Columbus Day v Indigenous People's Day v Leif Erikson Day

Great Debates
181

No, I’m asserting that even Black Americans have an identity as Americans. They have national identity.

What the hey does that even mean? Of course South Africa imprisoned him. The nation doesn’t magically change because its government does, that’s ridiculous.

I didn’t say anything about “Black American identity”. I spoke about the American identity of Black Americans, not the same thing at all. So I have no idea why you’re bringing it up.

My question was whether you had an awareness of that.

You think wrong, I’m afraid.

182

Could you please define “extricate”? I took it to be a synonym for removal or separation, or in this context, “to detach the one identity from the other without changing the former”.

I disagree. Making fun of @florida-man may be popular, but it is not something I consider part of the national identity.

~Max

183

Max, at what age/grade-level should the following narrative be found in an American history text book? Or is it better for ‘World history’, and, if so, what grade level?

184

To disentangle completely from a complicated conjunction. You can’t remove the N from the F without changing the F and the N.

In a very small part, it is, though. The bit about America’s wang was facetious, but the underlying point is not - America is the sum of all its states, remove one and it’s a different America (as it was before there were 50 states)

185

Okay, I misunderstood you. I agree with your assertion, for it is a tautology. A person with an American national identity who is also Black does have an American national identity. To go back to your earlier point,

why on Earth would, for instance, a Black American want to identify with European colonists? Why would they not want to identify with fellow victims of colonialism?

It’s not a matter of want, it’s a matter of identifying yourself as an American or not. I’m sure a Black person, or any reasonable American, doesn’t want to identify their own country as one which perpetrated the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments. We would all prefer if our country hadn’t done that, but part of being an American is to own that our country did commit atrocities. That’s not the America we know and love… or so we hope… but it is something the America we know and love used to be.

~Max

186

…and identifies with European colonizers?

But if you’re wrong, and American identity doesn’t necessitate identifying with European colonizers, there’s not conflict there for Black Americans. They can identify as American and yet as victims of colonizers. And that is, as far as I’m aware, the case in reality for many Black Americans.

And so your thesis that American identity necessitates identifying with the European colonizers is refuted.

I don’t see how identifying your country as having done bad things is somehow in opposition to identifying it as your country.

187

I don’t see a lot of stuff like this having any place in a school textbook unless the account comes from a tribe with local relevance and you’re teaching the history of the locality. That being said at the grade school level even, this narrative could be the device through which the teacher explains history from the perspective of Native Americans. I just have trouble imagining so long an excerpt coming up unless related to a current event or a local tribe or something extraordinary, thus I wouldn’t expect it to be in a general textbook.

At the middle school level and above, this kind of account could be used as an example of a primary source in any history class whose subject matter is even partially relevant. It could be U.S. History, or it could be World History, or Human Geography, but not, say, Greek or Roman studies. It could also be used as one of the highlights of a section that covers the Native American perspective, but as I wrote above, I wouldn’t expect to see many excerpts like these. There might be one in a side-box element, in the chapter about how the United States or its predecessors interact(ed) with indigenous peoples of that region. But even for that the excerpt you posted is a bit longer than I would expect. In my textbooks we would have blurbs, a sentence or two to one paragraph, about significant Native American figures or tribes or events such as a battle, and maybe each chapter or two there would be a large box spanning one or two pages that goes into detail on some thing. This extract, if used, would require a large box. Unless the course is Native American studies or something similarly focused, or the tribe has local relevance, I would not expect to see more than one, maybe two such accounts in a high school textbook.

~Max

188

In that case, I struggle to understand where I have contradicted myself. I admitted that you can’t remove the N from the F without changing the F. I admitted the Floridian identity is dependent on the national identity of the United States, but I did not admit that the national identity is dependent on Florida and would disagree with such an assertion.

America may be the sum of all its states, and it may change if Florida were to break off. But that will not change the identity of the nation. There wouldn’t be any confusion of identity as to whether the United States of 2021 should be identified as the same country which in 2022 lost Florida to Greater Hispaniola. This is not like the Republic of China fleeing to Taiwan, where people disagree as to which country is “China”.

I do not refer to stereotypes of character when I speak of a national identity. A love for apple pie may be American but it is not a component of the national identity, in my mind. My father, for example, is an American who hates apple pie (unless it has onions of all things). I question his tastes in sweet foods but I would not conclude, therefore, he is not an American.

I look back at historical figures like, say, General Lee in the Civil War. He was, an American - but during the Civil War he fought as a rebel against, and not for, the United States of America. I literally identify my nation, the United States, as the side of that conflict opposite the Confederacy.

It is true that some number of Tories after the Revolution eventually settled into the new United States. But when looking at the war of independence, I identify my country with the rebels.

And when the English colonists went to war with the Wampanoag, there is no question in my mind that the United States, through Massachusetts colony (which signed the Declaration of Independence that founded the U.S.), is to be identified with the Pilgrims.

And so on, the United States’ predecessor nation in the year 1492 was the kingdom of England, which by virtue of being European or extensions of the “western”/Roman/Christian civilization, is more closely associated with the crowns of Castile and Aragon than the Arowaks on Hispaniola.

~Max

189

Please retain the distinction between identifying with colonists and identifying your nation with colonists. The former is unreasonable because it implies moral approval and personal identification; the latter, in my opinion, is the correct way for Americans to interpret Columbus Day.

Again, there is a difference between identifying with something and identifying something with one’s nation. A Black American who told me my country was the victim of colonists, due to slavery, would be wrong in my opinion. A person who told me my country didn’t enslave people in the nineteenth century, because at that time my ancestors were not in America, and thus I do not inherit America’s sins, would be wrong.

~Max

190

Coming back to this:

I don’t think that’s a “meh” after all. It’s pretty close to one in the context of this thread, once we’ve spent a whole lot of posts clarifying your specific idiosyncratic meaning. But if you’re going around in general, including around people who have only had your sort of education on the subject, saying things along the lines of ‘there are no Native American nations currently claiming sovereignty’ (not an exact quote): that’s a major problem, because without the explanation that by ‘sovereignty’ you mean only absolute sovereignty with no restrictions including none made by acknowledged treaty between two nations, the statement is at best massively misleading; and if you’re going to continue in such circumstances to make it without qualifications now that you’ve been given information that the official US government recognizes over 150 tribes as sovereign, I’d have to say it would be deliberately misleading.

Possibly this whole thread is the result of another idiosyncratic use of words.

“The nation I am part of and in many ways love has done terrible things in its history and might well not exist if they hadn’t happened” is not at all the same thing as “I identify specifically with the people who did those terrible things, to the exclusion of all of those who terrible things were done to.”

Is it possible that you think those two statements are the same thing?

I’m not one who can say for sure; but I very much doubt that the equivalent of that is a statement that would be made by most, if any, Native Americans.

And I think the attitude to casinos is often ‘if you’re going to be stupid enough to give us a bit of our wealth back, we’re sure as hell gonna take it.’

It’s something that to some extent and in many ways we still are. Which we also need to acknowledge.

But acknowledging that is not the same thing as identifying with the people who did the worst of those things. Especially not combined with claiming that it’s only their identity that matters, not the identity of those who they damaged!

That is something wrong with your textbooks. Not something right about them.

191

I thought I was pretty clear from the outset that it was always national identity. Here is where I gave my main argument,

But I clarified here,

and here to you specifically,

&etc.

~Max

192

At the time, I acknowledged that they could be using a different definition. I said California was not sovereign the way I was using the word. There is a different definition, such as MrDibble used when he brought up state sovereignty.

~Max

193

Hmmm. I think narratives like that belong in elementary school US History texts next to the European side of the story of the European conquest of the area. Because I think both are important narratives defining our collective history, and as modern Americans, we ought to be inheriting both those perspectives.

I mean, my people didn’t immigrate here until after that had happened. But I embrace my national identity as an American, and I feel like I am heir to both those stories, just as other Americans are heir to my ancestor’s story of fleeing European oppression and finding a new life here.

194

You really have no idea how you’re sounding?

Implying that there are elements of white supremacism that aren’t detestable?

Both. This isn’t hard.

195

The only other element I can think of is that white people are or should be the dominant force, for example in politics, (ETA: or as applicable to this topic, in what we identify as U.S. history,) but I don’t find that inherently detestable.

~Max

196

“We” were both. “We” were also enslaved people. “We” were also people driven out of our original countries, from all over the world, who took refuge here, sometimes against the wishes of the government of the country at the time, sometimes with its encouragement. “We” were also people with plenty of resources who came here hoping to get more of them, or who came here hoping for more political freedom (sometimes only for themselves, sometimes in general), or both.

Who “we” are now is a mix of all those people, and a mix of all those cultures. You cannot reduce the current country to one sliver of its heritage, even if you’re doing so to try to land all the blame on that sliver, and claim that none of the rest of it matters enough to deserve more than a paragraph in a school textbook.

And Native Americans – including, @JohnT, Native American religions still being practiced, not abandoned as “poor” and “weak” – are a current part of this country. They influenced its history greatly, and they’re influencing it right now.

If you want to distance yourself from white supremacism, that ain’t the way to do it.

197

I disagree, I would not identify the enslaved population as the people of this nation until such time as they were legally emancipated or naturalized. (I might budge to de facto rather than strictly legal) Whether that is the fundamental disagreement or it runs deeper, I don’t know.

~Max

198

He doesn’t want to. He’s well on his way to embracing it. He’s the epitome of the type of personality that eventually falls into Dark Enlightenment.

199

But this thread is not about what we should teach high schoolers in a course called “U.S. history”. According to your OP, this thread is fundamentally about “what we should be celebrating” on this somewhat controversial October holiday. And that requires a much broader perspective on how we should be thinking about American history in general.

I don’t think you can neatly separate the two concepts when it comes to the history of a nation, which has a geographic context as well as a demographic one. What people do depends to a large extent on the characteristics of the land they’re in, and the characteristics of the land depend to a large extent on the actions of the people in it.

Some of “those people”—i.e., people in the region at that time—were “the ones doing the colonizing”. Many other people were enslaved or dispossessed by the colonizers, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have an equally valid claim to be part of American “national identity”.

? Even while enslaved, they were obviously part of the people of this nation: nobody’s claiming they were the only people of it. Even while enslaved and disenfranchised, they were counted among other people of the nation (the infamous “three-fifths compromise”) to help determine political representation for different parts of the nation. And of course, the enslaved people’s labor and their arts and inventions, of everything from songs to recipes to machinery, had immense and profound impacts on the lives of people in the dominant culture of white Americans.

Max_S, I really can’t see any logical justification at all for your stance here. It seems like nothing more than naive acquiescence in the systemic racism of earlier Americans’ equation of Americanness with whiteness. As I said before, just because their concept of American national identity was limited to white people doesn’t mean that ours has to be.

200

But I do, otherwise I have trouble reconciling the idea that a Native American tribe might retain its identity even as it is totally removed from the land. And there are countless other instances where an entire nation of people migrate, perhaps more willingly, yet retain their identity as a people. And while the United States itself has dramatically changed in size, geographically, I do not have any trouble seeing that it is a continuation of the same country. I also have to be able to work out the unusual cases, such as the RoC and PRoC, or of rebellions whether successful or unsuccessful. It seems to me that a clean separation of nationhood from geography is the most straightforward conception. I certainly see some reason to tie national identity to geography, but, thus far I don’t find those reasons convincing.

Those people who were enslaved or dispossessed, at the time they were of that status, I do not count as part of the people who enslaved and dispossessed them. National identity is a social construct, it does not exist at birth but arises from social interaction. If I am to define national identity, it is the shared sense within a community of people that each of them belongs to the same state, said state being defined with a common constitution (small c) and history. The critical questions in the case of Native Americans who weren’t U.S. citizens at the time, or even chattel slaves, are whether they would consider themselves American nationals, and whether their fellow Americans (or the law) would consider them American nationals. Only if both questions are answered yes, do we have a shared national identity (the historic person and I). So no, I do not think those historic Native Americans or Black slaves are included in the people of the nation. The former were at the time considered foreigners or savages, the latter property.

~Max