"Politics of Distraction: Considering Responses to the Anti-CRT Movement," by Lauren Shook, UT Doctoral Student

Lauren Shook wrote this cogent, critical essay for a course I taught this semester at UT-Austin titled, "Race, Ethnicity and the Schools." She nails it that the current anti-CRT movement is an exercise in the politics of distraction. What are we not doing in Texas that we should be doing because our attention is elsewhere?

Great job, Lauren!

-Angela Valenzuela

Politics of Distraction: Considering Responses to the Anti-CRT Movement

by 

Lauren Shook, Doctoral Student

Educational Leadership and Policy

University of Texas at Austin

The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing. – Toni Morrison

Last month I took my daughters down to the Texas State Capitol for a celebration of Indigenous People’s Day. I wanted them to know what I had not been taught about our history, our place in it, and our responsibilities going forward. Due to mixing up the dates, I found myself standing on Texas Confederate Memorial Lawn with sightseers and heavily armed Capitol police. Instead of introducing my daughters to both our Indigenous heritage and the legacy of our assimilationist settler ancestors, I walked them between the dozen statues reifying Texas Confederate troops while looking for the Tejano monument.

      One moment has stuck in my mind. Luna stopped in front of the monument for Terry’s Texas Rangers, Texas volunteers for the Confederacy. “Wow,” she said.

      I quickly tried to explain that these were not good people - they weren’t heroes to be admired and celebrated. As I tried to explain the Confederacy in words simple enough for a three-year-old, I felt the eyes of other Capitol visitors. I was frustrated – frustrated that instead of participating in a celebration of Indigenous past and future, I was spending my time centering the deeds of white men who betrayed their country in order to preserve the institution of slavery.

      We walked the halls of the Capitol building later – my first time in the building in seven years. It felt surreal to be in the space considering how much of my spring had been spent watching testimonies and hearings on my laptop concerning HB 1504 and HB 3979. HB 1504, which I submitted personal testimony and a policy brief for, might have provided more students with the opportunity to learn the history I had missed, and HB 3979 fought to preserve the particular version of history memorialized in the statues surrounding the building.

Spectacle as Strategy: Critical Race Theory as Distraction

      During the Texas legislative session, despite the acutely needed action on critical infrastructure, the Republican party introduced bills directly attacking Critical Race Theory in K12 education (“Texas Lawmakers Take Aim At Critical Race Theory,” 2021). Elsewhere, in other Republican controlled state legislatures, similar bills with similar language popped up (A. Harris, 2021), and local districts were engulfed in the panic to address a topic that many had not even heard before (Lah & Hannah, 2021).

      Why is Critical Race Theory the touchstone issue that is causing so much alarm on a local level and receiving so much coverage on a national level? Two possible explanations, one of which derives from Critical Race Theory, seem particularly salient to me. The first lies in the political utility of manufacturing a distraction to prevent action or resistance on the numerous crises facing our nation. The second explanation, the need to preserve Whiteness as an asset, does not negate the first explanation but rather explains why CRT was the manufactured distraction of choice.

      Edelman’s (1988) theory of political spectacle is helpful for understanding the utility of the battle against Critical Race Theory being waged in state legislatures. One particularly useful tenet of the theory is that problems are constructed and then used in order to advance political agendas, and this tenet has been used to examine other race-based challenges in education (Barnes & Moses, 2021). This tenet maintains that the problems addressed by policy are fashioned in order to justify the party’s actions and consolidate power.  Even the instigator of the movement against CRT, Christopher Rufo, publicly acknowledged that the controversy was contrived and generated in order to manipulate people into associating equity measures with their fears (Wallace-Wells, 2021).  

      My field notes from strategy sessions with TLEEC and NACCS Tejas Foco for HB 1504 show the cost of the manufactured distraction. I noted that I was struck by the amount of time and resources that were diverted away from progressive legislative goals in order to counter bills oppressing communities of color and the LGBTQ community.  For example, efforts to support HB 1504 were diverted to address HB 3979. During the May 8th NAACS Tejas Foco meeting, Dr. Emilio Zamora and Dr. Christopher Carmona lamented that attention had been diverted form the Equity Bill, and Dr. Carmona commented that although it had been his priority, he was not sure what had happened to it (field notes, May 8, 2021). The manufacturing of CRT as a false crisis in the K12 education system prevented advocates from putting their full time and energy into progressive issues.

      Likewise, Critical Race Theory’s tenet on the centrality of race and racism also provides support for why CRT itself has become such a touchstone. One of the central tenets of Critical Race Theory is the permanence and salience of race and racism in American society. Although there were voter suppression and anti-trans bills introduced in Republican dominated legislatures, the controversy surrounding CRT demonstrates the ongoing salience of race to the American public. The Republican elected in the recent Virginia governor race claims to have been won due to the stance on Critical Race Theory, and 25% of voters identified CRT as “the single most important factor influencing their vote (Beauchamp, 2021). Although the claim that CRT was the primary driver of the election results is relatively weak (Beauchamp, 2021), it certainly motivated a portion of the voters. The most notable demographic shifts in the electorate were among white women without a degree, two thirds of which said they valued more parental control over what was taught in schools (De Pinto, 2021). An NBC analysis of districts caught up in controversy over diversity initiatives showed that most of the school districts had rapidly diversifying demographics (Kingkade & Chiwaya, 2021). These results suggest that CRT in particular has become a touchstone with white voters precisely because of race’s ongoing relevance in American life, and the need to preserve White advantage.

      This directly ties to another one of Critical Race Theory’s central propositions, which is formulated by Harris (1993) as Whiteness as Property. Acknowledging America's white supremacist and colonial roots is threatening in part due to its ability to tarnish Whiteness and its value. Likewise, a critical exploration of American history and society threatens entitlement to White comfort. One of the primary arguments by anti-CRT activists is that white children should not be made to feel shame or are too young to discuss race (Changa, 2021), but even that framing centers white children and defines white comfort as part of the goods that they are entitled to. The emphasis on the emotional wellbeing of white children stands in stark contrast to real, harmful, documented effects of racism on children of color (Priest et al., 2013). Research has demonstrated that white students exposed to ethnic studies and multicultural coursework do not suffer in any meaningful way and benefit academically (Sleeter, 2011).

Addressing Distraction Without Succumbing to It

      I have been thinking in particular about the challenge of responding to the advocates and operatives working against diversity and equity in schools. On one hand, I feel it is important to respond to the challenge. Many of the opponents of CRT and DEI efforts demonstrate an obvious lack of knowledge concerning what Critical Race Theory actually is, how it is used, and who it can benefit from a more equitable society. Others make extreme claims that CRT can possibly lead to ethnic genocide (Thiessen, 2021), a dangerous precedent seen in historical “preemptive” crackdowns. Despite the seriousness of anti-CRT rhetoric, I find myself wrestling with how to work towards equity while thwarting the plan for distraction. The conversation can easily distract from a progressive agenda and center white interests. Perhaps this response on my part is related to my own frustration with wanting to work towards justice while feeling I must constantly prove the existence of injustice to my white community members.

      As admitted by figures like Christopher Rufo, the issue at hand is not actually Critical Race Theory itself. Addressing the disinformation about Critical Race Theory, the academic construct, is only useful in diminishing the utility of the concept for inflaming tension. While broad swaths of the public are likely misled and can become sucked into the school board meetings, the key players behind the push against Critical Race Theory know will not be persuaded. As Toni Morrison (Morrison et al., 1975) noted, distraction is an intended function of racism, and the expense of our labor on their agenda rather than our own is precisely the point.

      For the past several years, I continue to come back to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (King, 1992). Although King addresses his detractors, the letter is not written for them. It was written for the public, to deconstruct the arguments of his detractors while also reconstructing a vision for the Beloved Community. As critical legal scholar and early Critical Race theorist, Anthony E. Cook noted, although we must engage in theoretical and experiential deconstruction, critical work requires us to work in community towards a reconstructive vision (Cook, 1990). In order to address the hysteria around CRT, we both need to protect our rights within the current dominant systems while simultaneously creating alternative institutions for the Beloved Community.

Final Thoughts

      This year’s legislative session in Texas and in Republican state houses across the nation have been marked by culture war issues driven by national agendas, most notably the polemic against any diversity issue labeled Critical Race Theory by detractors. The underlying logics of the attack, understood through political spectacle theory and Critical Race Theory, offer insights about how to address those attacks. 

      One, we must recognize that the attacks are not good faith arguments, but rather serve as political theater to segment the electorate, manufacture threats, and consolidate power. To ignore the function of distraction is to resign our time and energy to the racists’ agenda rather than building our own. Secondly, we must recognize that CRT has become a lightning rod issue precisely because of the power of race and value of Whiteness in American society. Fighting for equal rights, opportunities, and outcomes for people of color within systems shaped by and for White Supremacy will necessarily elicit a backlash. Adopting a degree of racial realism (Bell, 1991) allows us to address the errors of our existing institutions while preserving our emotional and mental work for reconstructive acts of justice.

References

Barnes, M. B., & Moses, M. S. (2021). Racial Misdirection: How Anti-affirmative Action Crusaders use Distraction and Spectacle to Promote Incomplete Conceptions of Merit and Perpetuate Racial Inequality. Educational Policy, 35(2), 323–346. https://doi.org/10.1177/0895904820984465

Beauchamp, Z. (2021, November 4). Did critical race theory really swing the Virginia election? Vox, Policy and Politics.

Bell, D. (1991). Racial Realism. Connecticut Law Review, 24(2), 363–380.

Changa, A. (2021, November 5). CBS News Dragged For Article Questioning When Young Children Should Learn About Race. NewsOne. https://newsone.com/4244383/cbs-news-dragged-article-questioning-when-young-children-should-learn-about-race/

Cook, A. E. (1990). Beyond Critical Legal Studies: The Reconstructive Theology of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Harvard Law Review, 103(5), 985–1044. https://doi-org.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/10.2307/1341453

De Pinto, J. (2021, November 4). Virginia: What was behind the shift of White women toward the GOP? CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/virginia-governor-election-white-women-republicans/

Edelman, M. (1988). Constructing the political spectacle (pp. vi, 137). University of Chicago Press.

Harris, A. (2021, May 7). The GOP’s ‘Critical Race Theory’ Obsession. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/05/gops-critical-race-theory-fixation-explained/618828/

Harris, C. I. (1993). Whiteness as Property. Harvard Law Review, 106(8), 1707–1791. https://doi.org/10.2307/1341787

King, M. L. Jr. (1992). Letter from Birmingham Jail. U.C. Davis Law Review, 26(4), 835–852.

Kingkade, T., & Chiwaya, N. (2021, September 13). There is a common trend in school districts debating critical race theory, analysis shows. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/schools-facing-critical-race-theory-battles-are-diversifying-rapidly-analysis-n1278834

Lah, K., & Hannah, J. (2021, October 31). Race and rage whip up school board meetings to the dismay of students. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/31/us/nevada-douglas-county-school-crt-row/index.html

Morrison, T., John, P. S., Callahan, J., Callahan, J., & Baker, L. (1975, May 30). Public Dialogue on the American Dream Theme, Part 2. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/orspeakers/90

Priest, N., Paradies, Y., Trenerry, B., Truong, M., Karlsen, S., & Kelly, Y. (2013). A systematic review of studies examining the relationship between reported racism and health and wellbeing for children and young people. Social Science & Medicine, 95, 115–127. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2012.11.031

Sleeter, C. E. (2011). The Academic and Social Value of Ethnic Studies: A Research Review. In National Education Association Research Department. National Education Association Research Department. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED521869

Texas Lawmakers Take Aim At Critical Race Theory. (2021, July 11). In NPR. https://www.npr.org/2021/07/11/1015120437/texas-lawmakers-take-aim-at-critical-race-theory

Thiessen, M. A. (2021, November 11). The danger of critical race theory. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/11/danger-critical-race-theory/

Wallace-Wells, B. (2021, June 18). How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory

What It Means to Be ‘Latinx,’ and What That Means for America by Julian Castro

So many people are exploring not solely "Latinx identity," per se, but also what it actually means.  Here, Julian Castro reviews a book on the topic by Dr. Ed Morales titled, Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture.

Personally, I like the gender neutral part of the expression and also that it's a millennial development and I really love my millennial students and have two millennial children of my own.

The "Latin" part of the word is the rub for me as it smacks of assimilation as it suggests that we're "Latin," from Europe when we're not.  Even if our genes travelled all of the world, our people did not.  

Moreover, in some situations, "Latinx" can inadvertently participate in the erasure of history.  What comes to mind, in this regard, is the establishment of the "Chicana Caucus" at the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies," where some wanted to change the name to the "Latinx Caucus" a few years ago.  This put the caucus in an interesting situation due to its long history of progressive politics, but pushed back on this specific proposal in order to preserve the history of the caucus.

I'm confident that this kind of situation is playing out across many different contexts and is certainly something that must get discussed and negotiated.

That said, what I do like of Castro's reading Morales’ analysis of Latinx identity is that the x is variable, beyond the gender neutrality it clearly represents.  As an umbrella term, it conveys mestizaje, hybridity, and a spectrum of identity.  

My sense of where this will all go at least with respect to everyday social relations is in the direction of "situational ethnicity" where depending on the context, one's ethnic identity either gets displayed or concealed.  In some contexts, Latinx makes sense.  In others, it won't.

I conclude by citing another important work by political scientist Dr. Cristina Beltran, author of the book, The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity.  I think she nails it when she offers the following:

"Latino," like the category "women," should be reconceived as a site of permanent political contestation. 

This is a reasonable conclusion to draw and this is a good problem to have.  Thanks to Paul Saldaña for sharing.

Angela Valenzuela
c/s

What It Means to Be ‘Latinx,’ and What That Means for America

A crowd at the 2018 Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York City.CreditBebeto Matthews/Associated Press

Image

By Julian Castro

• Nov. 14, 2018

LATINX
The New Force in American Politics and Culture

By Ed Morales 368 pp. Verso. $24.95.

A crowd at the 2018 Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York City.CreditCreditBebeto Matthews/Associated Press

In September, just in time for Hispanic Heritage Month, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary recognized the word “Latinx,” which it defines as “of, relating to or marked by Latin American heritage — used as a gender-neutral alternative to Latino or Latina.” I was happy to see the addition, and also more than a little amused. I thought back to my freshman year of college in 1992. As I sat in a computer room in my dorm working away on an early Macintosh, a red squiggly line immediately appeared underneath the word “Chicano” after I typed it into the paper I was writing about my family’s background. When I hit the spell check to see what the problem was, Microsoft Word had a suggestion: Chicago. “You don’t even exist,” popped into my head. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a new experience. Years earlier, in middle school, I’d been asked to fill out a form that included a question about my background. There were three options to choose from: black, white or other. “Well, I’m not black or white,” I remember thinking, pencil in hand, “but I don’t like the sound of ‘other.’” I left it blank.

For many Latinos, stories like these are all too familiar. In “Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture,” Ed Morales fills in that blank as well as the long, painful, complex and intersectional struggle for identity that has shaped America’s Latino community. As Morales notes, Latinx is just the latest in a series of terms, from Hispanic to Latino/a and even Latin@, employed to refer to individuals of Latin American heritage in an inclusive way.

Reading Morales’s dissection of Latinx identity formation, however, one begins to believe that the x in “Latinx” is more than just a means of providing gender-neutrality. As in algebra, the x is variable. How a Latino or Latina perceives himself or herself — and how he or she is perceived by others — often depends on context. Unhappy with the binary notion of race popular in the United States, Morales offers the concept of mestizaje, or hybridity, that encompasses a spectrum of identity, the result of hundreds of years of intermixing among African, European and indigenous peoples in Mexico, Latin America and the Caribbean. Latinos can be black, white, brown or anything in between. Skin color, national origin, whether one lives in the mainland United States or outside of it, and one’s ability to speak Spanish, not to mention gender and sexual orientation, all play a role in one’s self-concept.

Morales, an adjunct faculty member at Columbia University who describes his own identity as that of a “racialized person living in a U.S. megacity, who has a somewhat ambiguous phenotypical appearance,” proves refreshingly introspective, weaving enough personal biography into the book to pull the work back from veering too far into inaccessible academic jargon. “In my own extended family, there is generally a disdain for blackness,” he writes, and tells of his father, who “traded on Anglo-Americans’ perceptions of his whiteness if it helped him in financial or social transactions, yet sought to avoid complete identification with whiteness when it came to his ‘real’ identity.”

According to the 2010 census, there were 55 million Latinos in the United States, and they made up 23 percent of Americans under the age of 18. Today, although Asian-Americans are now growing more quickly in percentage terms, Latinos are still growing fastest numerically. That means the destiny of the United States and the destiny of the Latino community are powerfully intertwined.

“The American identity will never be fixed and final; it will always be in the making,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote a quarter century ago in “The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society.” While Schlesinger’s observation may be true, it is much easier asserted than accepted.

With his boogeyman approach to electoral politics, Donald Trump has deftly exploited anxieties about the impact of America’s changing demographics on our national identity, and no group has been more vilified by Trump for political purposes than Latinos. After declaring in his announcement speech that Mexico was sending rapists and drug runners to our country, months later Trump dismissed questions about the legitimacy of fraud claims against Trump University by insisting that the American-born judge of Mexican descent who was presiding over the case could not do his job right because “he’s Mexican!” His administration has been even worse, cruelly separating families apprehended at the Southern border, failing to adequately respond to Hurricane Maria and then dismissing the deaths of 3,000 Puerto Ricans as mere fantasy concocted by political opponents.

It is no surprise, then, that the Latino community is widely misperceived and is especially in need today of voices to defend and humanize it. In this way, “Latinx” couldn’t be timelier. For one thing, Morales shatters Americans’ view of the community as monolithic. Although nearly two-thirds of Latinos claim Mexican heritage, Puerto Ricans, Cubans and a growing community of Latinos from Central and South America each have unique cultural and political experiences in the United States.

Morales explores these to varying degrees, and, importantly, makes clear that Latinos have been integral to America’s progress for generations, even as they have grappled with relative invisibility, outright rejection of their place in America and internal struggles about their own identity. He reminds us that it was Gonzalo and Felícitas Méndez, the Mexican-born father and Puerto Rican mother of daughter Sylvia Mendez, who challenged California’s separate and unequal “Mexican schools,” winning an appellate court victory in 1946 that paved the way for the Supreme Court’s opinion in Brown v. Board of Education that struck down racial segregation in schools eight years later.

Morales’s writing can be hyperbolic at times. “For an American economy that has been largely stagnant, the opening of Cuba is a last-ditch opportunity to stave off looming worldwide economic disaster,” he writes of President Obama’s efforts to open up Cuba to American investment. Still, the book’s deep dive into the crosscurrents of Latinx identity is a powerful reminder that, as Americans wrestle with questions about who is and who is not “American” — and, indeed, questions about what it means to be an American in the 21st century — the nation can benefit immensely from the robust inclusion and understanding of a community that has spent generations grappling with nearly every facet of its own identity.

Here is a cogent analysis of race that debunks the idea that race is a biological construct.  Not that this hasn't been done many times over but that this scholar notes what existed prior to race in Europe as "magisterial discourses" that were a premise for race as we know it today.  

This "talks back," if you will, to my earlier piece I posted titled, "Does Diversity Really Unite Us?" where I state that the author has a very limited, ahistorical, and ultimately harmful conceptualization of race that guides his whole analysis.  Pointedly, Heng states, "Europe was never really entirely white."

My only question for Dr. Heng is what preceded magisterial discourses.  I wonder if her book addresses that.  Happily, she's gifted me with a copy of her book that I can read upon my return to the U.S.  

You can listen to her interview on Soundcloud here, as well.

If our youth really understood the origins of race—such as through Ethnic Studies courses that many of us are working on getting into all of our schools—we could really make a difference in our society in the areas of stereotypes, implicit bias, racial and ethnic discrimination, systemic racism, and identity.

Angela Valenzuela

UT PROFESSOR SAYS YOUR RACE DOESN’T COME FROM YOUR DNA

Race, Geraldine Heng says, is ‘a sorting mechanism rather than a substantive construct.

Race has been at the center of many high-profile debates and confrontations. And recently the noise level of those who proclaim the idea of racial purity and race separation, as a good idea, has increased.

But that idea is also based on wrong information, says Geraldine Heng, author of the new book, “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages,”

Heng is Perceval fellow and associate professor of English and Comparative Literature, Middle Eastern Studies, and Women’s Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Race, as she defines it, isn’t really based in science.

“Well race has been defined for a long time from the 18th century,” she says. “Understanding that science was the magisterial discourse of an era. So race has often been thought of something biological, in your DNA. Science has obviously complicated our understanding of that. But the way I define race, has to do more with what happens to be the magisterial discourse of the time. In the middle ages religion was the primary discourse for everything. Understanding the world and everything else. So for me race is basically a sorting mechanism delivered through whatever magisterial discourse of the period is, in order to select among differences and to essentialized them and assign them to certain populations and human groups. And them conceptualize these differences as absolute and fundamental. So it’s a sorting mechanism rather than a substantive content.”

Heng explains that white supremacists who are longing for the time of ‘racial purity’ in Europe, don’t have their facts straight.

“There is a tremendous nostalgia for an imagined past, a Europe that never in face actually existed. A belief that Europe was already white and that today it is all these immigrant populations that are all the trouble, the containment, the fly in the ointment so to speak,” she says.

“But really Europe was never really entirely white. There have always been jews in the cities and towns of Europe, living side by side with the Christian Europeans. There have been muslims in southern Italy, the Mediterranean, Spain, the Byzantine Empire, Greek empire was always excessively multiracial. And slavery for instance resulted in what today we would say was misogynation.”

Women, Heng says, made up a large portion of enslaved people and this in turn results in a mix of races.

“The most popular kind of slave was female. Young women far exponentially outnumbered the numbers of male slaves. And most slaves were deployed in the household as domestic slave labor, rather than as field slaves. As a result these young women were of course the sexual property of their master and they bred for their masters. So slavery helped ensure that even white Christian Europeans people who think of Europeans white are wrong.”

America was never a white country — here’s why it never will be

America was never a white country — here’s why it never will be

by

Joe Krulder, Ph.D., teaches history at Butte College.

History News Network
21 Aug 2017 at 09:04 ET   

Events in Charlottesville recently cascaded into domestic terrorism. Three dead and dozens wounded as neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other “alt-right” members descended upon the university that Thomas Jefferson built; their purpose, it is alleged, to defend a statute a monument to the Confederate Civil War soldier, General Robert E. Lee. These radical rightists arrived from all across the United States upon the college town of Charlottesville to protect, in their words, their “white” heritage. Among the many problems, I have with so-called “white supremacists” is their purposeful mixing of “heritage” with “history,” rhetorically pining for a once proud “white” America.But history proves that America was never white.

That I need to make this statement, and worse, that some may take offense from it, shows the blurring rhetoric between what is Heritage and what is History. I’ll return to this later. For now, some History.
The first successful colonial holding in these current United States was Spanish, at St. Augustine, Florida, established 1565, four decades plus prior to Virginia’s Jamestown.

America was never white.

Speaking of Jamestown, the first Africans were brought into Virginia on a Dutch trading ship in 1619, a year before Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts.
America was never white.

And nearly half of those Pilgrims could not speak English. Of the near half that couldn’t, most spoke Dutch, with a scattering of German and French. America from the get go was not an English-speaking nation. When the Puritan, William Bradford, arranged the first Indian Treaty signing in 1621, it was with Massasoit, a Pokanoket of the Wampanoag Confederacy. At this time, depending on which archeologist you ask, the native population of North America was anywhere between 8 to 20 million. English speakers? Less than a thousand.

America was never white.

And it was the Dutch who seemed ascendant, as they settled New Amsterdam and the Hudson River Valley beginning in 1625. English-speaking America was in the minority of the European languages spoken by 1670. The French were firmly in place along the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes region, and it may come as some surprise to many Americans, but Green Bay, Wisconsin was once “La Baye des Puants” which is what the French called it when they founded “The Bay of Stinks” in 1634. Spain still reigned in Florida and along the Gulf Coast. Even the Swedes set up shop along the Delaware River taking up large swaths of what is today Delaware and Pennsylvania.

And if you were around in the mid-eighteenth century, don’t ask Benjamin Franklin about the indentured Palatines. In 1751 Franklin penned, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.” where he openly called German-speakers “swarthy” and “stupid,” that they would likely “Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them” unless there was a change to immigration policies.

Of course, one of the more famous eighteenth-century colonial wars, the French and Indian War, lasted nine years, and only after victory was secured in 1763, did English speakers become dominant among the many European powers that settled North America.

Back to Africans, according to SlaveVoyages.org, the activities of the Atlantic slave trade brought 9,507 Africans to mainland America by 1699. Over the next 75-years or a year before the United States declared its Independence, another 220,000 were brought to slave upon the American mainland. The 1790 census (the first undertaken by the United States) proved 740,054 Africans in America or 26.5% of the population just a year after the Constitution was ratified.

America was never white.

And the Revolutionary War was not white on white violence, or English speakers against Mother England. There was the famed Ethiopian Brigade, which General George Washington did his best to avoid. Yes, blacks fought on both sides of the war. And Crispus Attucks was black and he was the first to die at the Boston Massacre of 1770. Indians, too, fought in this war, forced to take sides by both British and colonial forces.

America was never white.

Even when the nation was young, and found a bargain from Napoleon to purchase all of Louisiana – yes, we gained the entire Mississippi River watershed, but since France had only just won Louisiana, a trophy for defeating Spain in Europe, and unable to hold on to Haiti in the Caribbean where slaves successfully rebelled, America received the Midwest which was filled with the indigenous mostly, and some Spaniards too.

America was never white.

Equally, the war of 1812, which once again pitted the United States against Britain, was not wholly a white on white conflict. Again, Native Americans took sides, the Shawnee chief Tecumseh had formed a large multi-tribal Confederacy and played an enormous role in ensuring that the young United States failed at taking Canada. The great United States Navy admiral, Oliver Hazard Perry, along with Daniel Dobbins, a shipmaster, built a fleet from Greenwood on Lake Erie using African Americans to build and then man the fleet. At War’s end, at the Battle of New Orleans, General Andrew Jackson’s fighting force included Choctaw Indians and freed blacks.
America was never white.

Texas, and the Mexican-American War which followed its annexation, obviously entailed the gaining of territory inhabited by Native Americans and Hispanics. When gold was all the rage in California, the world landed upon its shores. People from Europe, South America, and yes, Asia (China, in particular) descended and many remained.

America was never white.

In military history the 54th All Black Regiment of the Civil War, the 369th Infantry known as the “The Harlem Hellfighters” in World War One, and the all-Japanese 442th Infantry during the Second World War, still – to this day – remain some of the most wartime decorated units of our country’s fighting forces.

America was never white.

Which brings us to the topic of heritage and history. For this, I’ll quote famed historian David Lowenthal. Author of The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, Lowenthal remarks that heritage is not history at all: “it is not an inquiry into the past, but a celebration of it a profession of faith in a past tailored to present-day purposes.”

Monuments, under this definition, are not history. Monuments are memory-makers, celebratory edifices erected to hide History’s complexity, drown curiosity, and feed the simple in the present and in the future.

If we dig past the monuments of the Robert E. Lee’s and the Stonewall Jackson’s erected in the 1920s (Jim Crow era) or the 1950s (Civil Rights era), some in far away Arizona (Arizona achieved statehood in 1912, the Civil War ended in 1865), what we get to is a place called the past were easily traceable demographics prove a country filled with ethnicities from all over the world. What the alt-right desires are an America where whites maintain some semblance of power over anyone of color if not outright ethnic cleansing. Their rhetoric of Heritage is pure myth, a fabrication of a false past, creating memory where none existed.

America was never white, and it never will be.

Joe Krulder, Ph.D., teaches history at Butte College.

This article was originally published at History News Network

The rise of multiracial and multiethnic babies in the U.S.

We are not solely a multicultural, diverse society, but a highly inter-racial one, as well, albeit with variability on this across the nation.

In 1980, 7% of all newlyweds were in an intermarriage, and by 2015, that share had more than doubled to 17%, according to a recently released Pew Research Center report.

I, too, like and appreciate that despite the increasingly visible white, Alt-Right, ethnonationalist agenda for racial purity, the country as a whole sees interracial unions as a positive thing.

-Angela

 

June 6, 2017

The rise of multiracial and multiethnic babies in the U.S.

By Gretchen Livingston 

One-in-seven U.S. infants (14%) were multiracial or multiethnic in 2015, nearly triple the share in 1980, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data. This increase comes nearly a half century after the landmark Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia legalized interracial marriage.

Multiracial or multiethnic infants include children less than 1 year old whose parents are each of a different race, those with one Hispanic and one non-Hispanic parent, and those with at least one parent who identifies as multiracial. This analysis is limited to infants living with two parents because census data on the race and ethnicity of parents is only available for those living in the same home. In 2015, this was the case for 62% of all infants.

The rapid rise in the share of infants who are multiracial or multiethnic has occurred hand-in-hand with the growth in marriages among spouses of different races or ethnicities. In 1980, 7% of all newlyweds were in an intermarriage, and by 2015, that share had more than doubled to 17%, according to a recently released Pew Research Center report. Both trends are likely spurred in part by the growing racial and ethnic diversity in the U.S.

The general public seems mostly accepting of the trend toward more children having parents of different races. In a 2015 Pew Research Center survey, 22% of U.S. adults said more children with parents of different races was a good thing for society, while half as many (11%) thought it was a bad thing. The majority (65%) thought that this trend didn’t make much of a difference.

Among all multiracial and multiethnic infants living with two parents, by far the largest portion have one parent who is Hispanic and one who is non-Hispanic white (42%). The next largest share of these infants (22%) have at least one parent who identifies as multiracial, while 14% have one parent who is non-Hispanic white and another who is Asian.

The share of infants in two-parent homes who have parents of different races or ethnicities varies dramatically across states. For example, 44% of infants in Hawaii are multiracial or multiethnic. Shares are also high in Oklahoma and Alaska (28%). 

At the same time, just 4% of children younger than 1 in Vermont are multiracial or multiethnic, as are 6% of those in North Dakota, Maine, Mississippi and West Virginia.

Topics: Birth Rate and Fertility, Intermarriage, Marriage and Divorce, Parenthood, Race and Ethnicit