Bookworm on Mar 05 2008 at 6:18 pm | Filed under: Uncategorized
They don’t blog often at Scott’s Conservative News & Commentary, but they do blog well. This one from a month ago, which is a real cry from the heart, talks about a pernicious habit that’s crept into American language in the PC, multi-culti era, and that ought to be erased.
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Book, couldn’t agree more. A very sore point. In a little noticed protest I have started referring to myself as a Native-American. I was born here. I know that it is currently fashionable to corrupt the original meaning of many words but, we don’t have to accede to the corruption.
Both the Amerindians and black folks in the Roaring 20s had to deal with the decision of whether they will integrate wholly with American, to them the white man’s, culture or keep up with their traditions and cultural roots.
It was an interesting set of challenges. Do the Indians abandon their hunter-gather way of life that requires thousands of acres for their horses and buffalo hunting or do the Indians adopt the white man’s civilization of farming and trade that can support a higher population per acre but requires adopting white men’s culture and ways?
Historically, the Native Americans, like most tribal cultures, insisted on resisting new ways. New ways are extremely disliked by the conservative nature of tribes. Tribal cultures also lack political cohesion. Meaning the white man, even though he has problems in the new world, will win over the red man because the red man is too busy killing the people in the other tribe to worry about dealing with the white man long term.
By the time the Civil War was over, it was too late. The Amerindians no longer had the choice of adopting or not adopting white man’s ways, they were forced to by hunger, starvation, and the military power of the United States to give up more and more of their old ways and customs. Unfortunately, while the federal government tried to help with hired white farmers to teach the Indians how to farm and a budget to supply the Indians with rations of supplementary food, the Amerindians could not redress their grievances because they had no political representation in the US government. People should ask themselves not why the US government gave such poor care to the Indians, but why the US government would even want or be able to take money from tax payers and give it to the Indians. The answer to that question is that the British style of government is more advanced than the red man’s tribal system. MOre advanced in this sense means you can get more people working together. That, of course, is useless to the tribes of Indians if the Indians don’t buy into the political process. The Lakota Sioux, for example, danced the Ghost Dance not because they wanted to have red man and white man live in peaceful harmony, the goal the prophet that gave the Indians the Ghost Dance wanted, but because the Sioux wanted to go back to a time when there was no white man and there were plenty of bison.
Nobody can go back in time, of course.
The black folks in the Harlem Renaissance and during WWI also had a similar choice to make. Do they adopt and focus on their Africa heritage, their unique black traditions, instead of the white man’s culture and values? So long as they catered to this alien African or stereotypical black image that the America of then saw blacks as, they would have great trouble being embraced by the majority of Americans. And if you are not embraced by the majority of Americans, your political power will not be enough to represent yourself. The decision between using Africa styles in art and paintings as opposed to European or French styles, became a racial consideration for blacks. Because black leaders wanted more equal treatment, and it would be easier to get that if they could use art in a propaganda campaign to portray blacks as more than just day laborers and doormen, or watermelon munching darkies that are hysterically happy.
One black painter made the relation that the modern African American has no more knowledge of his hunting days in Africa than Europeans have of their Celtic and Germanic barbarian cultures. Thus it is only an artificial and counter-productive action to specifically emphasize Africa in the actions of blacks as a sort of morale lifter for the black race.
In the end, the same problem crops up. In this world, you can only prosper by combining your powers with the talents and abilities of other people. Even the mighty Americans needed the help of tribal and backwards Iraq and Afghanistan. When Indians or blacks folks sought to distance themselves from the majority of the nation that they were de facto part of, they only hurt themselves in the long term. Which is why both WWI and WWII did more to help blacks reach civil equality than everything Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton did put together. Americans respected soldiers, and when blacks served in WWI and WWII with distinction and honor, many Americans saw through the stereotypes and racist attitudes about the inferior black race. No amount of Black Panther violence or Rainbow shakedowns could have done that.
The sociological and psychological issues motivation the superiority complex of the Lakota Sioux and the Nation of Islam is very obvious to an objective analyst. When your people are oppressed and are at the bottom of the prosperity barrel, you tend to either develop an inferiority complex or a superiority complex. The Palestinians, for example, tend to exhibit superiority complexes because they also have an inferiority complex. When Arabs see the success of Israel and America, they just go out in the streets to prove their superior abilities at causing violence to make themselves feel stronger.
Thus the Native Americans, due to starvation and the erosion of their way of life, often times stuck even more fanatically to their traditional way of life as being superior to the white mans’. Also blacks focused more on developing their own culture, with rap and other motiffs, because of the economic hardship brought on by refusing to assimilate into the greater American culture.
To a certain point, it was not the choice of most blacks whether to assimilate or not, since many Americans didn’t want them as equals in the first place. However, that “certain point” ended sometime in the 80s. Race relationships are as fair as they are today only because the ancestors of blacks fought in the Union, WWI, WWII, etc.
The Native Americans often tried to co-exist with the white man, but the difference between the two groups were just too great to bridge with the resources available to them then. The languages were not only different, but one Native American language was not the same as another. Thus a white man could know an Apache culture well, but have to start afresh in a Cherokee or Commanche territory. That many language barriers do not make for cosmopolitan attitudes.
Look at the problems the US had with Iraq due to the language difficulties. And that was only with one language. Imagine an Iraq with as many languages as they had tribes. That’s why you tended to see the Indians keep fighting the white man, even up to the early 20th and latter 19th centuries. The Indians were given plenty of opportunities to side with America against a mutual enemy, such as the British or French, but they never did choose to do that. Thus an Al Anbar Awakening never occured, or if it did occur with Indians, it never succeded. No mutual enemy that could unite the tribes of the Amerindians as it did the Sunni tribes.
The assassination of the heir to Austro-Hungary’s throne precipitated WWI. 100 something years after the incident, Kosovo and Serbia are still in a state of perpetual conflict. That’s Europe for you. I mention this because perpetual warfare is the prize you get for not uniting different factions. A nation’s people should focus on binding the nation tighter together, not focusing on the divisions and differences. It is only going to cause more strife and suffering if you emphasize the differences Sunnis have with America, the red man has, to this day, with white men, the differences that blacks had with whites, and so forth and so on.
Unfortunately, many people, socialists that happened to become the patrons of black artists in the 20s, for some reason or other really like causing more strife and suffering.
Book, I agree and thanks for sending us to that link. As I mentioned there, Theodore Roosevelt spoke os his disdain for “Hyphenated Americans” and he was right way back then!
Ymarsakar, wonderful analysis, as always. You don’t comment so much as pontificate and elucidate. Nicely done!
Glad you liked it, benning.