In many Indo-European languages [1], all nouns, even those representing inanimate objects like pieces of furniture, even words like "person" that could refer to both males and females, can be described as masculine, feminine, or neuter. A group of linguists recently did an experiment to determine if speakers are influenced by grammatical gender.
They took groups of native German and Spanish speakers and asked them to describe sets of objects. Interestingly, when the Germans were asked to describe a key, for which they have a masculine word, they tended to use adjectives like "hard", "metallic", "jagged", and "useful". The Spanish-speakers, who have a feminine word for the same object, tended to describe it as "tiny", "shiny", or "delicate". This is quite clearly a reflection of lingual links to gender schemas.
Speakers of these languages cannot run from the genderdized connections their distant ancestors made when, for example, they gave most abstract nouns an aura of femininity.
[1] Including Romance languages descended from Latin, the mother of hard-wired sexism.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Geekery IV: We are missing pronouns.
Have you ever struggled with calling a beloved animal or a human baby "it", even though you don't know the gender to provide a "he" or "she"? Do you often use "they" in situations where an English teacher (or I) would be likely to correct you to "he or she"? This may seem trivial; your friends will undoubtedly still catch your meaning if you say, "If someone slacks off on a group project, they should get the low grade." But there is significant evidence to suggest that gender in language may affect the way we think and relate to cultural concepts of gender. In many situations, we literally don't have the words to speak about people without giving their genders.
In a 1978 experiment, Moulton, Robinson, and Elias tested college students to see if they were influenced by the gender of pronouns: 'College students were asked to make up a story about a fictional character who fit the following theme: 'In a large coeducational institution, the average student will feel isolated in introductory courses.' 1/3 of the students received the pronoun "his" in the blank, 1/3 "his or her", and 1/3 "their". ("Their" is of course technically incorrect, and "his" was considered grammatically correct until recent decades.)
The results? Predictably, there was a strong tendency for female students to write about females and male students to write about males. As a whole, however, only 35% of the "his" students wrote about females, compared to 46% for "they" and 56% for "his or her". Clearly, the gender of the pronoun influenced the writers. This experiment has been repeated and expanded to include different age ranges and different activities and yielded similar, and sometimes even more pronounced, results. [1]
As English speakers, most of our nouns are common gender. For example, if you use the word "sheep," that sheep could be male or female, or you might later refer to it as an "it". Likewise, the word "firefighter" does not refer specifically to a man or a woman (although our gender-typing minds would probably think of a man first).
However, our pronouns aren't so incorporating. We have "he" (masculine), "she" (feminine), and "it" (neuter), but no corresponding word that doesn't denote gender. "You", "they", and "we" do not, but the first two cannot serve the first person, and "we" and "they" cannot be singular. Therefore, we pretend babies and animals are sexless, and we fill our writing with awkward "he or she" phrases, or else ignore these fixes and become barbarians and sexists.
1. Check out Janet Shibley Hyde, 1984. Third graders are more likely to say that the sentence, "When a kid plays football, she likes to play with friends," than the same sentence with a he in it, even though both are grammatically correct.
In a 1978 experiment, Moulton, Robinson, and Elias tested college students to see if they were influenced by the gender of pronouns: 'College students were asked to make up a story about a fictional character who fit the following theme: 'In a large coeducational institution, the average student will feel isolated in introductory courses.' 1/3 of the students received the pronoun "his" in the blank, 1/3 "his or her", and 1/3 "their". ("Their" is of course technically incorrect, and "his" was considered grammatically correct until recent decades.)
The results? Predictably, there was a strong tendency for female students to write about females and male students to write about males. As a whole, however, only 35% of the "his" students wrote about females, compared to 46% for "they" and 56% for "his or her". Clearly, the gender of the pronoun influenced the writers. This experiment has been repeated and expanded to include different age ranges and different activities and yielded similar, and sometimes even more pronounced, results. [1]
As English speakers, most of our nouns are common gender. For example, if you use the word "sheep," that sheep could be male or female, or you might later refer to it as an "it". Likewise, the word "firefighter" does not refer specifically to a man or a woman (although our gender-typing minds would probably think of a man first).
However, our pronouns aren't so incorporating. We have "he" (masculine), "she" (feminine), and "it" (neuter), but no corresponding word that doesn't denote gender. "You", "they", and "we" do not, but the first two cannot serve the first person, and "we" and "they" cannot be singular. Therefore, we pretend babies and animals are sexless, and we fill our writing with awkward "he or she" phrases, or else ignore these fixes and become barbarians and sexists.
1. Check out Janet Shibley Hyde, 1984. Third graders are more likely to say that the sentence, "When a kid plays football, she likes to play with friends," than the same sentence with a he in it, even though both are grammatically correct.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Haiku
I wasn't fond of the last poem I posted here, and many of my posts are too long, so here is another, shorter one I've written:
A platefull of words:
Stringy meat and slimy beans
Garnished with thank-yous.
A platefull of words:
Stringy meat and slimy beans
Garnished with thank-yous.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Bears Wrestling
I chose the piece Bears Wrestling, a 1940 granite sculpture by Mathew Aqigaaq. It was presented in this exhibit of American art with no explaination or information except the name of the artist, the date, and the medium. However, when put in perspective of the portrayal of Native American art, it represents an interesting transformation in Inuit society.
In "traditional" Inuit culture, or culture before the influence of Europeans, this sculpture most likely would not have been ma. Inuits carved and decorated wood, stone, and ivory tools and crafted small objects that served religious or narrative purposes, but there are not pre-colonial examples of such heavy and time-consuming project as stone sculptures created purely for impractical aesthetic value. Art for art's sake did not have a comfortable place in a culture so impacted by scarcity of resources and nomadic lifestyle. In fact, some Inuit languages do not have a word analgous to our word "art".
In the John Smith reading, I was struck by the complete lack of interest in Indian culture--according to the footnotes, he didn't even bother to get half the names right, and seemed to prescribe undifferentiated religious articles to all he met. The legacy of complete disregard for accuracy and understanding of Native American culture can certainly be traced back to the attitude of the first settlers.
Mathew Aqigaaq is an artist of Inuit descent who creates fairly large stone figures, something his ancestors of 500 years simply wouldn't have done. It can be argued that some aspect of Inuit culture has been unfairly stuffed down into the snow by European economic pressures (do your own research on Canadian exploitation--"You should all carve totem poles, they'll sell better."), but Bears Wrestling clearly has quite a bit on plastic wampum made in China. Larger stone sculpture is a genre that naturally follows from traditional Inuit carving practices existing in a less physically harsh and demanding environment. It has resulted in something that is clearly art and posseses a regionally unique style that I personally find attractive.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Cold Gods
Two years ago on spring break I felt a sort of grinding madness that lead to frequent evening walks. It was early enough in the year that half past seven was black. I would walk under the streetlights by subdivisions, usually quickly, usually not dressed warmly enough, and as I went I would make disjointed connections between arbitrary common objects and whichever characteristics surfaced in my boiling brain. A single golden leaf clinging to a bare tree was a shivering coin, and I praised it (aloud) for its steadfastness. A crushed pine-cone on the sidewalk shadow appeared to me in the shape of a black heart. These walks would all end exactly halfway on the bridge over the Yahara; I never crossed it, only stood there to stare at the black and moving water.
The river was always my purpose, my undeclared destination. I judged the value of the walk on how long I could spend standing there at the edge, clinging to the metal rail that burned my un-gloved hands, yielding my open eyes to the wind that had not yet lost its teeth. And I stared downward at the shapes of the water constantly replacing itself and thought, blood is so thick and red and warm and human, water is so clear, cool, eternal, If we had water in our veins we would be cold gods.
I thought it in these words, and I recalled these words today while probing a dream I had last night. It was the kind of dream that becomes a nightmare only after you wake up and examine its atrocities. In this dream there were two or three or five beings that resembled men and women in appearance, but they were not people, certainly not human. I knew this first as one inexplicably knows universal truths in dreams, but I also saw it.
They placed less value on life than a small egocentric child places on the beetle he or she pulls apart in playful curiosity. They carelessly killed a man because they were not wildly impressed by his work, then discussed it idly, not bothering to face his nearby corpse. One of them skinned a cat alive; I saw the pink muscles still in the form, still twitching in the second before I looked away. The thing was holding the white and bloody fur in one hand, and eating it, tearing soft, wet swatches of it away in its teeth.
Perhaps most disturbingly, until I woke up, I was emotionally detached. I disapproved of these creatures and despised their acts, but possessed inadequately the empathy that was absent from their blank, bright eyes.
They were terrible and superior; I took it for a fact that they transcended me. In their indifference they seemed divine embodiments of amoral nature. They saw the universe as it might see itself : wildly and unaffectedly.
It is so strange that this which gives us the most undeniable awe is what we cannot allow in ourselves, and strange that its polar opposite of unlimited benevolent awareness is hallowed by its side.
The river was always my purpose, my undeclared destination. I judged the value of the walk on how long I could spend standing there at the edge, clinging to the metal rail that burned my un-gloved hands, yielding my open eyes to the wind that had not yet lost its teeth. And I stared downward at the shapes of the water constantly replacing itself and thought, blood is so thick and red and warm and human, water is so clear, cool, eternal, If we had water in our veins we would be cold gods.
I thought it in these words, and I recalled these words today while probing a dream I had last night. It was the kind of dream that becomes a nightmare only after you wake up and examine its atrocities. In this dream there were two or three or five beings that resembled men and women in appearance, but they were not people, certainly not human. I knew this first as one inexplicably knows universal truths in dreams, but I also saw it.
They placed less value on life than a small egocentric child places on the beetle he or she pulls apart in playful curiosity. They carelessly killed a man because they were not wildly impressed by his work, then discussed it idly, not bothering to face his nearby corpse. One of them skinned a cat alive; I saw the pink muscles still in the form, still twitching in the second before I looked away. The thing was holding the white and bloody fur in one hand, and eating it, tearing soft, wet swatches of it away in its teeth.
Perhaps most disturbingly, until I woke up, I was emotionally detached. I disapproved of these creatures and despised their acts, but possessed inadequately the empathy that was absent from their blank, bright eyes.
They were terrible and superior; I took it for a fact that they transcended me. In their indifference they seemed divine embodiments of amoral nature. They saw the universe as it might see itself : wildly and unaffectedly.
It is so strange that this which gives us the most undeniable awe is what we cannot allow in ourselves, and strange that its polar opposite of unlimited benevolent awareness is hallowed by its side.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Singing America
I can't sing America
A land so close it's out of focus
Always a dream,
Always someone else's,
The edge of a blanket partly before my eyes.
I can never hear what is underneath the myriad muffling folds,
Only feel what is pocketed in mine.
I've sung soprano, tenor, alto (not quite bass)
I thought I was a composer?
I've sung so many parts
I should be able to sing my own.
A land so close it's out of focus
Always a dream,
Always someone else's,
The edge of a blanket partly before my eyes.
I can never hear what is underneath the myriad muffling folds,
Only feel what is pocketed in mine.
I've sung soprano, tenor, alto (not quite bass)
I thought I was a composer?
I've sung so many parts
I should be able to sing my own.
Monday, March 1, 2010
Eminent Emerson
"There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; -- though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold."
I chose this disgustingly long quotation partly because I don't fully understand what he means, and partly because it closes the passage I thought was the sickest. In the preceding passage there are pithier statements: "A man is to carry himself as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he"; "The doctrine of hatred must be preached...." statements which I found despicable and arrogant.
Although I must agree on a superficial level that personal strength and confidence are good things, even necessary to "genius" as he claims, my humanistic sentiment cannot accept his nihilistic attitude towards everything that is not from himself. I'm sorry, but giving to charity is good, it's the best we can do. And abolitionists aren't bad people. I hope I'm not misreading the essay completely, I'm sure I must have some misinterpretations, but I still disliked the gerneral tone. He even goes so far to say that the truth is subjective, and that what HE percieves is fact.
The part I don't understand is the what his "class of persons" is. Presumably, by extention, what ANYONE percieves is fact, but he never really bothers to go there, and doesn't let the rest of humanity play by his rules. He claims consanguinity with all other men, but then sets them at an inferior level.
I chose this disgustingly long quotation partly because I don't fully understand what he means, and partly because it closes the passage I thought was the sickest. In the preceding passage there are pithier statements: "A man is to carry himself as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he"; "The doctrine of hatred must be preached...." statements which I found despicable and arrogant.
Although I must agree on a superficial level that personal strength and confidence are good things, even necessary to "genius" as he claims, my humanistic sentiment cannot accept his nihilistic attitude towards everything that is not from himself. I'm sorry, but giving to charity is good, it's the best we can do. And abolitionists aren't bad people. I hope I'm not misreading the essay completely, I'm sure I must have some misinterpretations, but I still disliked the gerneral tone. He even goes so far to say that the truth is subjective, and that what HE percieves is fact.
The part I don't understand is the what his "class of persons" is. Presumably, by extention, what ANYONE percieves is fact, but he never really bothers to go there, and doesn't let the rest of humanity play by his rules. He claims consanguinity with all other men, but then sets them at an inferior level.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Depressing War Post
My previous post exhibits the poem "Violets from Plug Street Wood," which was written by a soldier in WWI for a British nurse. I ran across this poem in the book Testament of Youth, which is the memoirs of Vera Brittain, the recipient of the poem. (I read the book as a choice reading assignment for AP Euro; maybe Justin's not that far off in claiming that AP Comp borders on being a history class.)
I read Testament in November, and couldn't help comparing it to The Things They Carried. The two books are incredibly, completely different: one is a bitter, laconic loose collection of fiction stories about American soldiers in the Vietnam War, the other is a 660-page tome of precise chronological recollections based exactingly on the journal entries of a British V.A.D. in WWI. Two vastly different wars, two different times, countries, positions, sexes, approaches. Here comes the depressing part: they both end in almost exactly the same place.
Vera's memoirs go on to describe her return to England after the war and her work there, and it is clear that she and others of her generation suffered from a condition of horrible disconnect and sickening isolation. She says that, quite literally, "all her friends are dead." The older and younger generations, and those of her generation who stayed behind, seem smug, distant, and cruel; One professor said to a soldier returning to Oxford simply, "...you've been away a long time....It's a pity--a great pity; you'll have to work very hard to catch up with the others!" The general opinion, as Vera experienced it, had switched from the 1914 view that the War was more important than anything else to the view that the War was a useless waste of resources, and that those who participated were fools. Those of the War Generation were alone, disenfranchised, psychologically and emotionally scarred. Vera Brittain cannot have been the only one who had trouble forming new relationships because she was, as she said, "afraid of giving life the means wherewith to deal me another of its major blows."
Perhaps because she was publishing under her own name a work that was meant to be a historical record, and not allowing herself the slight separation that O'Brien did when he published "fiction," she seems loath to discuss certain personal aspects of her experiences. Brittain does, however, make it quite clear that she suffered for some time from psychosis and later had a second, shorter but complete mental breakdown. She was not at the font lines, but she suffered incredible strain, illness, trauma from attack and the sometimes constant sound of nearby shelling, and experience with an "inundation of blood and pus," with stuffing men's intestines back in their bellies and watching others die from mustard gas, opening a Christmastime package to find her love's shirt, still stained and with a hole torn in it, hearing his pointless last words, and meeting all of this with the ultimate disapproval of her war-weary country.
Most heartbreaking of all, she recovered enough from it to lead a creative life in journalism and dedicated her energies to the support of peace efforts and the League of Nations so that she could with fresh optimism and life do all her small part in preventing the similar suffering of others, then she married and had children, who would have been exactly the right age to be drafted into WWII.
If her children survived to reproduce, their children probably would have been a bit young to be drafted into Vietnam.
I read Testament in November, and couldn't help comparing it to The Things They Carried. The two books are incredibly, completely different: one is a bitter, laconic loose collection of fiction stories about American soldiers in the Vietnam War, the other is a 660-page tome of precise chronological recollections based exactingly on the journal entries of a British V.A.D. in WWI. Two vastly different wars, two different times, countries, positions, sexes, approaches. Here comes the depressing part: they both end in almost exactly the same place.
Vera's memoirs go on to describe her return to England after the war and her work there, and it is clear that she and others of her generation suffered from a condition of horrible disconnect and sickening isolation. She says that, quite literally, "all her friends are dead." The older and younger generations, and those of her generation who stayed behind, seem smug, distant, and cruel; One professor said to a soldier returning to Oxford simply, "...you've been away a long time....It's a pity--a great pity; you'll have to work very hard to catch up with the others!" The general opinion, as Vera experienced it, had switched from the 1914 view that the War was more important than anything else to the view that the War was a useless waste of resources, and that those who participated were fools. Those of the War Generation were alone, disenfranchised, psychologically and emotionally scarred. Vera Brittain cannot have been the only one who had trouble forming new relationships because she was, as she said, "afraid of giving life the means wherewith to deal me another of its major blows."
Perhaps because she was publishing under her own name a work that was meant to be a historical record, and not allowing herself the slight separation that O'Brien did when he published "fiction," she seems loath to discuss certain personal aspects of her experiences. Brittain does, however, make it quite clear that she suffered for some time from psychosis and later had a second, shorter but complete mental breakdown. She was not at the font lines, but she suffered incredible strain, illness, trauma from attack and the sometimes constant sound of nearby shelling, and experience with an "inundation of blood and pus," with stuffing men's intestines back in their bellies and watching others die from mustard gas, opening a Christmastime package to find her love's shirt, still stained and with a hole torn in it, hearing his pointless last words, and meeting all of this with the ultimate disapproval of her war-weary country.
Most heartbreaking of all, she recovered enough from it to lead a creative life in journalism and dedicated her energies to the support of peace efforts and the League of Nations so that she could with fresh optimism and life do all her small part in preventing the similar suffering of others, then she married and had children, who would have been exactly the right age to be drafted into WWII.
If her children survived to reproduce, their children probably would have been a bit young to be drafted into Vietnam.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Violets from Plug Street Wood
I've been trying to read this poem at the beginning of class for a couple of weeks now, but it never seems like the right time, or else Kunkle's already got something in mind, so I'm going to do a blog post on it instead.
Sour Grapes: I can get in more background information: This poem was written by Roland Leighton in 1915 for Vera Brittain. The two of them were been sweethearts, or lovers, or something--it's difficult to settle on a word. Had they remained together, they certainly would have married, because they were madly in love with each other's beautiful intellects and sexy Oxford English degrees (no joke). As it was, they never even became engaged because when WWI broke out they both thought it was more important that Roland enlist with the British forces and Vera sign up as a nurse.
Roland was a poet long before the war and wrote Vera many poems over the course of their relationship. This is a poem he sent to her in England while he was stationed in Ploegsteert Wood in Belgium. The envelope contained actual violets, whose color, she claimed, was still blue when she received them.
R.A.L.
Ploegsteert Wood, April 1915
I chose this poem for this class because it reminds me, distantly, of "The Man I Killed" from Tim O'Brien's book. Think of the phrase "dear, far, forgetting land." More on this later.
Sour Grapes: I can get in more background information: This poem was written by Roland Leighton in 1915 for Vera Brittain. The two of them were been sweethearts, or lovers, or something--it's difficult to settle on a word. Had they remained together, they certainly would have married, because they were madly in love with each other's beautiful intellects and sexy Oxford English degrees (no joke). As it was, they never even became engaged because when WWI broke out they both thought it was more important that Roland enlist with the British forces and Vera sign up as a nurse.
Roland was a poet long before the war and wrote Vera many poems over the course of their relationship. This is a poem he sent to her in England while he was stationed in Ploegsteert Wood in Belgium. The envelope contained actual violets, whose color, she claimed, was still blue when she received them.
VILLANELLEViolets from Plug Street Wood,
Sweet, I send you oversea.
(It is strange they should be blue,
Blue when his soaked blood was red,
For they grew around his head ;
It is strange they should be blue.)Violets from Plug Street Wood---
Violets from oversea,
Think what they have meant to me---
Life and Hope and Love and You
(And you did not see them grow
Where his mangled body lay,
Hiding horror from the day ;
Sweetest, it was better so.)
To your dear, far, forgetting land
These I send in memory,
Knowing You will understand.
R.A.L.
Ploegsteert Wood, April 1915
I chose this poem for this class because it reminds me, distantly, of "The Man I Killed" from Tim O'Brien's book. Think of the phrase "dear, far, forgetting land." More on this later.
Aren't You Lucky
Since I've been sick I've spent some of my more mindless minutes doing what any good middle-class American teenager of today would do: watching lots of YouTube videos. On Friday I came across this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgAU5XQ2HnY
Maybe it's a bit thin for a blog post, and the sentiment certainly isn't an original one, but I enjoyed the simplicity of the satire. The message is worded into a children's song of few words, each of the first three lines beginning with a rhetorical "Aren't you lucky." It is a phrase we're all used to hearing, and it is delivered with the kind of assured earnestness every child hears from at least one or two adults along the way.
I remember hearing these specific words from a long line of family members and teachers, and I think I believed all of them to some extent. The bizarre thing is that now I'm also used to hearing people my age repeat it back to me.
So what do we think of it now? There are lots of ways to take it. You would think that certainly in those awful countries where everyone is being treated so poorly they don't feel lucky, and it does "suck" to be born over there, but those people also have their own cultures and ideals that seem like the only right ones to them. And you can argue that there are people who are really, truly dissatisfied with their situations and find them unjust, but we have those people here in the U.S. too.
Of course I can't help but think that my version of Western culture is generally right, and therefore that other cultures must be wrong where they contradict my own beliefs. At least I don't take it for granted anymore that the U.S. is always infallible, though, or assume that it's the only place where anyone can be happy.
I apologize for this weakish post; I didn't really know where I was going with it, but I'm hoping that at least it might get you thinking. Also, you should know that WKUK, or "Whitest Kids U Know," has produced several more sketches which include irreverent criticisms of European and American history. You can find them on YouTube if you are feeling dispatriotic, but many, though hilarious, are inappropriate for incorporation in a school assignment. I just want to give you some context.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgAU5XQ2HnY
Maybe it's a bit thin for a blog post, and the sentiment certainly isn't an original one, but I enjoyed the simplicity of the satire. The message is worded into a children's song of few words, each of the first three lines beginning with a rhetorical "Aren't you lucky." It is a phrase we're all used to hearing, and it is delivered with the kind of assured earnestness every child hears from at least one or two adults along the way.
I remember hearing these specific words from a long line of family members and teachers, and I think I believed all of them to some extent. The bizarre thing is that now I'm also used to hearing people my age repeat it back to me.
So what do we think of it now? There are lots of ways to take it. You would think that certainly in those awful countries where everyone is being treated so poorly they don't feel lucky, and it does "suck" to be born over there, but those people also have their own cultures and ideals that seem like the only right ones to them. And you can argue that there are people who are really, truly dissatisfied with their situations and find them unjust, but we have those people here in the U.S. too.
Of course I can't help but think that my version of Western culture is generally right, and therefore that other cultures must be wrong where they contradict my own beliefs. At least I don't take it for granted anymore that the U.S. is always infallible, though, or assume that it's the only place where anyone can be happy.
I apologize for this weakish post; I didn't really know where I was going with it, but I'm hoping that at least it might get you thinking. Also, you should know that WKUK, or "Whitest Kids U Know," has produced several more sketches which include irreverent criticisms of European and American history. You can find them on YouTube if you are feeling dispatriotic, but many, though hilarious, are inappropriate for incorporation in a school assignment. I just want to give you some context.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
"We"
Several times during the past two weeks of discussion I noticed that people sometimes use the first person "we" when they are referring to European colonists. Logically, this does not make sense. None of us, in fact, nobody alive today, was one of those colonists.
Usually when we say "we" we are talking about the degradation/displacement/killing of Native Americans. This makes sense on a psychological level: we want to release ourselves from social culpability by accepting guilt for actions of members of our race against members of another race (none of the [originally] subjugated Native Americans are alive today either, though their descendants have to live with the consequences.).
So I have a question. Is it right or necessary for us, modern Americans European descent, to identify ourselves with the European conquerors of the 1600s?
On one hand, we shouldn't need to. None of us have killed Indians, most or all of us have never done anything to directly harm Native Americans individually or as a race, culture, or nation. A great many of us are not the descendants of "original" English colonists; I for one am mostly non-English, and both sides of my family came to America long after the colonial period.
On the other hand, we cannot deny that English colonists through force established themselves as the dominant social order on the North American continent, and that perhaps all of us who have inherited that social order and its dominance through the virtue of our race only have responsibility for it by virtue of our race only.
On the third hand, identifying ourselves so closely with the colonists simply because of our race must reinforce the concept of our race as a whole and revive its status as subjugator. By accepting responsibility for the actions of historical white Europeans, we are to some degree taking on the racial role and transferring it to modern times.
Usually when we say "we" we are talking about the degradation/displacement/killing of Native Americans. This makes sense on a psychological level: we want to release ourselves from social culpability by accepting guilt for actions of members of our race against members of another race (none of the [originally] subjugated Native Americans are alive today either, though their descendants have to live with the consequences.).
So I have a question. Is it right or necessary for us, modern Americans European descent, to identify ourselves with the European conquerors of the 1600s?
On one hand, we shouldn't need to. None of us have killed Indians, most or all of us have never done anything to directly harm Native Americans individually or as a race, culture, or nation. A great many of us are not the descendants of "original" English colonists; I for one am mostly non-English, and both sides of my family came to America long after the colonial period.
On the other hand, we cannot deny that English colonists through force established themselves as the dominant social order on the North American continent, and that perhaps all of us who have inherited that social order and its dominance through the virtue of our race only have responsibility for it by virtue of our race only.
On the third hand, identifying ourselves so closely with the colonists simply because of our race must reinforce the concept of our race as a whole and revive its status as subjugator. By accepting responsibility for the actions of historical white Europeans, we are to some degree taking on the racial role and transferring it to modern times.
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