The Lie that Invented Racism by John Biewen | TEDx [Video]

In this widely-viewed Ted Talk, John Biewen makes a presentation on the origins of racism, that is, the origin of race as a concept. He reached out to renowned scholar Dr. Ibram X. Kendi and got the answer on how this all began and that you can read for yourselves in his seminal text, Stamped From the Beginning. 

In his masterful and authoritative account that Biewen subsequently recounts, Kendi finds that Gomes Eanes de Zurara was hired to write a book by the Portuguese King in the 1450s where he lumped all the people of African into a distinct group. A few years earlier, slave traders with close connections to the Portuguese Crown pioneered the Atlantic slave trade. The book thusly served to justify this trade by pointing to the inferiority of African peoples. 

Allow me to expound a bit on this lie that invented racism. Yes, it was invented, created. There is no country or national origin named "white" from which people emanate.

Racialization, a historical and contemporary process, created "others" to justify subordinate status, war, conquest and colonization and to set up structures like capitalism and ideologies like the supremacy of fair- or white-skinned peoples and individualism that disproportionately benefits whites. Western European immigrants that migrate to these shores readily become "American" within a generation or two in their sense of selves, as well as how they are seen by others.

Racialization was designed to rationalize horrific actions and policy decisions that wreaked havoc on Black and Brown people and established an enduring sense of privilege among many white people.

Specifically, Biewen maintains that racism is a tool to divide us and to prop up systems of advantage where some people are more highly ranked than others in systematic, stubborn ways.

Biewen's main personal discovery is that racism isn't a problem for people of color, but rather for white people. It's a "white people's problem," he emphatically states, and not the other way around. 

As to how this makes him feel, Biewen says that it's not so much about feelings of guilt, but rather about personal responsibility. He's specifically moved to pull down "the power that we [white people] did not earn." 

Great for the high school and college classroom.

-Angela Valenzuela

References

Kendi, I. X. (2016). Stamped from the beginning: The definitive history of racist ideas in America. Hachette UK.

Gildea, K. (2017, July 29). Impressive and challenging look at the history of racist ideas in US: Epic in scope, this book examines the many different and complex sources of racism, Irish Times. Retrieved: https://tinyurl.com/2p8sh89c

 The Lie that Invented Racism

by John Biewen | TEDx

To understand and eradicate racist thinking, start at the beginning. That's what journalist and documentarian John Biewen did, leading to a trove of surprising and thought-provoking information on the "origins" of race. He shares his findings, supplying answers to fundamental questions about racism -- and lays out an exemplary path for practicing effective allyship.

This talk was presented to a local audience at TEDxCharlottesville, an independent event. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

Read more about TEDx.  Listen to John Biewen's 14-part podcast series on whiteness.

A Few of My Reflections on Alex Haley’s Roots, the Television series

The late Alex Haley’s Roots television series is now airing on the A&E network and History Channel.  It is a re-make of the original series that came out in 1977 when I was a student in high school.  Here are a few thoughts that come to mind at the moment.

I agree that Roots should be mandatory viewing for our youth, millennials especially as they might otherwise ignore it, not sensing or seeing off the bat how it all connects to today.  All should also read Alex Haley's book by that same title—and also Haley's other classic text, The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley.  

For us college professors and high school teachers, many of us need to find the time and space in our teaching to share these and other important texts in our classrooms.  Another excellent volume that comes to mind is Dr. Theresa Perry's Teaching Malcolm X: Popular Culture and Literacy.

It has been 40 years since the original movie came out and it had a lasting impact on me.  I feel confident that Roots will positively impact a new generation in terms of the development of their critical consciousness of which knowing about one's roots as an individual and as a nation are a crucial part.

Another suggestion.  Check out the hashtags #Roots, #KuntaKinte and #RootsSeries to see how folks on Twitter are reacting, with moving, poignant and profound commentary.

Arizona State University Associate Professor Matthew Delmont, authored a book titled, Making Roots: A Nation Captivated (due out on August 2016) is also blogging on this. What an awesome opportunity to write a book on the making of the movie.

Dr. Erica Armstrong Dunbar's reflections on the remake appear on this American History Blog (see below) that you may wish to continue visiting.
 
We didn't have Twitter, Facebook, or blogs back in 1977 and so we didn't have the benefit of grasping people's sentiments in real time.  It's different today and although there is a lot of hating and hatred in the Twittersphere on #Roots, I am seeing an awful lot of thoughtful, important commentary that you can see for yourselves.

There is no reason why our children should be kept in the dark about the truth of slavery and all other forms of war, genocide, and atrocities that are an outflow of the myth of white supremacy and that finds regular expression today in the form of white privilege—as well as other forms like class, gender,  documented status, skin color, and heterosexual privilege.

My final recommendation this evening is a Vimeo titled, Deconstructing White Privilege with Dr. Robin Di Angelo. 

Dr. Di Angelo does one of the best jobs I have come across in explaining exactly what White Privilege is.  

Lastly, do watch the series.  It's outstanding.  Hope folks find this helpful.

Angela Valenzuela

“The Shame Is Not Ours”: Roots, Episode 1

Erica Armstrong Dunbar is the Blue and Gold Professor of Black Studies and History at the University of Delaware, and she directs the program in African American history at the Library Company of Philadelphia. She is also an OAH Distinguished Lecturer. Her forthcoming book, Never Caught: Ona Judge, the Washingtons’ Runaway Slave, will be published early next year.


Hollywood is onto something.

Historians, including myself, don’t usually make this kind of comment. Typically we tear Hollywood apart, calling out the historical inaccuracies of television shows and flailing against overdramatized films. But tonight, America was reintroduced to a television phenomenon that restored a bit of my faith in the film industry. On May 30, a new version of the epic television series Roots began airing on the History channel, A&E network, and those of us who study the institution of slavery in America, well, we were captivated.
At the recent conference, “The Future of the African American Past,” the renowned historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed prompted everyone in the room to think about the influence of recent events on the way we write history. The killings in places like Sanford, Florida; Ferguson, Missouri; and Charleston, South Carolina have had a deep and profound impact on historians, writers, and, so it seems, directors and producers. Older narratives about African American history are no rdnger acceptable to a younger generation of viewers and readers. Fortunately for them, we have more than forty years of groundbreaking scholarship that has changed everything. A new era of film and television now presents shows like Underground, Roots, and soon The Birth of a Nation. The terms have been reset for how we interpret and represent the lives of the enslaved.
The first episode of Roots begins on the Middle Passage, the journey that took untold numbers of kidnapped Africans to early and demonic deaths in the sugar cane and coffee fields of the Caribbean. A young Kunta Kinte from Juffureh, West Africa, appears chained, fearful, and ferociously angry. Just like millions of other Africans, Kinte was the victim of an African internal slave trade that spiraled out of control with the involvement of Europeans. The barbarity of his kidnapping, abuse, and branding with the infamous stamp of the Lloyd’s of London offer gut-wrenching attention to Africa’s internal warfare. Scholars such as Stephanie Smallwood, Daina Ramey Berry, Edna Greene Medford, and Lucy Duran steered the series’ directors and producers in the right direction, correcting many historical inaccuracies while adding depth to the lives of West Africans. The first episode clearly demonstrates how increasingly difficult it was to hold onto freedom when it was perched precariously next to enslavement. I imagine that this will be a theme that is touched on throughout the series.
What I found most powerful in the first episode was its attention to slave resistance. Kunta Kinte’s training as a Mandinka warrior could not overpower the might of European slavery, but it prepared him to fight slavery at every turn. He constantly tries to escape and to fight his captors, and he is unafraid to use deadly force. The new Kinte reminds viewers of the strength and courage of African people, appropriately challenging the stereotypes of docile and timid slaves. No matter how degrading the situation, the enslaved did not lack humanity, nor were they traumatized beyond dignity—a dated myth that is eviscerated in the first episode. Kinte is reminded of this during his horrific Atlantic crossing when a countryman declares, “The shame is not ours!”  The blame of slavery is placed squarely on greed and white racism.
I can’t wait for tomorrow night.
Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s comments on each episode will appear following the East Coast broadcast each night.
Dunbar and colleagues Kellie Carter Jackson, Daina Berry, and Jessica Millward will also participate in an AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) at Reddit’s AskHistorians forum on Friday, June 3, aiming to field questions about the history of American slavery, the slave trade, and the representations of slavery.

 When we look at the names on our schools, monuments, and holidays, many of us seek to be new wine, in new wine skin. That is what this piece, by Bill Bigelow, Co-director, Zinn Education Project; Curriculum editor, Rethinking Schools, is about. 

From the very beginning, Columbus was not on a mission of discovery but of conquest and exploitation—he called his expedition la empresa, the enterprise. When slavery did not pay off, Columbus turned to a tribute system, forcing every Taíno, 14 or older, to fill a hawk's bell with gold every three months. If successful, they were safe for another three months. If not, Columbus ordered that Taínos be "punished," by having their hands chopped off, or they were chased down by attack dogs. As the Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas wrote, this tribute system was "impossible and intolerable."

And Columbus deserves to be remembered as the first terrorist in the Americas. 

 Time for a name change.

 -Angela

Time to Abolish Columbus Day

Posted: 10/05/2015 6:33 pm EDT Updated: 10/06/2015 2:59 pm EDT

Once again this year many schools will pause to commemorate Christopher Columbus. Given everything we know about who Columbus was and what he launched in the Americas, this needs to stop.
Columbus initiated the trans-Atlantic slave trade, in early February 1494, first sending several dozen enslaved Taínos to Spain. Columbus described those he enslaved as "well made and of very good intelligence," and recommended to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella that taxing slave shipments could help pay for supplies needed in the Indies. A year later, Columbus intensified his efforts to enslave Indigenous people in the Caribbean. He ordered 1,600 Taínos rounded up—people whom Columbus had earlier described as "so full of love and without greed"—and had 550 of the "best males and females," according to one witness, Michele de Cuneo, chained and sent as slaves to Spain. "Of the rest who were left," de Cuneo writes, "the announcement went around that whoever wanted them could take as many as he pleased; and this was done."
Taíno slavery in Spain turned out to be unprofitable, but Columbus later wrote, "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold."
The eminent historian of Africa, Basil Davidson, also assigns responsibility to Columbus for initiating the African slave trade to the Americas. According to Davidson, the first license granted to send enslaved Africans to the Caribbean was issued by the king and queen in 1501, during Columbus's rule in the Indies, leading Davidson to dub Columbus the "father of the slave trade."
From the very beginning, Columbus was not on a mission of discovery but of conquest and exploitation—he called his expedition la empresa, the enterprise. When slavery did not pay off, Columbus turned to a tribute system, forcing every Taíno, 14 or older, to fill a hawk's bell with gold every three months. If successful, they were safe for another three months. If not, Columbus ordered that Taínos be "punished," by having their hands chopped off, or they were chased down by attack dogs. As the Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas wrote, this tribute system was "impossible and intolerable."
And Columbus deserves to be remembered as the first terrorist in the Americas. When resistance mounted to the Spaniards' violence, Columbus sent an armed force to "spread terror among the Indians to show them how strong and powerful the Christians were," according to the Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas. In his book Conquest of Paradise, Kirkpatrick Sale describes what happened when Columbus's men encountered a force of Taínos in March of 1495 in a valley on the island of Hispañiola:

The soldiers mowed down dozens with point-blank volleys, loosed the dogs to rip open limbs and bellies, chased fleeing Indians into the bush to skewer them on sword and pike, and [according to Columbus's biographer, his son Fernando] "with God's aid soon gained a complete victory, killing many Indians and capturing others who were also killed."

All this and much more has long been known and documented. As early as 1942 in his Pulitzer Prize winning biography, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, Samuel Eliot Morison wrote that Columbus's policies in the Caribbean led to "complete genocide"—and Morison was a writer who admired Columbus.
If Indigenous peoples' lives mattered in our society, and if Black people's lives mattered in our society, it would be inconceivable that we would honor the father of the slave trade with a national holiday. The fact that we have this holiday legitimates a curriculum that is contemptuous of the lives of peoples of color. Elementary school libraries still feature books like Follow the Dream: The Story of Christopher Columbus, by Peter Sis, which praise Columbus and say nothing of the lives destroyed by Spanish colonialism in the Americas.
No doubt, the movement launched 25 years ago in the buildup to the Columbus Quincentenary has made huge strides in introducing a more truthful and critical history about the arrival of Europeans in the Americas. Teachers throughout the country put Columbus and the system of empire on trial, and write stories of the so-called discovery of America from the standpoint of the people who were here first.
But most textbooks still tip-toe around the truth. Houghton Mifflin's United States History: Early Years attributes Taíno deaths to "epidemics," and concludes its section on Columbus: "The Columbian Exchange benefited people all over the world." The section's only review question erases Taíno and African humanity: "How did the Columbian Exchange change the diet of Europeans?"
Too often, even in 2015, the Columbus story is still young children's first curricular introduction to the meeting of different ethnicities, different cultures, different nationalities. In school-based literature on Columbus, they see him plant the flag, and name and claim "San Salvador" for an empire thousands of miles away; they're taught that white people have the right to rule over peoples of color, that stronger nations can bully weaker nations, and that the only voices they need to listen to throughout history are those of powerful white guys like Columbus. Is this said explicitly? No, it doesn't have to be. It's the silences that speak.
For example, here's how Peter Sis describes the encounter in his widely used book: "On October 12, 1492, just after midday, Christopher Columbus landed on a beach of white coral, claimed the land for the King and Queen of Spain, knelt and gave thanks to God..." The Taínos on the beach who greet Columbus are nameless and voiceless. What else can children conclude but that their lives don't matter?
Enough already. Especially now, when the Black Lives Matter movement prompts us to look deeply into each nook and cranny of social life to ask whether our practices affirm the worth of every human being, it's time to rethink Columbus, and to abandon the holiday that celebrates his crimes.
More cities—and school districts—ought to follow the example of Berkeley, Minneapolis, and Seattle, which have scrapped Columbus Day in favor of Indigenous Peoples Day—a day to commemorate the resistance and resilience of Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, and not just in a long-ago past, but today. Or what about studying and honoring the people Columbus enslaved and terrorized: the Taínos. Columbus said that they were gentle, generous, and intelligent, but how many students today even know the name Taíno, let alone know anything of who they were and how they lived?
Last year, Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant put it well when she explained Seattle's decision to abandon Columbus Day: "Learning about the history of Columbus and transforming this day into a celebration of Indigenous people and a celebration of social justice ... allows us to make a connection between this painful history and the ongoing marginalization, discrimination, and poverty that Indigenous communities face to this day."
We don't have to wait for the federal government to transform Columbus Day into something more decent. Just as the climate justice movement is doing with fossil fuels, we can organize our communities and our schools to divest from Columbus. And that would be something to celebrate.


Bill Bigelow is curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools magazine and co-director of the Zinn Education Project. He co-edited Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years and A People's Curriculum for the Earth: Teaching Climate Change and the Environmental Crisis. This article is part of the Zinn Education Project's If We Knew Our History series. Learn more about the Zinn Education Project and how you can help bring people's history to the classroom.

© 2015 The Zinn Education Project.

Follow Bill Bigelow on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ZinnEdProject

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