shame on white people

    First, I want to point out that I foreshadowed this reading/conversation with my first blog post re: the appalling depiction of deculturalization in Arizona, in which I included the link to the trailer. In the spirit of watching trailers this week, I encourage you to scroll down and check it out, and if ever you happen across the full length documentary, WATCH IT! It was eye-opening to say the least. 
     I'm going to revisit our group's discussion of the deculturalization of the Native Americans, particularly in the aspect of their being the original inhabitants of the land we know as the U.S.A.  In a nutshell, European Americans were the conquerors who invaded the homeland of the Native Americans and forcibly uprooted them to increasingly smaller, more contained lands. Given that the Native Americans were the first foreign group of people the European Americans encountered, they were the first ethnic minority to be subjugated by the Protestant Anglo majority, and ironically, the last to gain citizenship. While Joel Spring certainly incriminates the injustices and tortures wrongly inflicted upon the Native Americans, he doesn't go in to much detail regarding their treatment on the reservations and in the boarding schools. When Meghan was searching for a video to share with the class, she and I watched one that was a poetic form of narrative describing the horrible brutality the Native American children faced at the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania.  Not a single act by their authorities was benevolent or even just; literally everything described was an instance of barbarically inhumane abuse, on all levels: physical, verbal, mental, emotional, spiritual.  The child, as subject of the poem, desperately resorted to literally her only way of escape: her own death.  What a cruel and inexcusable tragedy! Prior to reading this textbook I admit to my own ignorance of the history of abuse of Native Americans on the part of the U.S. government and political leaders.  More than a century later, and I, having no connection to the transgressors but for the color of my skin, feel immense shame and deploration. 
    I've been reassuring myself since the start of this course and its exploration of the sins and violations committed by the white man that I am in no way responsible for the atrocities of the past, only for how I handle myself in the present. Literally, I sit in my seat and repeat this inside my head, so as to ease the creeping guilt building in my heart.  I remind myself that I did not choose my skin color, and I am not a man (and therefore by historical social convention and gender discrimination not at fault for the history of brutality), and that since childhood I'd wished for darker skin, so that I could be apart of a different group than the one I'd known, and love my body and be beautiful like the black girls I saw. And I rationally know that my professor, classmates, and even Mr. Joel Spring are not accusing me of co-conspiring with the racist and discriminatory U.S. politicians of the past. So why, then, do I still feel such guilt and angst over a situation that cannot be undone?? Perhaps the answer lies in the psychology of empathy, or perhaps it's something else; I really don't know. 
     I do know that I find it particularly bothersome and confusing when people use the pronoun 'we' in reference to these primarily Protestant Anglo racists and xenophobic psychos ruling the majority in American culture and politics. I am not one of them. Not now, and not then. And neither are you.