Which, as you agreed, excludes both Columbus and his voyages.
Again, I don’t know where to start.
I don’t understand why you seem unable to understand that that’s deliberately diminishing the contributions to the country of all heritages that aren’t European, while exaggerating the contributions of Europeans. Or, alternatively, why you seem unable to understand what’s wrong with that.
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You want a single national identity for the USA, one that includes all its citizens? Try this:
We are the country that started off by saying that it is self-evident that all men are created equal and have the unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And that has been arguing, ever since, about exactly what that means.
I think it’s quite possible to see all of US history through that lens; to teach it to children in that fashion; to include both the evils that were done, and the resistance to those evils; to include the evil-doers, the sufferers, the resisters, and the complicated and difficult but nevertheless essential fact that many people were more than one of those at the same time. And it doesn’t leave anybody out.
OK, so if there is a moral difference, and one is necessarily a negative one, how do you justify rejecting that one not having a positive moral value?
One explicitly identifies with European colonialists and one explicitly does not. How can they have the same identity when who they identify with is, according to you, an inextricable part of national identity?
No, you said you think B belongs to a different nation:
It’s the latter. The contributions of non-European heritage was for a long time actually diminished, so it only makes sense to identify the United States as a people who, for a long time and even to some extent today, were dominated by European heritage.
Do you mean, how do I justify rejecting that an oppressor lacks positive moral value? Or do you mean, how do I justify rejecting that a resister to oppression is part of the national identity?
If the two are part of the same nation, at least one person is wrong.
Look at it this way. Let’s say my friend John thinks the U.S. was founded by Martians, and that the planet Mars is our national homeland. I still think John is an American - he was born here, is considered a citizen by the law and pretty much everybody in this country. John still thinks I am an American. We both think we share the same national identity - we just have different ideas as to what that identity entails. John thinks it involves Martians. I think it doesn’t. John thinks I’m wrong. I think John is wrong.
What you quoted relies on a premise: two people do not share the same national identity. That premise is denied in example B, so far as I am concerned:
And if B thinks I belong to a different nation, but I think B and I belong to the same nation and I think the law backs me up, I still think B and I belong to the same nation.
OK, so you’re now saying that we should not celebrate Columbus Day, and while we’re at it should not identify with the conquistadors, who also long pre-dated the nation?
No; that’s why it makes sense to stop diminishing the contributions of non-European heritage by pretending that the European contributions are the only ones that matter.
Consider the possibility that the person who’s wrong is the one who’s insisting that national identity rests on identifying with only one specific segment of the nation.
I didn’t say either of those things. But if you can quote where I did, I will recant.
I don’t insist that it rests on identifying with one specific segment of the nation, I’ve been saying that for most of history the nation didn’t include swaths of Native Americans or Blacks or Chinese or what have you; and when those groups were integrated into the nation, the only changes to the national identity were changes going forward.
The language you use, “diminishing” or “exaggerating”, are present-tense. This hasn’t escaped my notice and… reminds me that you have a totally different perspective of the issue than I do. You write as if I am actively doing something wrong.
My idea of a national identity is rather fixed - I won’t say I’m totally close-minded but this is not something I would expect to change from a single internet debate. I’m sure you understand that a lot goes into a person’s sense of identity, both mine and yours.
To me the national identity is sort of like a gallery, a particular exhibit in a museum of identities, with a painting associated with event or each time period I happen to consider. The exhibit has a well-defined subject, the nation of people. I look at the paintings that represent the nation in 1789, 1820, 1840, &etc. and where Native Americans are present at all, they are usually sidelined or in the background. For example there is a painting of the Cherokee removal, for example, but the subjects of the paintings are U.S. army or state militia members.
Before 1776, borrowed from other national collections (such as the British or Dutch) the paintings show the people of the colonies who would later form the nation. Native Americans are even more rare as the subjects of a painting. And so on, until we pass paintings of the Mayflower and other such ships, and the hall opens up into large room.
Here are those portraits of ships and explorers and conquistadores and missionaries, a bridge between the Eastern and Western hemispheres. Prominent in this room is the arrival of Columbus in the Caribbean.
So, take the Cherokee removal as an example. You come to me, and tell me my museum is poorly curated. Cherokees are part of the nation now, aren’t they? So why are you diminishing the heritage of Cherokees by displaying paintings where their removal is only in the background? Let’s paint a more accurate picture of the nation and hang it in that spot, a picture where the Cherokee people are in focus too.
I understand but only to some extent. Only recently did the nation include the Cherokee people, and so it doesn’t make sense to me to go back and make changes - it seems revisionist. Dangerous. I need more to go on than inclusiveness for the sake of inclusiveness… which is not inherently moral enough to make changes, in my opinion. The entire purpose of having a national identity, or any other form of identity, is to distinguish in-groups from out-groups. Inclusiveness for its own sake is antithetical to that purpose.
It seems to me that they follow from your saying that Columbus is excluded from “the bright-line definition of national identity” that you were using.
Yes it did.
[considerably etcetera, I’m not going to quote it all]
The problem is that you’re looking at a museum full of paintings that were selected to focus on members of only one group; not at a museum full of photographs which show who was actually there.
And when people point out that the paintings left people out, you want to cite the paintings as if they proved that those who they chose to leave out weren’t there in the first place. But they were there; and it’s a problem that you’re preferring to look at the selectively-chosen focus of the paintings, and refusing to look at the people who were actually there.
Nope. For one thing, it isn’t really something that has a purpose, as if it were designed by somebody and imposed on the others – it’s something that happens as the result of a concatenation of a whole lot of interactions. For another, cohesiveness and indentification within a group has to do with that group’s internal interrelationships. If the only relationship they’ve got with each other is that they all want to other somebody else, you haven’t got a group identity there at all.
You say revisionist, everyone else is saying that it is correcting historical wrongs. You seem to insist on remaining on the wrong side of history. This nation always included the Cherokee, we just didn’t acknowledge it until relatively recently.
Revisionism is a good thing. It’s how the study of history is supposed to work. If we don’t occasionally revise our understanding of history we’re being shitty historians. There’s are reasons Gibbons is no longer the go to text on the Roman empire.
You’re saying someone is wrong about correctly assessing who they identify with?
Because if you mean they’re wrong about which nation they consider themselves to be, we’re right back to “Blacks who don’t identify with colonialists aren’t real Americans”. Because you’re saying you think they’re wrong.
In this sense, of course, so are Hideki Tojo, Thomas Pelham-Holles, and John Cabot. I’d argue Cabot, certainly, is more important in the sweep of early American history than Columbus, and yet there’s no Cabot Day. Italian-Americans could even claim him in place of Columbus (his real name was Caboto.)
We disagree on what is or is not part of a nation’s history proper; however I still do not insist that national identity rests on identifying with only one specific segment of the nation today.
Exactly my point, I see a nation as a specific group of people - not necessarily the people who were “there”. You are not pointing out a lost work that belongs in my exhibit, nor proposing a restoration, nor are you exposing any works in my collections as fraudulent. You would have me change the subject of the exhibit itself.
I disagree. I think there is a purpose to identity: to distinguish same from different, self from non-self, us from them, in-groups from out-groups etc. A desire to ‘other somebody else’ is all it takes. Identity can be designed and imposed unilaterally, or by mutual consent. I am at liberty to assign any group a common identity without their knowing, much less their consent; I may do so without the members sharing any other trait whatsoever.
Actually, apparently, he liked to sign his name Zuan Chabotto. But yes, I will give you Cabot. The question is- would Cabot have made his voyages if Columbus hadn’t done his first? It does not appear so, and Cabot still thought he could find China going West.
Is it a historical wrong - that is, an inaccuracy - that the Cherokee nation was a foreign adversary during the war for independence in 1776? That they became U.S. nationals on an individual basis, until an act of Congress granted the remainder citizenship in the '20s?
Maybe; exploration fever was running high in Europe, and had not started with Columbus. Advances had been made towards the exploration of Africa and as far westward across the Atlantic as technology and people’s courage allowed. Columbus was not the only guy thinking of finding a new way to the Far East, since the Ottomans had cut off the overland trade routes. Columbus wasn’t even the first guy to think of heading West to go the other way around the globe.
I am not sure if Cabot specifically went because of Columbus or because it seemed like a profitable idea to sell to a patron (and he had significant financial concerns that would motivate a venture that could be lucrative and would also get you away from Europe for awhile) but it’s worth noting that, of course, Cabot actually found North America, and did so on behalf of the English crown. His was the first foray by England, and the fact Columbus landed in Hispaniola and South America while Cabot landed in (what is now) Canada and the USA has a lot to do with why the USA was founded the way it was by the people it was founded by.
Yes. They were there first, how could they be foreign?
Now, were they traditionally presented as such, as though they were a foreign power like the British they allied with? Yes. But that view was/is wrong.