North America is a Crime Scene: The Untold History of America this Columbus Day
From Salon, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz from her book An Indigenous People's History of the United States
In the United States the legacy of settler colonialism can be seen in the endless wars of aggression and occupations; the trillions spent on war machinery, military bases, and personnel instead of social services and quality public education; the gross profits of corporations, each of which has greater resources and funds than more than half the countries in the world yet pay minimal taxes and provide few jobs for US citizens; the repression of generation after generation of activists who seek to change the system; the incarceration of the poor, particularly descendants of enslaved Africans; the individualism, carefully inculcated, that on the one hand produces self-blame for personal failure and on the other exalts ruthless dog-eat-dog competition for possible success, even though it rarely results; and high rates of suicide, drug abuse, alcoholism, sexual violence against women and children, homelessness, dropping out of school, and gun violence.
This article situates American interventions abroad as the continuation of an imperialist project that originated in the genocidal founding of this country.
Read it here and click below for more quotes.
"That the continued colonization of American Indian nations, peoples, and lands provides the United States the economic and material resources needed to cast its imperialist gaze globally is a fact that is simultaneously obvious within—and yet continually obscured by—what is essentially a settler colony’s national construction of itself as an ever more perfect multicultural, multiracial democracy. . . . [T]he status of American Indians as sovereign nations colonized by the United States continues to haunt and inflect its raison d’etre. —Jodi Byrd"
"...Kaplan became one of the principal intellectual boosters for U.S. power in the world through the tried-and-true “American way of war.” This is the way of war dating to the British-colonial period that military historian John Grenier called a combination of “unlimited war and irregular war,” a military tradition “that accepted, legitimized, and encouraged attacks upon and the destruction of noncombatants, villages and agricultural resources . . . in shockingly violent campaigns to achieve their goals of conquest.”
Dunbar-Ortiz quoting Kaplan: "While microscopic in size, it was the fast and irregular military actions against the Indians, memorialized in bronze and oil by Remington, that shaped the nature of American nationalism."
"Rather than bestowing the status of prisoner of war on the detainees, which would have given them certain rights under the Geneva Conventions, they were designated as “unlawful combatants,” a status previously unknown in the annals of Western warfare. As such, the detainees were subjected to torture by U.S. interrogators and shamelessly monitored by civilian psychologists and medical personnel.
In response to questions and condemnations from around the globe, a University of California international law professor, John C. Yoo, on leave to serve as assistant U.S. attorney general in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, penned in March 2003 what became the infamous “Torture Memo.” Not much was made at the time of one of the precedents Yoo used to defend the designation “unlawful combatant,” the US Supreme Court’s 1873 opinion in Modoc Indian Prisoners."
"Byrd points out that, according to this line of thinking, anyone who could be defined as “Indian” could thus be killed legally, and they also could be held responsible for crimes they committed against any US soldier. “As a result, citizens of American Indian nations become in this moment the origin of the stateless terrorist combatant within U.S. enunciations of sovereignty.”"
Quoting Cynthia Enloe: "Militarization . . . [is] happening at the individual level, when a woman who has a son is persuaded that the best way she can be a good mother is to allow the military recruiter to recruit her son so her son will get off the couch. When she is persuaded to let him go, even if reluctantly, she’s being militarized. She’s not as militarized as somebody who is a Special Forces soldier, but she’s being militarized all the same. Somebody who gets excited because a jet bomber flies over the football stadium to open the football season and is glad that he or she is in the stadium to see it, is being militarized. So militarization is not just about the question “do you think the military is the most important part of the state?” (although obviously that matters). It’s not just “do you think that the use of collective violence is the most effective way to solve social problems?”—which is also a part of militarization. But it’s also about ordinary, daily culture, certainly in the United States."
"The astronomical number of firearms owned by U.S. civilians, with the Second Amendment as a sacred mandate, is also intricately related to militaristic culture. Everyday life and the culture in general are damaged by ramped-up militarization, and this includes academia, particularly the social sciences, with psychologists and anthropologists being recruited as advisors to the military. "
"They quote an Independence Day speech by President John Quincy Adams in which he condemned British colonialism and claimed that the United States “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” Stone and Kuznick fail to mention that the United States at the time was invading, subjecting, colonizing, and removing the Indigenous farmers from their land, as it had since its founding and as it would through the nineteenth century. In ignoring that fundamental basis for US development as an imperialist power, they do not see that overseas empire was the logical outcome of the course the United States chose at its founding."
"A “race to innocence” is what occurs when individuals assume that they are innocent of complicity in structures of domination and oppression. This concept captures the understandable assumption made by new immigrants or children of recent immigrants to any country. They cannot be responsible, they assume, for what occurred in their adopted country’s past. Neither are those who are already citizens guilty, even if they are descendants of slave owners, Indian killers, or Andrew Jackson himself. Yet, in a settler society that has not come to terms with its past, whatever historical trauma was entailed in settling the land affects the assumptions and behavior of living generations at any given time, including immigrants and the children of recent immigrants."
Settler colonialism, as an institution or system, requires violence or the threat of violence to attain its goals. People do not hand over their land, resources, children, and futures without a fight, and that fight is met with violence. In employing the force necessary to accomplish its expansionist goals, a colonizing regime institutionalizes violence. The notion that settler-indigenous conflict is an inevitable product of cultural differences and misunderstandings, or that violence was committed equally by the colonized and the colonizer, blurs the nature of the historical processes. Euro-American colonialism had from its beginnings a genocidal tendency.
This article characterizes the founding of America as inherently genocidal and argues that we need to understand it within the colonial framework.
Read it here and click below for more quotes.
"It should not have happened that the great civilizations of the Western Hemisphere, the very evidence of the Western Hemisphere, were wantonly destroyed, the gradual progress of humanity interrupted and set upon a path of greed and destruction. Choices were made that forged that path toward destruction of life itself—the moment in which we now live and die as our planet shrivels, overheated. "
“The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. Land is life — or, at least, land is necessary for life."
"To say that the United States is a colonialist settler-state is not to make an accusation but rather to face historical reality. But indigenous nations, through resistance, have survived and bear witness to this history. The fundamental problem is the absence of the colonial framework.
The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism — the founding of a state based on the ideology of white supremacy, the widespread practice of African slavery, and a policy of genocide and land theft. "
"Origin narratives form the vital core of a people’s unifying identity and of the values that guide them. In the United States, the founding and development of the Anglo-American settler-state involves a narrative about Puritan settlers who had a covenant with God to take the land. "
"Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) historian Jean O’Brien names this practice of writing Indians out of existence “firsting and lasting.”"
"US history, as well as inherited indigenous trauma, cannot be understood without dealing with the genocide that the United States committed against indigenous peoples. From the colonial period through the founding of the United States and continuing in the twenty-first century, this has entailed torture, terror, sexual abuse, massacres, systematic military occupations, removals of indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories, and removals of indigenous children to military-like boarding schools."
However well intentioned, the urge to treat Matthew Shepard as a blameless angel demonstrates so many of the pathologies in contemporary social liberalism. First is the left’s attraction to heroes and martyrs — a drive to personalize and individualize every issue, in a way that seems to directly cut against the theoretical commitment to identifying structural causes for social problems. After all, it is the right wing that prefers to reduce complex social issues to problems of personal character and claim economic outcomes are entirely the result of individual work ethic and talent. Advancing individuals as the symbols of a political causes invites attempts to discredit the causes by discrediting the inevitably flawed martyrs pressed into service to emblemize them. Yes, the personal is political. But the person is not the politics.
This article examines the responses to a new(ish) book that adds complexity to the conventional "hate crime" narrative about the murder of Matthew Shephard. The author argues that the tendency to individualize issues "invites attempts to discredit the causes by discrediting the inevitably flawed martyrs pressed into service to emblemize them."
Read it here and click below for more quotes.
"If empirical tests suggest that our social construct of race align with differences in our social construct of intelligence, it invites consideration of how those constructs have been assumed or theorized, how those tests have been designed, and how structural aspects of our economy and our society have created conditions that make such perceived differences possible. No test results could undermine our pre-empirical commitment to the social and political equality of all races."
"The right to live is not deserved. The right to not be killed does not stem from the perceived social legitimacy of one’s sexual or gender identity."
"If Jimenez’s Matthew Shepard — involved in the drug trade, intimately acquainted with his killers, despairing — is the real Matthew Shepard, we face the same moral questions that we do when we consider Shepard the secular saint. Even if his death was not a black-and-white morality play which spoke perfectly to the assumptions of those who mourn him, and he not a media-ready victim but a complex and flawed human being, would he then lie outside of the boundaries of our compassion and our responsibility? And if he did, where is left for a movement seeking human justice to go?"
Racism doesn’t require the presence of malice, only the presence of bias and ignorance, willful or otherwise. It doesn’t even require more than one race. There are plenty of members of aggrieved groups who are part of the self-flagellation industrial complex. They make a name (and a profit) saying inflammatory things about their own groups, things that are full of sting but lack context, things that others will say only behind tightly shut doors. These are often people who’ve “made it” and look down their noses with be-more-like-me disdain at those who haven’t, as if success were merely a result of a collection of choices and not also of a confluence of circumstances.
Police Face a Long and Complex Task to Mend Distrust Deepened by Killings
From the NYT, by Manny Fernandez
Last Monday at the White House, in response to the events in Ferguson, President Obama announced the formation of a task force to examine ways to strengthen community policing, a law enforcement strategy that focuses on preventing crime and addressing neighborhood concerns rather than merely reacting to crime.
After a steady increase during the late 1990s, community policing programs declined as the federal government shifted more grant money to fighting terrorism. From 2000 to 2007, the number of full-time community policing officers nationwide fell by more than half, to 47,000 from 103,000, according to Justice Department data.
From the New York Review of Books, by Andrew Delbanco
In order to agree that America’s schools ought to be better (Ravitch), we don’t have to believe that they are worse than ever (Rhee). We don’t have to think, as Rhee does, that “great” teaching is a magic bullet in order to agree with Ravitch that the training of teachers ought to be more rigorous and that our nation needs “a stable workforce of experienced professional educators” who receive good compensation and respect. Rhee is right that our schools could use some shaking up. Ravitch is right that “the wounds caused by centuries of slavery, segregation, and discrimination cannot be healed by testing, standards, accountability, merit pay, and choice.”
This article examines the philosophies of two voices in American education, Diane Ravitch and Michelle Rhee. Rhee (who heads a lobbying organization) is a proponent of charter schools, privatization, and testing-based accountability who dismisses the effects of structural inequality. Ravitch (described as "arguably our leading historian of primary and secondary education") emphasizes the importance of addressing poverty alongside education reform, as well as a stable workforce of better trained, experienced educators who receive "good compensation and respect."
Read it here and click below for more quotes.
" “The public schools,” ...“are working very well for most students.” She points out that over the last few decades high school drop-out rates have declined. Average test scores have risen, if modestly. Nor is it clear, as often assumed, that American children lag significantly behind their foreign counterparts in science proficiency.
But if Ravitch disputes prevailing assumptions, she does not gloss over the fact that school performance by the large minority of American children who grow up poor or in segregated neighborhoods is disproportionately weak. On the contrary, she thinks that their plight is a national scandal, that today’s school reformers are misguided in their efforts to redress it, and that, along with the persistence of poverty and residential segregation, we should be alarmed by the current reform movement itself."
"Diane Ravitch not only sides with Rhee’s critics; she surpasses them in her condemnation, which borders on contempt. Here is her summary of Rhee’s legacy to the Washington schools: “cheating, teaching to bad tests, institutionalized fraud, dumbing down of tests, and a narrowed curriculum.”2 The reference to cheating is to an improbable rise in passing rates on reading tests during Rhee’s first two years (in the case of one school, the rates almost doubled). Although an investigation by the D.C. inspector general did not determine exactly what happened, it found that teachers in at least one school, under intense pressure to show good test results, erased wrong answers and substituted correct ones."
"Ravitch describes that approach, aptly, as “testing mania.” Tests, she thinks, can be useful diagnostic instruments, but as a high-stakes method for evaluating teachers and schools, they create more problems than they solve. She quotes Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond (who was Arne Duncan’s chief rival to become President Obama’s secretary of education) that teacher ratings based on tests “largely reflect whom a teacher teaches, not how well they teach.” Conflating test scores with teacher quality has the effect, Ravitch writes, of punishing “teachers for choosing to teach the students with the greatest needs,” while encouraging them to “spend more time with the students who will respond to their coaching and to spend less time with those who will not.” The emphasis on test scores exacerbates rivalry, discourages teamwork, and undermines morale."
"[Rhee's] fervor for competition exemplifies what is fast becoming the national education dogma, which boils down to a few variations on a single theme: (1) Students should compete for test scores and their teachers’ approval. (2) Teachers should compete for “merit” rewards from their principal. (3) Schools should compete for funding within their district. (4) School districts should compete for budgetary allocations within their state. (5) States should compete for federal funds."
"For one who grew up, as I did, in the 1960s and 1970s, it is strange to hear such faith in the salutary power of competition from someone who calls herself “radical.” That word once implied deep discontent with the basic structure of society and a revolutionary zeal to overturn it, beginning with the distribution of wealth. Now it apparently means the determination to remake public institutions on the model of private corporations."
"In this respect, too, Rhee’s book is a representative document of our time. She wants to bring financial incentives, rewards, and penalties into a bureaucratic system that she regards as dysfunctional and complacent. She wants to save it from itself by the infusion of entrepreneurial energy. In this sense, too, her approach to school reform is part of a trend that has been building since the 1980s to introduce private competition (in police, military, and postal services, for example) where government was once the only provider."
"Vouchers were first proposed in their modern form in 1955 by the free-market economist Milton Friedman.4 For groups seeking to escape what they regarded as the coercive culture of public schools, it was an attractive idea. It appealed to Catholics resentful of paying taxes to support schools to which they did not wish to send their own children, and to southern whites who wished to withdraw their children from public schools during the first phase of forced integration."
"As for charters, Ravitch notes the irony that the idea was first brought to public notice in the late 1980s by Albert Shanker, the longtime president of the teachers’ union. What Shanker had in mind was small collaborations of teachers interested in helping troubled students by moving them into a sort of school-within-a-school that would be a laboratory for teaching experiments and that might be expanded if proven successful.5"
"Among lobbyists who favor maximum freedom of action for charters is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—the same organization, supported by the Koch brothers, that drafted the legislative proposal on which Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law was based."
"Because some charter schools—or networks of schools under centralized management—enjoy generous funding from private donors, they have the potential to support students and families in ways that go far beyond the scope of what schools dependent solely on public funding can possibly do. The leaders among them, such as the Promise Academy and the KIPP schools, provide what Ravitch calls, approvingly, “wraparound services”—prenatal counseling for expectant mothers, programs for preschoolers, longer school days, after-school and summer activities, and other support services urgently needed in low-income neighborhoods. Children whose families do little to encourage them to learn can greatly benefit from such services."
"Her central concern is that pressure to show quick improvement in test results will create a “publicly funded dual school system”—one, consisting of some charter schools, will mainly appeal to the “motivated and willing”; the other, including public schools, will serve the “rejects.” It is by no means clear that large investments in charter schools will turn out to be money well spent."
"Ravitch, too, is indignant—at the callow arrogance of those who describe poverty as an “excuse” for not performing better in school. She is outraged by the persistence of poverty and its terrible effects: low birth weight with the associated risks of cognitive deficit, asthma, and the neurological effects of lead poisoning, among other debilitating conditions. She reminds us that poverty damages, often irretrievably, children who start school already hurt by having lived amid angry, often poorly educated adults prone to violence, having been parked in front of TV and tended by exhausted caretakers who rarely speak in complex sentences or about anything beyond the fraught incidents of day-to-day life. This fall, on the south side of Chicago, thousands of children are walking to and from school on streets lined with armored police trying to protect them from crossfire between warring gangs. Of course a good school can be a haven in such a setting, and good teachers can try to show children an alternative world, but it is foolish to overestimate their power to transform the lives of frightened and, inevitably, hardened children"
"Without citation, Rhee mentions a Harvard study showing the durable effects on “kids who had just one effective teacher in their lifetime” (p. 142). Ravitch’s view of “great” teachers is that “there is no evidence that they exist in great numbers or that they can produce the same feats year after year for every student” (p. 101). She cites multiple studies in her endnotes. For an extended discussion of excessive faith in education as the remedy for economic and social problems, see W. Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson, The Education Gospel: The Economic Power of Schooling (Harvard University Press, 2004.) ↩"
"Ravitch, born in the late 1930s, looks back at the 1960s and 1970s and sees something different. She sees the achievement gap narrowing between black and white students at a time of increased government support for early-childhood education, improving economic opportunities for black families with the help of antidiscrimination laws and jobs programs, and federal funds allocated to schools that enrolled poor children, rather than according to comparative performance on tests. In short, she sees President Johnson’s Great Society policies as a force for progress."
"She acknowledges that initiatives such as TFA have helped elevate the prestige of public-school teaching by attracting talented young college graduates. But she stresses the value of long experience, and thinks that teaching as a professional career is undermined when eager young recruits drop in for a few years before dropping out in order to move on to something more lucrative or prestigious.7 In short, Rhee wants to bust the union while Ravitch wants to strengthen it as an “advocate for better working conditions and better compensation for its members,” since “better working conditions translate into better learning conditions for students.”"
From the New York Review of Books, by Jonathan Zimmerman
Of course, our best teachers can and do make a difference in the lives of our least privileged children; you can see Keizer doing that, in small ways, in Getting Schooled, his fine book. Yet every piece of credible social science confirms that, notwithstanding such efforts, schools cannot overcome the crippling effects of poverty. Telling teachers that they can represents yet another insult to their intelligence, all in the guise of bucking them up. Ditto for the perennial promotions of digital technologies, which promise to “revolutionize” teaching very soon. Similar claims greeted film projectors, radio, and television in their own times; in 1922, for example, Thomas Edison predicted that motion pictures would replace textbooks within a few short years.
This article looks at three books that focus on the history and quality of teacher education in America and the state of education today. Zimmerman argues that the current accountability movement is based on faulty assumptions (that any teacher or student can succeed "if the correct incentives are in place," despite social science research to the contrary), is often insulting to teachers and their intelligence, and ineffective. He also recommends that teacher preparation programs focus on training teachers how to teach a specific discipline, "stressing cognitive skills above all else."
Read it here and click below for more quotes.
"Susan B. Anthony had taught school for over a decade but had become tired of its deadening routines; she also resented the nineteen-year-old man who was hired to supervise her, at a higher salary than she could hope to earn. In her first recorded public address, to the New York State Teachers’ Association, Anthony argued that the profession would never achieve parity with others if men continued to regard it as a feminine domain:
Do you not see that so long as society says a woman is incompetent to be a lawyer, minister, or doctor, but has ample ability to be a teacher, that every man of you who chooses this profession tacitly acknowledges that he has no more brains than a woman?"
"Privately, Anthony’s feminist comrade Elizabeth Cady Stanton condemned “schoolmarms” who had attended specialized “normal schools” for teachers—not the more demanding liberal arts colleges, which were starting to open their doors to women. The normal schools were also a brainchild of Mann and others of his generation. Teachers who defended the second-rate teacher-training institutions they had attended were “an infernal set of fools,” Stanton told Anthony. Indeed, Stanton concluded, the entire teaching profession was “a pool of intellectual stagnation.”"
"When teachers were hired for their inborn ability to “nurture” schoolchildren, many derided or disregarded their intellectual capacities. Now we’ve created a system that is so firmly tied to scholastic achievement—as narrowly defined by standardized tests—that no serious scholar would want to teach in it."
"Despite its resolute dismissal of the simplistic ideas of rapport with students and group feeling that still dominate many education schools, Lemov’s book actually echoes one of the most enduring myths of such schools: that any “good” teacher can teach anything well. But as cognitive psychologists have been reminding us for a half-century, each discipline, whether history or math or English composition, has its own “episteme” or system of knowledge—that is, a distinct way of asking questions, gathering evidence, and generating answers."
"At least college professors can work without fear of being dismissed by people who disagree with them. Not so for our K–12 teachers. Especially in the McCarthy era, as Goldstein reminds us, hundreds of teachers were fired for expressing unpopular opinions or for associating with allegedly subversive organizations."
"No Child Left Behind and its spin-offs are premised on the grim notion that teachers will work harder—and better—if we can somehow pinpoint their performance and connect it to rewards and punishments."
"The entire conception of “accountability” is an insult to the intelligence of American teachers, taking little account of the demanding intellectual activity—both the command of knowledge and ways to show it—that good teaching involves. According to the logic of those at the top, these people just need a good kick in the pants and everything else will take care of itself. Should we be surprised that intellectuals like Keizer—who lasts exactly one year in his return to the profession—are avoiding it?"
"But he does deflate another absurd assumption of the accountability movement, which is that any student—like any teacher—can succeed, if the correct incentives are in place."
"In America, by contrast, we’re always looking for the next gadget to improve—and, one suspects, to supplant—our beleaguered teaching profession."
"Do lawyers have to love their clients? Must doctors adore their patients? What American teachers need now is not love, but a capacity for deep and disciplined thinking that will reflect—and respect—the intellectual complexities of their job."
Racist policing isn’t happening in a vacuum — it has to be seen, at least in part, as the flip side of the economic gutting of those communities.
The local, state, and federal governments have slowly eroded black neighborhoods by shuttering public schools and public housing, closing public clinics and hospitals, and slashing funding for social programs. They have stood by while the foreclosure crisis gave way to an eviction crisis.
They advocated the destruction of public-sector jobs that have been a source of middle-level incomes for African Americans, and instead championed low-wage underemployment. Plus, the mass incarceration of hundreds of thousands of black men and women has left them unable to participate in the job market — or if so, only at its margins.
This article describes the scale of police violence against African-Americans, looks at some of the causes (Economic gutting of black communities> populations more vulnerable to drug arrests> easier arrests to make for cops/politicians looking to appear "tough on crime"), and makes recommendations for justice (civilian review boards, laws against racial profiling, arrests of officers, disarmed police forces).
Read it here and click below for more quotes.
"The FBI calculated that from 2007 to 2012, white police killed at least two black men each week — roughly five hundred deaths in all. To put this in perspective, consider that in the five years prior to the introduction of federal anti-lynching legislation in 1922, there were 284 lynchings of African Americans. The epidemic of racism is raging through every institution connected to the American criminal justice system."
"Just in the days prior to the grand jury decision, police in Cleveland killed an unarmed African-American woman, Tanisha Anderson, by smashing her head into the concrete. Then, 12-year-old Tamir Rice, also of Cleveland, was shot in the stomach twice by white cops and killed. He was holding an air pellet gun on a playground. African American Akai Gurley was murdered by New York City cops when he entered the stairwell of a public housing complex.
These cases only scratch the surface of the scope of racist policing in the US, but it is the subject of almost no discussion outside of radical circles."
"Police violence is only one aspect of a generally racist criminal justice system that feeds off the bodies of black people. Enormous numbers of African Americans have been victimized by the “war on drugs” that has resulted in the literal criminalization of African American communities. To take only one statistic illustrating the disparities, African Americans are 13 percent of drug users — roughly the same as their proportion in the population as a whole — but are 46 percent of those convicted for drug offenses.
The foot soldiers in the war on drugs are the cops on the beat, who target black communities to make the easy arrests increasingly demanded by municipal officials, who crave them as proof that they are fighting crime. And there is the other motive — in Ferguson, municipal court fines, mainly from vehicle violations, are the second largest source of income for the city."
