A Frank Look at America’s Formation
/(with contributor Janet Winans, Ph.D.)
The older I get, the dumber I feel. I do remember, though, being told (when I was much younger) that the more you learn, the more you realize what you don’t know. I guess that’s how life is. Seriously, my recent research on current issues – Critical Race Theory, gun violence, democracy/autocracy/fascism - has made me feel rather like an ostrich who’s had her head in the sand for decades. For a while, the learning was uplifting and invigorating, but then the strangest thing happened to me: All the pieces of the puzzle started to come together – and the image of our country’s history taking shape sickened me.
Perhaps I’m simply seeing things incorrectly. Maybe I’ve gotten it all out of perspective or am jumping to conclusions. I don’t know. So I’d like to share this experience with you and ask whether my interpretation makes any sense. Do you see things the way I do, or am I way off base? Please be patient as I try to explain these doggoned puzzle pieces I’ve recently discovered and how – in my mind – they seem to be coming together. Then please comment for all to see, and let’s get an open-minded conversation going.
I suppose the way it all started was that my kids grew up and left home, and I got old enough not to work full time, and so I started to read more, and pay attention to smart people like Fareed Zakaria, and have time to attend discussion groups and presentations and hang out with civic-minded people. If I must assemble a chronology of events that led me to these fascinating puzzle pieces and the most depressing image they’ve formed for me, it might include such events as these:
Fareed Zakaria recommended How Democracies Die, and I read it, and I was shaken. I wrote an abstract of the book and, after a bit, wrote an even shorter summary of it. (Both are here in the Speakeasy Archive.)
Elected to my local City Council, I heard a council member say, regarding a resolution about our local public schools, that he would support it, “as long as they’re not teaching Critical Race Theory.” It was 2021, and this old lady, who considers herself smart and educated, had never seriously considered that theory before! I was baffled – and beguiled. My eyes and ears were opened: I had to learn about Critical Race Theory.
I joined a discussion group of senior citizens at the local state university. Someone recommended How Democracies Die. I seconded the motion – I’d already read it! And then a sharp woman in the group recommended How Civil Wars Start. I couldn’t resist that read either, and I wrote an abstract of that book too.
A smart friend recommended The Second Amendment: a biography. Come on! The biography of a constitutional amendment? I had to check it out.
And then this “Critical Race Theory” topic was all over the news and part of heated discussions at local school board meetings, and I had to take that seriously and learn about it too. Some of that learning is also here in the Speakeasy.
You can see what happened, right? I read about how democracies die and saw how easily ours could die: I was shaken. I read about how civil wars start and saw how close we actually are to the brink of another civil war in 2022. I watched a lot of news and heard the vitriol and anger, and then I went out as an alder (city council rep) to meet my constituents, and I lived the vitriol and anger daily! Afghanistan fell, and suddenly I had Afghan neighbors – and other neighbors who hated them because they are “different.” I started reading everything I could get my hands on related to Critical Race Theory. I had serious conversations with friends a lot smarter than I. We discussed white supremacy, racism, gun control, American history, Critical Race Theory, and more. It was an exhilarating ride until the day I sat out in the sun and simply breathed - and it all started to come together in an ugly picture.
White supremacy, for example
What did that term mean to me over my lifetime? It suggested angry young men with tiki torches marching in a far-away state, chanting “Jews will not replace us.” It had, in my mind, something to do with Adolph Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan and shotgun-wielding, bearded men with missing teeth and southern accents. It was a movement, not a fact. It was regional lore, not my country’s history. It was a whacko idea in the addled minds of a small percentage of uneducated Americans. That’s how I saw “white supremacy” – a fringe idea to be sneered at.
And now I see the truth about white supremacy: It has been a key part – maybe THE key part – of our American history from Day One. When those white Europeans stepped off their ships on this side of the Atlantic, ready to claim this vast, “uninhabited” continent for their great experiment in modern democracy, they pointed their guns at the indigenous people with darker skin and drove them off their ancestral land. They assumed, I am convinced, that they, the white Europeans, were superior.
When the first slave ship came from Africa and the dark-skinned people who had been kidnapped from their homes were lined up as sales merchandise for white landowners, surely both buyers and sellers assumed they were superior to these dark-skinned hostages. And after they’d made slaves of them, how could anyone doubt the darker humans were inferior? After all, they were enslaved to the whites.
It was the white landowners, almost all slave holders themselves, who met in Philadelphia and wrote our constitution and launched their great democratic experiment, establishing America as a country owned and run by white men. They wrote the laws, and I now understand (because of my research) that laws are quite possibly made by people in power to maintain the status quo for the benefit of people in power. As the history of our country unfolded over the years, no benefit would come to people of color unless that benefit converged neatly with benefits desired by white men. (I suppose the same could be said about the needs of women.)
From Day One until this moment in 2022, we have been a white supremacist country. And I never saw it until now. White supremacy is not about ultra-right zealots expressing a unique sort of hatred, and it’s not necessarily about racism within the individual heart. It’s about the history and fabric of this country. It permeates our laws and our assumptions, our traditions and mores. We are a white supremacist nation - and I never saw it.
Always a gun culture
Here’s another piece of the puzzle that now fits into the picture: We have been a gun culture since Day One. Notice above that I mentioned the “supreme” white Europeans pointing their guns at the “Indians” whose land they were stealing. They outgunned the natives, gunned them down, matched their bows and arrows with guns, pressed them into submission with guns. This nation was built as a gun culture, I now realize, and today people are weeping over murdered children and teachers and weapons of war in the hands of teenagers, as if this is a modern phenomenon. Now we, the Americans, who represent 4% of the world’s people, own 42% of its guns. We have 120 guns for every 100 Americans, and a gun lobby whose millions of dollars in political contributions have much of our leadership bought and paid for. About 53 people are killed by guns every day in this country. We’ve had 27 school shootings so far this year.
Do you think that’s anything new? A twenty-first century concept? Do you remember learning about “manifest destiny” in school? I sure do, and it made me proud back then. It seems, in the early nineteenth century, white settlers in the eastern part of this great continent believed it was their destiny to own the whole thing – to press onward and push those natives farther, contain them more cruelly, take all their land. Why not? It was their manifest destiny to do so. And they took their guns along and decimated the natives at Sand Creek and Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee and so many other places we’ve all forgotten.
The result? The wild, wild west, which supported the TV fiction of my childhood: Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Wyatt Earp, Death Valley Days, Grizzly Adams, The Virginian, Maverick… We lived and breathed shoot-‘em-up westerns in which every white man wore a holster with a gun on each hip and had a rifle in his cabin and another in the back of his wagon. I’ll bet that, in my childhood, I heard more gunshots than birdsong or music. We learned that guns were inherent to the success of our young nation.
When the massacre occurred at the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, I wrote I Oppose Gun Control and posted it here in the Speakeasy. I’m not going to explain it or review it here; I urge you to read it. My point is that “gun control” is an oxymoron and “gun safety” is pure lunacy, because a gun has one purpose, and one purpose only: to kill. But we used guns to take land from Mexico in the Mexican American War, just as we had used them to steal native lands. Guns are a part of our history – the second appalling part of the puzzle I now see: We have always been a gun culture.
Violence is nothing new
I suppose some countries are established by treaty or financial agreement or maybe even by the work of a surveyor. Most, I suspect, have their birth in agonizing bloodshed. And I suppose that’s easy for white people like me to forget. After all, my forebears were the white guys with the guns; most of the bloodshed was suffered by the natives whose land was being stolen. I’ll bet, had I grown up in an American Indian culture, I’d have a much better sense of the violence that birthed the United States of America. But I didn’t learn it that way. I learned of the well-spoken, well-heeled guys in powdered wigs who sold the tobacco their black slaves grew for them – It all sounded pretty civil and intellectual to me.
Don’t tell me that slavery could have been anything but violent. Beatings and whippings – and always the threat of the gun – surely kept those Black slaves in line. You know, if you learn American history from the perspective of the refined fellows in Philadelphia and Washington, the story comes to you by way of treaties and speeches and debates and reasoned news reports – not in the form of heartfelt “Negro spirituals.”
My ancestors were German immigrants who came here long after the Civil War and settled on farmland in the upper Midwest. I doubt they had to steal their land from natives (it had all been stolen by then), and they surely didn’t get involved in the slave trade. While they were planting their potatoes and corn, though, subtle violence was afoot throughout our country:
Forced American Indian Residential Schools, separating children from their families in order to “civilize” them
The Runaway Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850, authorizing the federal government to seize and return escaped slaves to the hellholes from which they’d escaped
An American president shot dead in a theatre as he watched a play
An American president shot dead as he rode through the streets of Dallas
The desegregation of schools under the watchful eyes of armed enforcers
The first vigilante militia – to control gangs - in North Carolina in 1767!
Post-Reconstruction vigilante militia groups suppressing and terrorizing Black Republican voters
Lynching of free Black citizens, including 3500 in Louisiana alone by the “White League”
Violence used to oppose unionizing factories
This 1842 statement by a New York City leader: “Thronged as our city is, men are robbed in the streets… The defenseless and the beautiful are ravished in the daytime and no trace of the criminals is found.” (BTW, NYC had 3000 homeless children on its streets at the time.)
In the 1850s, 40 murders in Los Angeles (then a village of 8,000) in a 15-month period
Philadelphia in the 19th century, already with gangs called “Bleeders,” “Garroters,” “Rangers,” “Tormentors,” and “Killers” – some members as young as ten years old – carrying clubs, brass knuckles, knives and pistols
Anti-Catholic rioting in the northeast from 1830 to 1850 - Baltimore with 12 major riots, Philadelphia with 11, New York City with 8
The Hatfields and the McCoys in the 1870s and 1880s – dozens killed and maimed
Well, I could go on and on, but I’ll spare you. The point is that we are shocked and surprised at the violence we witness in our country daily, and yet I now realize that violence has been the watchword of American life all along.
Female Subjugation
So, three pieces of the puzzle came together for me that day as I sat out in the sun, letting my mind wander. But there was a fourth piece hovering on the horizon. I knew it fit, but I couldn’t articulate it; my recent research hadn’t touched on it because I hadn’t been focusing on the possible imminent overthrow of Roe v. Wade (which, of course, is now a reality).
Now, remember I said above that I discussed my new insight with smart friends to deepen my understanding. Well, one of those friends helped me see the fourth piece of the puzzle – just as bitter as the other three, and undeniably a significant part of our country’s identity from Day One: the subjugation of women by white men and their laws. That friend was Janet Winans, Ph.D., retired University of Washington professor of anthropology, and this is a subject she knows well. As we ended our conversation, I asked her to put in writing a brief review of female subjugation and feminism in our country’s history, and then the sordid picture would be complete. Here’s what Janet wrote:
“Ism” is the awareness that Things are Wrong in Human Relationships. And it is an absolute threat to the status quo. That Status of the Quo is very alert to the Privilege that the “…ism” has discovered.
The Supreme Courts from the time of Chief Justice Warren and the Brown vs the Board of Education Decision until 1990, when Justice William Brennan retired from the “Rehnquist” court, had confronted the legal arguments of those Isms, as racial justice, which confronted “White” privilege before it was named. Each one has now been named: the struggle for racial justice for people of African descent, Native American descent, Japanese descent, Hispanic descent, Chinese descent; the many non-white people and immigrants who have had to fight to be recognized as equal citizens of the United States.
The Roe v Wade decision in 1973 confronted the particular uniqueness of female non-privilege, any woman’s choice whether to be impregnated. It is particularly interesting that now, in 2022, White Male privilege will usurp that opportunity that women have had since, only, 1973, and the invention of the “birth control pill.” And many are so enraged by the very idea that Woman might choose to become not-pregnant they are willing to allow the fetus impregnating their wife who was raped to survive until birth.
So. Feminism. What does it mean in this 22nd year of the 21st Century? The advocacy of women's rights on the basis of the equality of the sexes. (Google) The Roe decision is exactly the one to delete. It is not just White privilege fighting back against all the isms, but it is male privilege. We must see it as “Their” attack on the “weak link” in Women’s right to equality: her/ our right to be or not to be pregnant. What will come next?
It is not the idea of “back-room abortion” that is so very frightening. After all everyone seems to be saying that there will, still, be “two-tiered” abortions that will maintain the White privilege of well paid for abortions. The issue is that the decision will undo the very idea of equality between the sexes. Remember, it was only in 2009, with the Lilly Ledbetter Pay Act, that the Supreme Court allowed the idea that women should get “equal pay for equal work.’’
It is that Ism, Feminism, that strikes at the very soul of what is wrong in the system of Human Relationships
What a perfect storm: a country built on white supremacy, guns, violence and the overt subjugation of half its people. This is how the puzzle pieces started to come together for me:
Now, I’m well aware that our country was built on some good things too, like public schools (and Catholic schools) and public libraries, neighborhood polling places, the League of Women Voters, Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon and the interstate highway system. I don’t mean to denigrate our country or its history. What I hope to express is my wide-eyed wonder at the American history I have failed to see – and the contemporary America I have, until now, failed to recognize.
When you were in grade school, did you draw pictures of the “First Thanksgiving” in November? Sure, we all did. And I believed the story: The Indians kindly taught the colonists how to grow corn, and the colonists roasted some wild turkeys and gratefully invited the friendly natives to share a meal. Perfect harmony. Throughout my childhood, I was aware of the Indian reservations across our state. I thought the Indians had fashioned those reservations by choice.
I believed the Emancipation Proclamation freed all the slaves, and they migrated around the country, getting jobs and being smoothly assimilated into society. When my mother listened to the radio as I played with my dolls, and I heard them talk about Brown v. the Board of Education, it was my understanding that all schools would now – immediately - reflect the entire population of their area, neatly integrated – amen. Just over 20 years later, when I moved to the Deep South as a U.S. Army wife and sought a teaching job, I was gob-smacked to discover this thing called “white flight.” I had no idea some American schools had resisted desegregation for nearly two decades.
You probably are too young to have lived through the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but I’m not. I remember my heartbreak when the loudspeaker came on in every room of my high school, blasting out the voice of Walter Cronkite: The president has been shot. I could not conceive of such an atrocity, and I firmly believed that Lee Harvey Oswald was a unique American who must have jumped through unfathomable hoops to possess a gun. Little did I know he had purchased it easily by mail order, using an alias. But I simply could not imagine my homeland a place of untethered violence.
As a youth, I learned of our country’s glory, its proud accomplishments, its natural grandeur. As an adult, I followed the path of my American whiteness, working hard, but generally getting the deserved payoff. I’ve never been the victim of violence, have never touched a gun (or wanted to), have never witnessed a riot firsthand, have never seen a gun in public except in the holster of a policeman, and was never denied my right to vote or hold a job. I have never perceived law or government at any level to be “against me,” have never for a second questioned my right to walk into any store or restaurant I wanted to enter. It never occurred to me that people in the same room with me might be carrying guns (until I found out they are).
I truly believe I had a wonderful education, and I am deeply grateful to the nuns who guided that education for 12 years. When I entered college and my first roommate was a Black girl from Milwaukee, I never gave a thought to whether her path was more difficult than mine (until the evening when she rushed into our room with several Black girlfriends in tow, all in hysterical tears, having fled back to the dorm through a hail of racist jeers I’d never had to witness).
When I learned about “women’s suffrage,” I thought how noble and brave those women were. It never occurred to me that perhaps females should have had the same rights as males all along. Throughout this lifetime, I escaped the direct effects of violence and guns and white supremacy and male supremacy, and so I didn’t understand the role they have always played in our history.
And now, here I am, eyes wide open at last, and I wonder: What does someone DO about an awakening such as this? We cannot rewrite our history, but I suppose we can affirm that violence, guns, white supremacy and female subjugation, as significant as they were in our history, must not be part of America’s future. Would anyone agree to that? And, if so, what might they DO about it? Is it possible to change our country so significantly that the next 250 years will offer Americans a gun-free, nonviolent culture in which all humans are equally respected and protected?
Or maybe I just sat out in the sun too long, pondering those puzzle pieces.