GAP had to pull T-shirts with that – only that – written on them:
I like to think I’m sensitive to people’s heritage, but this seems to be a case of what Bloom County called “Offensensitivity”.
On the other hand, maybe I should just be happy that people know enough history to be offended.
How come nobody complained about this when a guy wrote a book entitled Manifold Destiny, about cooking meals on your car’s manifold as you traveled?
Uh, what? Of course it’s offensive, in roughly the same way a shirt saying “Yellow Peril” would be. Manifest Destiny not only refers to a process that involved killing people and taking their stuff, it explicitly was coined to provide the smug moral justification for such activity.
Speaking of smug moral justification, maybe I should say it’s more like putting Arbeit Macht Frei on a T-shirt.
Well, the pinhead who made the shirt obviously does NOT know what it means – if he can be believed:
Note to pinheads: might want to Wikipedia something you vaguely remember from high school before staking your image on it.
Note to faceless megacorporations: might want to hire a fact-checker before staking your company’s image on the work of pinheads.
But it may be more sinister than that:
That implies he might have known exactly what Manifest Destiny means, and he’s smug about it.
Labored puns are obviously more about stretching the language than about endorsing the philosophy.
1.) This is the first I’ve heard of people taking offense to it. When I learned of this in school it was as a philosophy and concept
2.) Actually, the framers of “Manifest Destiny” saw it as spreading the influence of Western Civ further westward. It was certainly used as justification for land-taking, etc., but your stsatement of it is pretty loaded itself, right down to the “smug” part.
3.) You could make all the same arguments about a T-shirt with “Colonization” on it, but I seriously doubt it would produce the same visceral response.
So when did “Mamnifest Destiny” go from being a boring phrase you learned in sophomore history to a hot button code phrase? That’s a serious question – did someone write a book, song, or other piece of pop culture that made “Manifest Destiny” such a forbidden phrase?
Probably when a big retailer decided to slap it on a t-shirt as if it meant something like “Seize the Day.” I think we’re all agreed on what Manifest Destiny was and what it meant, so I don’t see the confusion here. It’s based on an accurate representation of what the words mean. If they put something like “White Man’s Burden” or “Civilize Africa” or “Be Imperialists” on t-shirts I think people would also complain.
“Anglo-American Manifest Destiny and its destructive influence on Hispanic identity.”
El Gigante de Siete Leguas (The Giant with Seven-league Boots) prominently features Manifest Destiny in its attack on US policy in Latin America.
Destino Manifiesto is a hot-button phrase for Latin Americans.
Not at all. As far as I know, “colonization” by itself was never used as a slogan to justify territorial expansion and conquest.
Putting a slogan like that on a t-shirt was utterly idiotic.
Trying to think of what someone would have to put on a t-shirt that would offend me. I’m drawing a blank. Plenty of things I disagree with. Sometimes vehemently. But not offended.
It’s hard for me to believe that all of the administrators and marketers and artists at Gap somehow didn’t realize what a terrible idea this was. The question isn’t really “Is it offensive?” The real question is, “Will a significant number of people find this offensive?” The former is subjective, the latter is not really.
Admittedly, these are much more offensive than “Manifest Destiny” (and album covers instead of t-shirts), but I think there are some things that you would object to.
I still think if you asked random people off the street what manifest destiny means, you’d get something about american exceptionalism, “Go west, young man,” or the monroe doctrine.
My question was was why the boring history phrase “Manifest Destiny” was poroducing such a rapid and exttreme response. In my day, it wouldn’t have excited people any more than “Copernican Revolution” would have. It seemed to me that someone or something has been stirring people up.
The articles you link to explicitly use “Manifest Destiny” in this way. Is this only in Mexican sources? How loong has it been going on?
Because I seriously dpoubt that if something like this were not taking place, people wouldn’t be objecting to the shirt so vociferously.
“Colonization” describes perfectly a system of exploiting local people and resources for the enrichment of the founding power. It just doesn’t currently have the same Hot Button status. The question is: “Why not?”
And just so that we’re clear – I’m not advocating “Manifest Destiny”, or saying that it wasn’t a cloak for the nefarious activity that people are protesting. I’m nwondering about the reason it has that effect. Saying “Manifest Destiny is evil – look at what they did in its name” doesn’t explain it. I agree that putting “Arbeit Macht Frei” on a T-shirt would be phenomenally stupid – but that’s because the phrase is famous and famously associated with atrocity. There are plenty of innocuous-sounding phrases I could put on a T-shirt that are more obscure, and wouldn’t cause an uproar. Until today, I’d have though “Manifest Destiny” was one of them.
My point is, while it may be a “boring history phrase” to you, it’s a hot button issue to Latin Americans. Given the large increase in the Hispanic population of the US since you went to school, I don’t think anything beside the phrase would be necessary to stir things up.
No. The second link was to a book published in Cuba last year. I’ve heard it used by anti-US interests in Panama. (Building the Panama Canal was viewed by some as an expression of Manifest Destiny.) I’m sure it would be an issue as well in the Central American countries that have been invaded/occupied by the US (or by American citizens like William Walker).
I would guess since the Mexican War at least.
I think you’re just unaware of how this plays to the people who have been subjected to Manifest Destiny.
Because it hasn’t been used as a slogan to justify that policy. Manifest Destiny has. A parallel would be “White Man’s Burden,” not colonization.
I’m pretty sure the idea of the shirt was to say, “I’m clearly awesome.” ie. my destiny is manifest (obvious). I doubt the designer was thinking, you know what will really resonate with people now in 2012? Expansionist slogans from the 1800s.
It’s not offensive to discuss it in a historical context. But the phrase has an implication that white Anglo-Americans were destined to take over North America (and maybe a lot more of the Americas), either by divine mandate or because of their innate intellectual and moral superiority to the brown people who were already there - something that the latter rather understandably resent.
