distinguish themselves from the decadence and rigid class hierarchies of Europe.

Specifically, by playing Indian, Americans have sought to claim the positive attributes ascribed to Indians-- self-reliance, economic independence and connection to the natural word-- while continuing to covet Indian lands and treat Indians as inferior race destined for extinction. As Indian cultural theorists and activists argue, the danger in these images in not in whether they are positive or negative representations of Indian culture and life, but they convey a message of Indian culture and life as a thing of the past; something that is virtually extinct, and has no place in modern American culture.

DeLoria starts from a similar premise as Takaki. Most white American representations of Indians tell us little or nothing about the actual lives and communities of Indian nations and peoples. Rather, from the colonial era to the present day, they tell us about American perceptions of and attitudes towards the Indian. Moreover, in the contrasts they draw, explicitly or implicitly, between Indian ways of life and white American practices, they tell us about white American self-definition and perception. So, just as Takaki argues that Anglo-American definitions of what it meant to be civilized were dependent on representations of savagery as a distant other (i.e. without the idea of savagery, you can't have the idea of civilization). DeLoria argues that representations of the Indian other were crucial to the development of a self-conscious American national identity ("national subjectivity"-- the construction of an explicit and self-conscious American point-of-view).

What is challenging about DeLoria's argument is his claim that these Indian representations worked in two ways: not only did they assert white America's racial superiority and its commonalities with European civilization by contrasting it with Indian primitiveness, but they also enabled American colonialist to assert a national and racial identity distinct from the British by emphasizing the colonists' similarities to the noble and free savages of North America.

18^th century critics of British colonial rule were not claiming to have become actual Indians (they had not, like Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves, committed race suicide.) Rather, their Indian "play/performances" demonstrated how their rootedness in North American soil had enabled them to shed the rigid class hierarchies and deference to social order inherent in British culture and to replace it with a culture that embraced the democratic equality of all (white) men and the freedom of wild Indians as much as the civilized order of european society.

It was the colonists' identification with Indianess (rather than with real Indians) that transformed them from Anglo-Europeans into Americans. By wearing Indianess as an "obvious" disguise, the Boston Tea Party radicals and other performers of Indianness, emphasized their difference from real Indians even as they asserted that their adoption of certain Indian ways had made them into a new thing called an American.

Pocohontas: How does Disney's version of the story of Pocohontas represent the Indians and the relationship between Indians and the English colonists?

Disney's retelling of Pocohontas is also a retelling of the founding of American from a multicultual perspective that seeks to recognize the crucial contribution that the local Indians made to the Virginia settlement at Williamsburg. And to bring the story even more up-to-date, in the process both the Indians and the settlers are learning a lesson in racial tolerance.

For example, in Disney's version, when Pochontas and John Smith meet, she successfully challenges his unconscious view of her as uncivilized and from an inferior culture to his. Her closeness to nature enables her to demonstrate to him that his sense of English superiority is arrogant and disrespectful of other creatures and of the knowledge and skills inherent in Indian societies.

But while, Diney's Pocohontas is more fairy-tale than history, I hope you'll notice how traditional elements of Indian representation, particularly the idea of the noble savage, remain in the movie. The Pocohontas figure is represented in supernatural terms, able to talk to trees and animals, but the English sailors can't, emphasizing again the contrast between the animal-like Indian and the civilized English.

Most importantly, in the movie's conclusion the English sailors become American by aligning themselves with the Indians against the ship's captain who has come to symbolize the greed and in humanity of British royalty. Thus, as in DeLori's recounting of the Boston Tea Party, Americanness is represented as a combination of respect for Indian lives and culture and a hatred of British aristocracy and the British class system.