Richard A.S. Hall: Critical race theory, genocide and a personal anecdote

I want here to weigh in on a contentious issue now at the forefront of public discussion, namely, critical race theory. The appropriateness of its name may be in doubt, but not the truth of its proposition that racism is endemic to American society as, by the way, it is to most societies.

However, in American society it has taken two virulent forms: One form, what most people think of when they think of racism, is manifested in American slavery and Jim Crow laws, a racism directed against Africans. But there is another form which is manifested in the genocide of Native Americans by European settlers.

And that is what it was, genocide, comparable to the Nazi genocide of Jews, though it may not seem that way. The Nazi genocide is the more obviously so since it occurred within only a few years during the Second World War and was on an industrial scale employing railways and gas chambers. It has been amply documented and commemorated in countless historical studies, museums like Washington’s Holocaust Museum and films like “Schindler’s List.” The Holocaust is vivid in our collective imaginations.

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By contrast, the American genocide against the indigenous peoples that once amply populated the Americas is less obviously so since it occurred in the distant past over several generations. It was not a pre-planned, systematic, and industrial scale genocide like the Nazis, but took the more subtle but no less horrific forms of massacres, wars and the enforced removal of native tribes from their ancestral homes, all in the name of Manifest Destiny. But the result was the same — the extermination of a people.

Of the two, slavery and genocide, though equally abominations, genocide is marginally the worse since it involves not only the murder of millions but also the eradication of their culture and identity, which is cultural genocide. Cultural genocide was also practiced by white Canadians against their native peoples which recently made headline news with the discovery of mass graves at residential schools established by the Canadian government to indoctrinate native children in Western ways.

By contrast, African American culture is, happily, alive and well. Slavery and genocide together form the original sin of North American society.

Two photographs, with disturbing similarities

I believe that the genocide of Native Americans, together with slavery, and their legacies should bulk large in the curricular of American schools and colleges. Knowledge of it would change students’ perspective on their history.

It changed mine, when I was in junior high school in Rapid City, South Dakota. That genocide was brought home to me, not in a classroom, but accidentally outside. Part of the historical curriculum in the Rapid City school system was a history of South Dakota. If I remember correctly, in that course we read small green books with laminated pages and grainy black and white photographs of the early settlers and their settlements. The Great Sioux War of 1876, which occurred in the Dakotas, may have been mentioned, but I forget since it made no lasting impression.

But one thing did. I happened to visit the local museum. There I distinctly remember seeing displayed a daguerreotype. It depicted a scene of American soldiers standing on the edge of a mass grave filled with the corpses of recently killed native men, women and children. They were posing in the photograph as if it were a souvenir to send to their wives or girlfriends back home.

Thereafter, I discovered under my parent’s bed a large official looking folio. Inside were the first photographs taken by American troops when they liberated the Nazi death camps. There I saw German soldiers standing at the edge of a pit full of dead Jewish men, women and children. Again, they were posing as for a picture to send home to their relatives.

The soldiers had the same impassive faces as those in the daguerreotype. Only their uniforms were different. These two images have never left me. Significantly, I did not first learn of the American genocide in class, where I should have learnt it, but fortuitously from a photograph in a museum.

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American students need to learn this dark side of American history, as I did, as well as the brighter side. The American philosopher, Josiah Royce, wrote, “California, from the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco,” a history of his native state. However, Royce’s history was criticized because in it he exposed the mistreatment of the native population by the later settlers. Royce justified this by saying: “Here in the early history are these faults, writ large, with their penalties, and the only possible salvation from them.”

On a broader scale, salvation may come for American society by allowing the exposure of all the skeletons hidden in its historical closet. Significantly, Dante had to travel through hell in order to arrive at heaven.

Richard A. S. Hall is a professor of philosophy at Fayetteville State University.

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