An Interesting Unscientific Poll on Race

So here is something that I don't understand; it befuddles me. I have taken an unscientific poll in my classes for a couple of years now. I have no numbers to relate...it is only qualitative. Quick background: in my classes I require students to participate in a group project. Five students per group and the topics range from Native American reservations to the Great Depression to the Culture Clashes of the 1920s to the Vietnam War. They have to watch a film that I assign specific to each group but more importantly they have to go to assigned websites that have posted primary sources.

One of the group projects is on the Japanese Camps of the 1940s where U.S. citizens and non-citizens of Japanese descent were imprisoned after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. The Library of Congress has an excellent collection of Ansel Adams photographs from Manzanaar. Here is another site that my students are required to use for this project (you have to register for this site but it is free and worth it). In 1988, Congress authorized reparation payments to the survivors of the camps at $20,000/person.

Here is where the informal poll comes into play. Remember my students tend to be fairly conservative suburban and rural students. Almost all of my students agree that reparations should be paid to the Japanese-American survivors, in fact they argue quite demonstrably that $20,000 is not enough and more should be done. So, I try to push them a little further. I ask the students if Jews should be paid reparations for the money stolen by the Nazis during World War II? They reply unanimously that indeed Jews should receive reparations. Then I ask if the United States should use American taxpayer dollars (just as they did for the Japanese-Americans) to pay reparations for stolen land and resources from Native Americans? This is usually not unanimous but an overwhelming majority will say, yes, the U.S. should do this, although they claim that non-pecuniary measures should be included such as free education, health care etc.

Here is where it gets strange to me......I then ask if the U.S. should pay reparations for slavery?

One or two will say yes but the vast majority will say NO! In fact, the students get very restless even angry with me for bringing this up. It is an amazing shift in attitude within 5 seconds. I can feel the disdain from the students when I ask this question. So I then ask, why not? They respond something along the lines of: "it was a long time ago and if we could have paid reparations to the actual freedmen, then that is ok....but my family had nothing to do with slavery and so I owe them nothing. In fact, my family was poor and look at me...I have pulled myself up by my bootstraps, why can't they? They are too reliant on welfare." When I point out that the U.S. actually tried to pay reparations in the 1860s via the Radical Republican agenda of "40 acres and a mule" through the Freedmen's Bureau but southern whites through the Democrat Party actually undermined this process through Black Codes and Jim Crow Laws that established segregation, particularly in the South, I find that they are incapable of processing this. So then I bring up the connection between race and class that hurricane Katrina and New Orleans made so evident, and they have trouble understanding that blacks in New Orleans could not get out of the city....they think that African-Americans CHOSE to stay in the city during and after the hurricane. In other words, they are unwilling to acknowledge that one reason class is tied to race is because when slaves were freed whites made specific laws that were designed to stifle black, but help white economic progress and that legacy is still often felt today....i.e. Hurricane Katrina.

So this has got me in a quandry. Obviously they are not being intellectually honest....or intellectually aware of their own argument. Native American land was stolen over a hundred years ago and the Native Americans living on reservations today are not the ones whose land was stolen during Indian removal policies of the 1830s-1890s. To me, this distinction of time, reference to slavery reparations, makes no sense at all. Why are they willing to support reparations for Native Americans but not African Americans? I don't consider 95% of them to be racist (after all, they support reparations for other racial/ethnic groups) but I can't quite figure out why most of them think about race in this particular way: there seems to be a disconnect on the issues of race. Is it because we as historians still have a huge task in front of us in dismantling the historical myths written by southern historians from 1865-1964? This was truly a case of the losers writing the history books; am I still seeing the fruits of this in 2007? Or has Reaganomics and conservative-cowboy-rugged-individualism so gripped these students that they are not able to see that a free market does not actually exist in the United States......that democracy in America has, for the most part, meant democracy for whites and (until recently) disenfranchisement for blacks both politically and economically? Or is it an expression of white guilt coupled with a resentment of defeatism and colonialism in the South? At least I got them to admit that Native Americans should receive compensation of some sort.....I count that as a victory.

The President is no Visionary.

One thing I can't figure out is why President Bush is seen as a visionary. He claims that we need to go to Mars and go back to the moon; his supporters claim him to be the next John Kennedy. He invades Iraq and his allies claim he is Reaganesque....confronting Islam like Reagan confronted the Soviet Union. But the President is not a visionary, he is really using strategies and ideas from 100 years ago, dusting them off, and re-presenting them to the American people.

A preface...President Clinton was no FDR democrat. The last New Deal democrat was Jimmy Carter. Clinton was, at best, a progressive in the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt. Clinton pushed through free trade agreements and pursued moderate welfare reform but never staunchly defended the New Deal policies of the 1930s. Theodore Roosevelt, similarly, was a progressive reformer, but not always very liberal. TR was responding to the excess of the so-called Gilded Age and laissez-faire capitalism of the William McKinley presidency. McKinley was an imperialist, a capitalist, and in the back pocket of big business. Things had gotten so out of hand at the time of McKinley's assassination in 1901 that Roosevelt was able to bring many moderate reforms....reforms that mirror the Clinton administration closer than Teddy's cousin Franklin's. George Bush is a sort of reincarnation of William McKinley, except instead of the progressive responding to the laissez-faire-ist of the nineteenth century, Bush is responding to the progressivism of Clinton (of course President Bush would love to roll back the New Deal including Social Security too). Bush is rolling back union labor rights and giving big business lucrative business opportunities. He is removing the regulations of a progressive economy and going back to the economy of the 1890s. We are living in a second gilded age and also an age of imperialism.

Take for example what the President said in 2003. President Bush announced that democracy in Iraq and the larger Middle East would be based on the model of democracy in the Philippines. For a concise criticism of the Philippine model of democracy click here. The problem with this is that nobody really knew what the President meant. The Philippines? Yes, the Philippines, which was given its independence by the U.S. in 1946 after it demonstrated that Filipinos had successfully "learned" the practice of democracy. The reason hardly anybody knew what the President was talking about was because we, as a nation, had forgotten the Philippines and the Philippine/American War 1899-1913. I hope you knew that the U.S. fought a war in the Philippines against Filipinos who had declared their independence from Spain in 1898 under the leadership of Emilio Aguinaldo. If you don't, don't be too hard on yourself, few people are aware of this. We have forgotten about this because it is America's dirty little secret. Aguinaldo engaged in guerilla war to get the Americans out of the Philippines. The U.S., however, engaged in successful anti-guerilla tactics that eventually defeated these "freedom fighters." For example, the U.S. used a scorched earth policy of burning whole villages, imprisoned civilians in concentration camps, and used torture methods such as "water boarding." Between 250,000 and 1 million Filipinos died due to war, disease, and starvation brought on directly and indirectly by this conflict. Yes, the hostilities quieted around 1913 and the U.S. eventually granted the Philippines independence in 1946. Is this the cost of democracy that President Bush is talking about? Why did the U.S. get involved in the Philippines? To spread democracy/civilization (the white man's burden) and to create a lucrative marketplace for American big business to tap into Asia. The Philippines proved very lucrative....should the U.S. succeed in Iraq (which is increasingly doubtful, unless the U.S. fights a dirty war similar to the Philippines), American businesses stand to gain vast profits in the Middle East as well as continuing to crack the Chinese market.

President Bush and the neo-cons have taken a play out of the McKinley book. McKinley never declared war against the Philippines, he sent in 126,000 troops, he declared that Emilio Aguinaldo (a friend of the U.S. a year earlier) was a "bandit." The parallels between the Philippines and Iraq are striking. In fact, the entire Presidency of George W. Bush has been largely informed by the last great laissez-faire, big-business, imperialist President of the 1890s much more than the conservative President of the 1980s or the Presidency of his own father. President Bush is no visionary in the likes of JFK or Reagan. He is not looking forward, but backward to William McKinley. President Bush's ideas are over 100 years old, obsolete, and anti-republican (as in republicanism, such as Jeffersonian or Jacksonian republicanism). Old ideas applied to new problems are like new wine placed in old wineskins....even Jesus knew this didn't work.

Does anybody know who Bruce Springsteen is?

Next week my u.s. history class is to read Jim Cullen's Born in the U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition. But I have come to realize that the majority of the students in my class don't know really who Bruce Springsteen is. This is quite traumatic for me...almost as bad as the day that I came to realize that many students in my class had never seen Star Wars. It will be interesting to see how the class discussion goes. I anticipate that many will resist this book because Springsteen bucked his traditional political stance in the last presidential election by coming out to endorse the democrat candidate John Kerry. He even gave a concert in Madison, Wisconsin during his campaign. This, in light of the infamous George Will/Ronald Reagan fiasco of trying to co-opt "Born in the U.S.A." as a purely Republican Party themes song in the early 80s makes me think that the students in my class will resist Springsteen. But I also think that they will be forced to like "the Boss" after they read the way Cullen depicts him. The musician is an inheritor of the American tradition that descended from Emerson, Whitman, Guthrie, and Dylan, argues Cullen. They are all focused on representative government or republicanism as the expression of American ideas. Thus they key on people who are "plowman" but who, through individualism and a commitment to the community, become more than actors of republicanism, but professors of republicanism. Who can argue with this message? We'll see if my famous "Communist Fascist" student has something to say. If W.E.B. DuBois is a Communist Fascist, what does that make Springsteen?

A May Day Conversation

The wind blows through the trees.
The leaves speak to the wind
and I hear their conversation.
To be so free, to fly so high,
like a bird or a kite,
but this is all a cliche.
I'm not interested in flying, I'm interested in listening.
And what I hear are allegations.

The leaves fear that they will be silenced;
the wind is afraid that its voice will not be heard.
They accuse each other; instead of recognizing
that in each other their vulnerbilities are erased.
And so the wind blows harder and the leaves shake louder.
This shouting competition, driven by a need to be heard, to be validated,
ends up in silence. As the autumn moves to winter,
leaves change their color,
and the wind knocks them to the ground.
The wind stops speaking when the leaves are all gone.
No more poetry, no more music, no more discourse; a muted cupid.

A young girl at home in a suburban nation,
listens to the soft steady rain fall on the jungle pavement.
Each drop, a note in a symphony that plays in her head.
But this masterpiece will never be heard;
her parents, her sisters, her brothers have all gone to work
and she slowly goes crazy because the suburban silence is deafening;
until the silence makes her wish the rain drops would turn into bombs.
Her symphony has turned into war.

Like a solider from world war one,
she went over the top with her gun.
She smelled the tear gas; heard the shelling,
but she couldn't hear herself yelling.
She was lost in no man's land;
a place where no man should land.
Like ghosts of the damned,
whisping across the sky searching for tranquility;
she ran across the scarred countryside--jumping from crater to crater--
searching for serenity.
The guns finally stopped, but there were no more trees and no more leaves.
And the wind moved silent through the sky,
like a blank stare in a suburban girl's eye.
I ask the wind, can one speak if there is no one to listen?

A young boy visits his father's grave
and listens for a voice to stave
off the pain of an entire past of emptiness.
He falls to his knees asking for an answer,
but a hush from heaven echoes the silence from his father.
He hears the wind blow because new leaves have grown.
but alas, anew allegations are sown.
They whisper: you will suffocate my chorus; you will kill me.
And the boy thinks about his father's legacy:
a taciturn gesture, a reticent embrace, a suffocated love.
All these lead to accusations and accusations lead to silence.
The silence of a boy standing on a dead man's grave.
I ask the leaves, can one listen if there is no one to speak?

A mundane revolutionary act; to speak, to listen, without contention.
The wind blows through the trees.
The leaves speak to the wind
and I hear their conversation, without allegation;
it brings me peace.

5 Interview Questions from Dr. Brazen Hussy

Thanks to Dr. Brazen Hussy for making the effort to come up with these questions. I had fun answering them. Check out her blog if you want to learn about martini etiquette and all sorts of other interesting information about the ivory tower of academia and life in general.

1. Why did you decide to start blogging?

Cartharsis. I needed an outlet to voice my frustrations with the academic world and I wanted to remain anonymous. I have since tried to put my thoughts down in very random patterns. I enjoy reading other blogs more than writing. For the things that I have written, I am hoping for some constructive criticism and validation.

2. How are you liking the South?

The South is a strange place. I simultaneously love it and hate it. People in the South are very nice but very superficial. The weather is great but the cities are not efficient. I have run into quite a few "klansmen" and uber-conservatives but I have also run into quite a few thoughtful people on all sides of the political spectrum. When I moved down here, I thought I was born in the wrong place....that I was a southerner at heart. But since being here, I have realized that I was mistaken. I am not southern nor do I want to be. Southerners seem to be fighting a legacy (sometimes real, sometimes imagined) of colonialism and defeatism. Racial tension is prevalent under the surface. Many northerners are moving to the region and the southerners often resent this. Although southerners portray themselves to be very carefree, hospitable, and easygoing, I think they are really afraid, anxious, and conflicted. It is very difficult to walk into a classroom when students know you are from the North. They stereotype northerners as much as northerners stereotype southerners. The South has nice sweet tea though.

3. What are your plans for the weekend?

Last weekend I was in D.C. to do research at the Library of Congress. This weekend I plan to attack the copious amount of weeds in my backyard and watch the NCAA tournament. I think I will buy a new pair of sunglasses too.

4. When did you first realize you wanted to get a Ph.D. in history, and why?

I spent a year as a missionary of sorts in Jordan during my third year in undergrad. While there, I realized that everything I understood was uncertain and mythologized. The western indoctrination was shown to be a farce when I confronted Islam. When I returned, I realized that history was a way for me to challenge American myths and western dogma. As far as the Ph.D. is concerned, I got into it for all the wrong reasons. I pursued a Ph.D. to show-off. I wanted to prove to everyone that I was better than them or that I could do what people told me I could not do. I have suffered for this. But I really enjoy learning about and teaching history, it is very satifying and I believe myself to be chipping away at the establishment concocted by those who have gone before me. So, I find that my path has some rewards to it. But I have no idea why I am trying to join a club made up of people who I really do not like. (No offense to any Ph.D.s reading this).

5. What country would you most like to visit?

Russia. I am a cold war kid and in high school it was forbidden for us to visit the Soviet Union and East Berlin. My imagination of these places have had a huge influence on my life. I have been so indoctrinated in the "othering" of Russian people, yet I have always felt that the people, the landscape, the weather of Russia could not be that much different from America and Americans. I am very curious to see Russia, Berlin, and Cuba.

Thoughts About D.C.

People in Washington D.C. do not seem very happy. I don't understand why. They seem to work very strict 36-40 hours per week. It was amazing how the government buildings emptied precisely at 4:57 every evening. There is no litter on the sidewalks nor the streets; one has to search to find a cigarette butt in the seams of the sidewalk. For an entire week, noboday smiled and I didn't see anybody...male or female....who I would consider attractive. It seemed that everyone just moped around and existed. Is this because everyone habitating in the capital is embroiled in cynicism and sarcasm? There was a protest march on the mall while I was there, so it seems that there is activism; the cynics have not reached everyone yet. All the government workers were dressed exactly the same: black suits and gray ties for men, black or gray suits for women. It seems that style was significantly lacking in this city. People were "northern nice" in that they didn't smile or say hi but they didn't cuss you out either. So it was a bit strange after living in the South for several years now. D.C. is a southern/northern hybrid city as President Kennedy famously quipped about D.C. having all the efficiency of a southern city and all the charm of northern cities. I found this sarcasm quite applicable. The only ones who seemed to be happy were the tourists and the protestors. Of course this is just the description of the federal square. Venture outside the square and few communities like Georgetown exist. There seems to be a lot of poverty through much of the city and perhaps the grandeur of the federal square juxtaposed so closely with the poverty of most Washingtonians only exacerbates the seeming hypocrisy of a capital that is out of touch with the rest of the world. Is this why people in D.C. did not seem happy? Are they fatigued from participating in a space that obviously shows the disparity of wealth within a few miles. Do people who work in the federal square live in poorer parts of the city and so are always reminded of their poverty compared to the wealth of the nation? I don't know but something sure was making Washingtoninans less vibrant than what I expected.

New Rules

For those of the fascistic persuasion who would like to make English the national language for the United States (what?--you mean we don't speak American in America?). New Rule: you must be able to correctly use the English language before you can criticise people (immigrants????) whose first language is not English. I mean, Come on!!!! I overheard the following in a McDonald's yesterday as I was returning home from my research trip (I have an unhealthy fascination with bacon egg and cheese biscuits....McDonald's bastards!). A man who looked to be of of Indian (as in India, not Native American) descent was taking orders. A woman who was a senior citizen and impatient received the incorrect food. When she complained, the employee quickly and politely, replaced her order and made it correct. But she continued to gripe because she specifically stated that she wanted her egg mcmuffin "plain." A senior citizen man standing next to her stated for everyone to hear....."we should make 'em learn English."

Now, the employee was using English.....it was just that the place was packed and he made a mistake. So, obviously, this man was referring to the fact that the employee had darker skin than he did. The older lady left and the arrogant older man stepped up and placed his order. He wanted two coffees 3 and 3. (Apparently McDonald's now places cream and sugar in your coffee for you and he wanted three creams and three sugars in each). They employee, who heard what the man had earlier said about learning English, responded, "1 Coke and 1 Coffee." The old man then said, "I don't want no Coke. I didn't order no Coke. I want coffee and I want YOU to put the cream and sugar in the coffee." It is my understanding that a double negative in the English language equals a positive. So, this man, who supports English as the official language of the United States, could not actually communicate using the English language. Unfortunately for the old man, the cream and sugar machine was broke, so he had to add it himself.

My Dissertation Abstract

Dissertation Title: “The National Way of Death: Funerals, Gravesites, and Monuments in American Public Culture from the Gilded Aged to the Great Depression.”

In recent years, scholars have emphasized the importance of collective memory in the making of national identity. Where does death fit into the memory of the United States, particularly in the economic and social chaos of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How did death shape the collective memory of American national identity in the midst of a pluralism brought on by immigration, civil and labor rights, and a transforming culture? On the one hand, the commemorations of public figures such as Ulysses S. Grant, William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt constructed an identity based on Anglo-Saxonism, American imperialism, and the “Strenuous Life.” This was reflected in the burial of American soldiers of the Spanish American and Philippine American wars and the First World War. On the other hand, the commemoration of Booker T. Washington, Susan B. Anthony, and the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and of lynching created opportunities to both critique and appropriate definitions of national identity. Through a series of case studies, my dissertation brings together cultural and political history to explore the (re)production and (trans)formation of American identity from the Gilded Age to the Great Depression. I am particularly interested in the way people used funerals and monuments as tools to produce official and vernacular memory. I argue that both official and subaltern forms of commemoration can help historians understand the social and political tensions of creating national identity in a burgeoning industrial and multicultural society.

Research Trip

The internet has completly changed the way scholars research. I have heard stories about the ancien regime researchers who used card catalogs and typewriters to write dissertations. Of course, one typing error meant starting the whole page over. And apparently many ph.d. candidates would store their manuscripts in the ice box/freezer because it was the only thing in the house that was fireproof; they were too poor to buy a safe. And of course conducting research in the archives was a painstaking task of locating information. It was almost easier to go to the stacks and sift through every document until one found what one was looking for.

Today it is different. I can sit here at home and access the online catalogs of thousands of libraries and archives around the world. Many of these institutions have put their collections online. I am planning on going to the Library of Congress (LOC) next week for research. I have just received word from one of the librarians that the Frederick Douglas papers are completly available online. This is an amazing prospect. I can access them from my computer at home. I wonder if this will change the way funding of projects are awarded. Until now people had to write grants for money so that they could afford a trip to the archives. Of course, this usually means that ivy league graduate students get most of the money while the rest of us have to get the scraps. The internet was supposed to bring down the communist regime in China, I wonder if it will also bring down the dominance that elite schools hold over the rest of us.

Of course trips to the archives will still be made. The internet does not make archives obsolete, although, if google gets its way, this may become a reality in the future. Realistically students need to go to the archives because not all the papers are digitalized. Major collections might be posted to the web but minor collections will remain in the stacks in the forseeable future. Still, it seems that access to sources are becoming democratized and this is a good thing because I can't afford to make multiple trips to the LOC.