The Hubris of Anglo Racial Thought by Emilio Zamora, Ph.D.

I am happy to share this blog post by past-President of the Texas State Historical Association and University of Texas Historian, Dr. Emilio Zamora. You can learn more about him here. It provides a cogent example of historians' craft, examining text, subtext, and context in the assessment of early 1900s, Anglo racial thought in Texas and its relevance to us both in its time, as well as today in the current battle over history curriculum—masquerading as opposing Critical Race Theory—in the Texas State Legislature.

I don't know about you, but I think he needs to keep blogging. 

Enjoy!

-Angela Valenzuela

The Hubris of Anglo Racial Thought

by

Emilio Zamora, Ph.D.

Blog Contributor

Department of History, University of Texas at Austin

Ultra-conservatives like the Republican members of the Texas State Legislature continue to condemn the history of race thinking, racial discrimination, and racial inequality as a regular subject of study and learning in our classrooms, and they do it descaradamente (with a shameless, consummate “hubris”).  

Their reluctance to consider this history and its continuing relevance is understandable.  Why would they turn to history if it proves that race explains major parts of our recorded experience, including slavery, Jim Crow, differences in employment, education, and political representation, health disparities, voter suppression, injuries to a sense of worth, and racialized identities among Anglos, Mexicans, and Blacks? According to a growing number of accounts by the press, ultra-conservatives instead prefer to falsely accuse teachers of advancing a theory of race that blames Anglos and their children for the evils of race. They continue to make such accusations without evidence while also advancing the notion that race is not necessary in the classroom.  

Texas Republicans seem to believe that they do not have to explain anything since they are in power, meaning that they can do as they please without fearing any repercussions at the polls.  They are mistaken.  In a Democracy, those in power are obligated to advance the principle of shared governance that minimally requires a fair, honest, and open process of dialogue and law-making in cooperation with the opposition.  The citizenry also rightfully expects comportment of the highest order and deserves the greatest and highest good that their representatives can provide.  Their monumental failing at this moment of the debate on the teaching of race, however, is that they do not ground their views on history. 

To demonstrate this, I offer a racialized text from Mexican American history to argue that sensible and verifiable observations of race in our state’s history offer important lessons not solely for our youth, but also for those whose job in government is to serve and represent the people of Texas well:

"When first discovered, Texas consisted of mostly cosmic junk, including cactus, rattlesnakes, horned toads, tarantulas and four kinds of climate.  Later, the greaser, a species of human invented by the Spaniards moved in and the rattlesnakes moved north in search of a better society.  In the past seventy years, however, great improvement have been made."  (Zamora, 1993, p. 49)

Adopted as a resolution offered by the delegates from El Paso to the annual meeting of the Texas State Federation of Labor held in San Antonio in 1912, the statement clearly broadcasts widespread racial animus against Mexicans, expressed in a language of comical derision intended to foster public approval.

The clearest meaning in the text is that the ostensibly superior Anglos have a demonstrated ability to develop Texas, whereas Mexicans do not, reducing them to such a lowly, sub-human species that even rattlesnakes hold them in contempt. Aside from being deeply offensive, the resolution exaggerates the role of Anglos in Texas history that is nevertheless emblematic of their baseless, racialized resentment—other than for the shameful purpose of reinforcing unequal relations. The lesson is less about Mexicans than it is about the narcissistic and intolerant posture of Anglo supremacist culture.

An underlying theme, or subtext, in the resolution is that an evolutionary interpretation of history based on the Darwinian model of the “fittest” supports its conclusion of socially superior Anglos and socially inferior Mexicans.  Implicit in this theme is the rejection of the lesser known evolutionary view of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck who underscored that micro and macro organisms had an equal capacity to adjust to life’s difficulties and to evolve.  At its core, the resolution denies Mexicans their natural, “God-given” worth and potential, while heralding the appearance of a savior-like people imbued with a hubris to demonstrate their self-professed biological and cultural superiority, an unending political project.

The historical context adds meaning to the resolution and underscores the importance of using race as a tool for understanding our past.  The first contextual point that is worth noting is that the delegates from El Paso proposed the resolution and that the labor meeting occurred in San Antonio. This suggests that the large concentrations of Mexicans in the two cities did not deter the assembly from openly stating their racialized views.  They may have thought it necessary to adopt the resolution to psychologically prepare the Anglo and possibly Black population for the unsavory plans by local, state, and federal authorities to deport and repatriate to Mexico hundreds of thousands of Mexican Nationals and Mexicans Americans in the 1920s and 1930s.  Organized labor and nativist organizations (made up mostly of Anglos) were complicit in thought and deed when they supported the expulsions because of the unfounded fear that employers would replace them with Mexican workers, depress their wages, and destroy the unions.  

The context of an increasingly bloated labor market and the fears of labor competition also offers evidence of a robust organizational life in Mexican communities that, according to several labor histories, included large numbers of independent workers’ organizations and mutual aid societies.  In other words, Mexican workers were demonstrating a capacity to self-organize and their leadership from places like El Paso and San Antonio had begun to question the failure by Anglo organized labor to incorporate them, calling out their exclusion as a callous form of racial discrimination.  The resolution by organized labor, in other words, may have been more than an expression of racial thinking that disregarded fellow Mexican unionists, derailing any possibility of inter-ethnic solidarity. The segregationist Anglo unionists were acting like a labor cartel in response to a perceived racialized threat.

 An examination of a single act in history like a resolution, even if accompanied by sensible observations of text, subtext, and context, may seem to some like a limited exercise in the historical interpretation of the significance of race. The study of race in the history of the United States, however, inescapably consists of such focused observations, underscoring their indisputable, thematic importance in our classrooms.

Texas historians have also developed a rich historiography on race and ethnic relations since the early 1970s that allows us to see the 1912 resolution as a representative record of racism that we must heed, especially at a moment like this when ultra-conservative Republicans seek to deny a vast, illuminating body of knowledge of our country’s racial past and present.

In Lak Ech

Zamora, The World of the Mexican Worker in Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1993). To Purchase the book: https://www.amazon.com/Mexican-Worker-Centennial-Association-Students/dp/0890966788

This is a must-read piece in the Boston Globe by Michael P. Jeffries on Obamacare and how legislation against it should deeply concern us, not just because it's racist and draconian—and that's serious enough—but also because it has equally pernicious spillover effects. Quote by Jeffries from within:

            Perhaps this legislative catastrophe will result in new understanding about the infectious capacity and true danger of racism, sexism, and the unmoored pursuit of profit. Disease, gruesome suffering, and undignified death are powerful forces that can redraw moral lines. But hoping for this moral awakening — for the authors of this bill and their colleagues in the Senate to suddenly realize the error of their ways — is a grave mistake. We cannot count on those who literally toast to the death of their constituents to reverse course before or after the legislation is finalized.

The Senate needs to stand up to this grotesque bill that the House just passed.  Friends, call your Senators right away in protest. They need to hear from you.

Angela Valenzuela

Opinion | Michael P. Jeffries

Obamacare repeal is based on racial resentment

            

 House republicans are taking health services away from disabled children, women who give birth, and survivors of rape and sexual assault. They are consigning thousands of people with serious illnesses to death by making them uninsurable in an era of unaffordable treatment. Virtually every reputable medical organization in the country condemns the health care bill that passed the house Thursday, but the GOP clings to two reasons for passing it.

            First, republicans claim that the new legislation provides economic benefits. These benefits are unclear, though reports suggest that they entail a transfer of resources from vulnerable people to rich people. The bill passed the house without a score from the congressional budget office, so we can dismiss any economic justification for it without further discussion. Passing the bill without a score from the CBO is a signal that republican legislators are not taking the economic dimensions of this issue seriously, so we can follow their lead and move on to the heart of the matter.

            The other explanation given by house republicans for passing the bill is political. These congressmen felt they had to repeal the affordable care act because they promised to do so. Most Americans have no quibble with Obamacare itself, but for republicans, repealing it is and always has always been a way to repudiate former president Barack Obama. Since taking office, president trump has done several things that he previously chastised Obama for, but these contradictions have had little impact on his party or their supporters. This is largely because GOP voters’ disdain for Obama and support for trump cannot be separated from findings about racism. Studies conducted after the election confirm that racial resentment directed toward people of color predicted both overall support for trump and voters’ propensity to switch from Obama to trump.

            GOP voters know they don’t like Obama, but they do not know Obama’s legislative record, whether it pertains to the economic recovery or health care legislation. A December 2016 poll showed that 67 percent of Trump voters believed that unemployment had risen during Obama’s tenure, even though it dramatically declined. A February 2017 poll found that one third of all Americans did not even know that Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act were the same thing. Over half of the Republicans in that poll did not know whether Medicaid would be impacted by repealing Obamacare. Medicaid will be gutted by the new bill.

            So the naked truth is that racial resentment directed toward Obama set off a chain of events that will likely cause 20 million people to lose their health insurance and ignite a public health crisis of unimaginable consequence. Some time ago, I wrote about one of the myths of white supremacy: the idea that its ill effects are limited to targeted groups. I explained, “What white supremacy does, eventually, is normalize and spread the abuse, trauma, and destruction initially prescribed for targeted groups.” The damage prescribed by hateful ideologies is most severe within targeted groups, but it is never contained.

            Financially secure people who criminalize and denigrate poor people for being born poor do not understand the threat that poverty poses to their own health. Those who hate and traumatize women and LGBT people do not understand how sick their idea of manhood is, and the threat that such toxic masculinity poses to their own health. Those who dehumanize people of color and people who worship different gods do not understand that ethnic cleansing is never complete. It requires the constant conjuring of new witches to hunt and more wood for the pyre, starting a fire that burns down the whole village.

            Perhaps this legislative catastrophe will result in new understanding about the infectious capacity and true danger of racism, sexism, and the unmoored pursuit of profit. Disease, gruesome suffering, and undignified death are powerful forces that can redraw moral lines. But hoping for this moral awakening — for the authors of this bill and their colleagues in the Senate to suddenly realize the error of their ways — is a grave mistake. We cannot count on those who literally toast to the death of their constituents to reverse course before or after the legislation is finalized.

            House Republicans refuse to be our caretakers, so we must care for each other. We must continue to call our representatives, continue to march, and prepare to vote for our lives in 2018.

Michael P. Jeffries is an associate professor of American studies at Wellesley College and author of three books, most recently, “Behind the Laughs: Community and Inequality in Comedy.”