Racism has diminished in US, but it’s far from gone
Professor George Nation’s essay in Town Square on July 7, “Teaching U.S. history controversies ignores the facts,” misses the main purpose of studying history as well as key factors in understanding the history of the United States.
Nation rightly argues that a balanced approach, one that presents the country’s positive and negative aspects, is essential. But studying history starts with the facts and builds on them to provide an explanation for what has occurred in the past.
Nation says “students must . . . learn that America’s virtues . . . are far more unique in the world than its sins,” but how unique in the world America might be is not the main purpose of studying its history. That cruelty, slavery, and racism are not uniquely American does not excuse or dismiss those behaviors. We study history not to feel good about ourselves, but to understand how our society came to be as it is.
Nation argues that we should not just focus on the negative aspects, notably slavery and racism, but also on the positive achievement of American history, including democracy, private property rights, free market capitalism and a strong economy. But the “virtues” and the “sins” are not two distinct categories. What he misses is the inextricable linkage between the two. Knowing about and understanding the “sins” is vital to explaining the “virtues.”
Understanding American history begins with the land: the enormous quantity of it and its extraordinarily rich resources, the virgin forests, varied wildlife, rich soils, favorable climate and mineral wealth. Landless European settlers of the seventeenth century saw America as a vast wilderness to be exploited and developed, But, of course, it was not a wilderness at all. In 1500, seven to 10 million people lived in the future United States. The European settlers pushed aside the native peoples, declared them “savages,” decimated their numbers with disease and massacres, and then carved out farms on their land.
By the time of the American Revolution, most adult white men owned their own farms and could vote, an economic abundance and political virtue that rested on racism toward those native peoples. Prosperity, market capitalism, political democracy and opportunities for social mobility were built on dislocation of the natives and the exploitation of the land. Throughout the 19th century, the federal government repeatedly made treaties with the Native Americans and then broke them when white settlers coveted their land. Eventually the government corralled the remnant of remaining Native Americans onto “reservations,” usually on arid and unproductive land no white men wanted.
Early southern settlers also discovered tobacco and exported it to England. Smoking quickly caught fire and was immensely profitable. But tobacco cultivation in the hot and humid weather was unpleasant work. To cultivate more land, white landowners imported enslaved Africans with all the horrors that followed. In the 19th century, the shift to cotton, also back-breaking work done by Black slaves, provided white plantation owners with great wealth. Much of the American economy in the antebellum decades relied heavily on cotton. The Industrial Revolution in America began with making cotton cloth and was financed by exports of cotton.
Nation points out that only a minority of southern white households owned slaves. But that hardly lets everyone else off the hook. A deeply embedded racism infected the entire country, North as well as South. Free Blacks in northern cities could only find work in the most demeaning occupations that whites did not want. In the pre-Civil War decades free Blacks in the North were sometimes kidnapped and sold into slavery.
Racism hardly ended with the Civil War. Black sharecroppers in the South, often kept illiterate, were exploited by white landowners and merchants. Throughout the 20th century, in the areas of education, housing, employment, union membership, criminal justice and veteran’s benefits, Blacks were excluded or denied opportunities open to whites. To take one glaring and important example, the federal home mortgage insurance program kept interest rates low and enabled millions of Americans to build equity and move into the middle class. This is one of the virtues that Nation touts. Regrettably, Blacks were largely excluded from the program and pushed into higher rate or more risky mortgages which greatly retarded their social mobility.
The roundup and internment of Japanese Americans on the West Coast during World War II is certainly an example of racism. Nation argues that this story “does not reflect America today.” Racism in America has certainly diminished in the past 70 years, but to suggest that it has disappeared is certainly to avoid many painful facts.