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Our readings this week addressed a number of topics: Indian Removal, American Populism, and Abolition. And while each might seem entirely unrelated from the others, I think that we can draw a number of connections between them—from the rift in the Jacksonian Democrats and Abolitionists to the ostracization freedmen in the North and Native peoples in the West. For this blog, however, I would like to raise a question and explore it in light of our readings:
Could either of the popular proposals for abolition—colonization and “immediatism”—fall under the category of “structural genocide”?
First, let’s examine “structural genocide.” Patrick Wolfe approaches the topic of genocide under the umbrella of what he calls the “logic of elimination,” whereby he asserts that settler colonization—his primary topic of interest his essay—is “inherently eliminatory but not invariably genocidal” (387). Nevertheless, genocide, he asserts, did occur along the frontier via Indian removal. This genocide, however, was not the generally understood sense of the term, in which a powerful group (usually the state) carries out the systematic mass murder of another group (usually singled-out according to race, class, or religion), but rather a “structural genocide”—contrary to Wolfe’s opinion, one might also call it “cultural genocide”—in which individuals “relentless sought the breakdown of the tribe” either by physically removing a group or by socially dissolving a group into individuals (400). Thus, Wolfe urges that both Captain Richard Pratt, the founder of Indian boarding schools, and General Phil Sheridan, the bloodthirsty “scourge of the Plains,” were guilty of genocide (397; 398). Through this two-fold form genocide, the “progressive individualism” and property rights of White American society retained their permanence under the cloak of land grants and cultural assimilation(400).
Now, let’s consider the popular proposals for abolition in early 19th-century America: colonization and “immediatism.” I think that the former could certainly be categorized under the “logic of elimination.” As Davis describes, colonizationists called for the emancipation of enslaved Africans—most likely gradually—and the subsequent transportation of freedmen to then-prospering Liberia because “racial prejudice and racial difference were simply too strong . . . for whites and blacks to live together as equals” (256). Moreover, colonizationists in the predominantly white American Colonization Society (ACS) feared the disproportionate violent crime rate amog free blacks and, inspired by such racism, believed that the not only slavery but also the presence of the Africans, slave or free, were “detrimental to the nation’s long-term interest” (257). Considering their racist motives and pursuit of white solidarity, I think it would be difficult to claim that the notion of colonization did not imitate the Indian Removal in the West and the Wolfe’s “logic of elimination.”
But what about “immediatism?” Inspired both by black anti-colonizationists and their British contemporaries, immediatists—as their name would suggest—called for the immediate abolition of slavery. But even more, being led by notable abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, immediatists believed that the true abolition required the “equal coexistence . . . of blacks and whites and [combated] racial prejudice in the North” (258). In doing so, these abolitionists encouraged interracial marriage and equal rights for those liberated from centuries of oppression—not only blacks but women as well (260). It was, indeed, a direct response to the great hypocrisy of American democracy, a call for true egalitarianism. The movement, however, employed some rather demeaning tactics. In addition to antics which no doubt created a poor public image—think of Garrison burning a copy of the Constitution on the Boston Common—immediatists, as the abolitionist leader Gerrit Smith described, incited “whites to develop ‘a black heart,’ in the sense of seeing the world ‘through Negro eyes'” (263). Relying on notable black leaders, such as Frederick Douglass, abolitionists sought to undermine the widespread beliefs of black inferiority and promote the idea of “civilized Negroes” (260). Certainly, they were well-intentioned. However, the thought of appealing to literate, genteel freedmen to prove the possibility of the social integration calls to mind the words of the allegedly-genocidal Richard Pratt to “kill the Indian, save the man.” So, I would like to ask my colleagues this question: in the pursuit of equal rights and emancipation, were the American abolitionists guilty of “structural genocide” by insisting on the integration and cultural assimilation of freed blacks?
In his post this week entitled “You Can’t Take It With You,” Matthew Gilliland discussed the effects of Indian Removal in light of Patrick Wolfe’s article, stating that “[the] Native Americans that were removed from their land were not stripped of their heritage” (http://sites.davidson.edu/his141/you-cant-take-it-with-you/). And while I wish I could agree, I unfortunately cannot. Certainly,the removed Native peoples carried their culture and heritage with them, but they also lost their permanence (as described by Patrick Wolfe). Moreover, those who were allowed to retain their land, such as the Choctaw peoples in Mississippi, eventually lost their culture to their tribes’ assimilation to White society. Or, as Wolfe writes, “they had become ‘homesteaders and American citizens’ . . . . individuals” (397). The “logic of elimination” was two-fold, entailing both the removal of certain groups and the dissolution of others. So, while it might be easy to focus our attention on the removal of the Cherokee, we cannot forget the genocide of the Choctaw.
