Essay On "a Different Mirror" Bernadette Harris

1 It is no secret that our country, the United States of America, was founded on the premise, as it states in our Constitution, that “all men are created equal.” We cite the “unalienable rights of all mankind”, and for the past 230 years, have written the laws and treaties governing our nation, along with the millions of textbooks used to teach the youth of our county on these beliefs…or have we? In the first chapter of “A Different Mirror” by Ronald Takaki, (1993) we begin to learn of the many stereotypes and biases of the white, Eurocentric American attitudes that have ruled our nation for centuries. Beginning with the story of the Asian taxi driver, it is apparent that it is the practice of the white American to not only judge those different from us at face value, but to attach, along with our superficial judgments, many assumptions regarding their ethnic origin, level of intelligence and ability, societal class, and general “worthiness” to inhabit our soil and breathe our air! If we begin to explore the history of the founding of our nation as an independent country from England, we must also begin to examine the flavor of righteousness we have attached to not only our accounting of said history, but also the means by which we have acquired the great wealth and status that we have, as well as the reality of those still suffering in deprivation within the boundaries of our modern land. Beginning with the early colonists and their treatment of Indigenous Americans, we see a pattern emerge of the misappropriation and acquisition of land, goods and life! According to Takaki (1993), the early European settlers judged the Indigenous people as “lacking everything the English identified as civilized—Christianity, cities, letters, clothing and swords. They do not bear arms or know them, for I showed them swords and they took them by the blade and cut themselves through ignorance.” (p. 31)

2 It never occurred to the early American settlers that the Indigenous citizens simply were not familiar with these types of weapons because they were a peace loving culture, and did not use violence as a means of settling differences, acquiring that which they desired, or winning battles. They created many sophisticated types of tools out of “buffalo horns, stone, wood and antlers” (Prindle, 1994, p.22). They designed many efficient tools and weapons for hunting and gathering food, building their somewhat unsophisticated homes and shelters. Early European settlers used Shakespearean theater and characters known as Caliban, which were “cruel, barbarous and treacherous savages,” Takaki (1993, p. 31), to depict their opinion of the Indigenous Americans. In Social Studies curriculum programs in the United States, students are taught about fair trade, and our literature supports that fair trade was always used by the colonial settlers to acquire the states from the Native Americans (Mifflin). That coincides with what, on paper, was promised to the Native Americans by President Jefferson, who, promised, “ We take from no nation what belongs to it. Your lands are your own. Your right to them shall never be violated by us; they are yours to keep or to sell as you please.” Takaki (1993, p. 48), This, according to the land treaty made between the early members of government and the Native Americans, guaranteed them that their land was sacred and could not be overtaken by the new settlers. What our history books have omitted, however, are the “conditions” surrounding such treaties and agreements. I do not ever recall reading about the savagery and unjust means of attack at such battles as Wounded Knee in history books growing up. As Takaki (1993) points out, “along with seemingly honorable and generous promises on the part of Jefferson and his government”, (p. 48) came

3 deliberately mandated conditions that these officials knowingly put into place that would make it impossible for the Native Americans to keep their land. For example, in Jefferson’s “Confidential Message to Congress” in 1803, he encouraged Congress to increase the trading houses and push the selling of merchandise to the Native Americans so that they would acquire more debt than they could possibly repay, which would then allow the government to claim their land as payment. In small print, also, were the conditions stating that if the Native Americans decided to rebel and “take up a hatchet” against the United States, that individual’s entire tribe would be taken for execution, or removal from the country! It is not hard to imagine why these details have not been included in grade school history accounts of our country for decades. In our schools, we present an image of our nation as one of solidarity, one that ‘reaches out’ to its neighbor to offer help, safe haven, and equity of opportunity, education and property ownership. We would not be able to uphold this attitude toward the United States in our students if they read and learned about some of the underhanded ways in which we acquired this great land that we now call our own. Even today, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, less than 1.5% of the population of the United States is made up of Native American and Alaskan natives. Those that are here have been pushed to the western-most part of the nation, and many still live in segregated communities. Moving away from the history of the Native Americans, we begin to explore the early African Americans and their experiences on U.S. soil. According to Takaki, (1993) the Shakespearean Caliban characters “could have just as easily represented the African

4 Americans”, (p. 51) once they began to travel to the United States seeking safety and freedom. Like the Native Americans that the early settlers had encountered before them, the African people had an unfamiliar color to their skin, and were thought to be unintelligent and “savage” by the European Americans. “The character Caliban, in The Tempest, which was the popular theatrical performance for decades, was dark, and was the child of a demon and a witch! Darkness (be it of skin or other) brought with it the bias of “foul, malignant, or sinister” (Takaki 1993, p. 52). The English found a great similarity in the Caliban and what they perceived the African people to be. They were believed to be barbaric and uncivilized, and only capable of manual labor. The early Americans decided that they should be owned as property and used as slaves on the farms and plantations, if they wanted to remain in the United States. Their vile mistreatment, interestingly, is, for the most part, fairly accurately depicted in much of the Social Studies curriculum in schools across the United States. Growing up in the northeastern United States, I recall my grandmother, who was born in 1899 to wealthy European American parents in Racine, Wisconsin, telling me to “never look ‘em in the eye” when referring to African Americans. She tried to instill a fear in us as children that anyone of African American descent was dangerous and violent and that if we merely looked them in the eye passing them on the street we might be beaten or killed! It wasn’t long into my childhood and early adolescence that I found her dispositions to be ludicrous, although there were very few, if any, African American students in the schools I attended in southern New Jersey in the 1970’s. There were none living in our neighborhood, and none attended the Catholic church that my family belonged to for fifteen or twenty years. I recall that there were communities of African

5 Americans, but that many of my parents’ associates considered those to be the “bad neighborhoods” and “projects.” Since I grew up in a small rural town, there weren’t any such neighborhoods that I can recall, but when you traveled into the surrounding cities, there were. There were very vast details regarding the treatment of slaves, however, that were not included in the history books that I read growing up, and are still not included in them today. For example, in a Virginia court case that addressed the occasional happenstance of white American land owners and/or their children or white servants running away with African American slaves, the courts stated, “Whereas six English servants and Jno, a Negro servant hath run away and absented themselves from their masters Two Months, it is ordered that the sherriffe take care that all of them be whipped and each of them have thirty-nine lashes well layed on them.” (Takaki 1993, p. 55) In 1630, in Virginia Vs. Davis, the courts decided that Hugh Davis, was to be “whipped before an assembly of “Negroes” and others for abusing himself to the dishonor of God and the shame of Christianity by defiling his body by lying with a Negro.” (Takaki 1993, p. 55) Slavery and segregation plagued the United States well into the twentieth century, and the attitudes of white supremacy and superiority are still actively part of our Eurocentric culture. Even though we now have federal laws that forbid businesses to discriminate against prospective employees, promotions, performance awards, etc. based on race, according to the NAACP, there have been recent studies that prove that discrimination against African Americans is still alive and well in many industries, particularly the advertising industry.

6 What is probably most appalling is the realization that the brutal and savage treatment of African slaves was not only legal and acceptable according to the U.S. courts and Constitution for so long, but that it far surpassed what we now consider felonious animal cruelty. We send citizens to prison for beating their dogs less severely than the way these citizens were treated for generations. Coming to America was the promise for freedom and prosperity to people in many less privileged countries, one of which was Ireland. Many Irish made the voyage to America between 1815 and 1920, and landed on U.S. soil, many during the reign of Andrew Jackson’s presidency. They came to escape the rule of England’s government. Just as the Native Americans and Africans had been bitterly oppressed in the United States, the Irish were oppressed by England, under the rule of King Henry II, who, invaded and took over all but 14% of Ireland by 1700. In coming to the United States, the Irish were forced by the colonists to abandon their Protestant faith and become Catholics. They lived in small peasant communities on U. S. soil, working as subsistence farmers. When the U.S. colonists decided to begin cattle farming, they gradually began reclaiming their land and pushing the Irish farmers off of their farms. Since the Irish workers were only skilled in plant farming, they were no longer useful on cattle farms and were reduced to severe poverty. Although the Irish were not discriminated against due to skin color and the presumption of savagery, as were the Native and African Americans, they were considered less intelligent and slovenly because of their status in England before coming to the United States. The United States government took advantage of their sense of desperation for freedom from the rule of England. Between 1815 and 1845, one million

7 Irish migrated to America. Former potato farmers, they had lived on small plots of land, in tiny one room homes. Many of them had to return to Ireland and work construction jobs seasonally, to earn enough rent to come back to the United States and carry their families through the next season. In 1845, a potato fungus destroyed the crops, causing one million Irish to die of hunger and illness by 1855. This period became known as The Great Famine. The inability to grow potato crops and earn their rent caused the Irish families to be evicted by the land owners, leaving them homeless. In their desperation, any means of survival and earning a living was a relief to the Irish immigrant. In the United States, they were viewed, much as the African Americans, as laborers, only fit to serve and work. They became road construction and railway workers, along Connecticut, Rhode Island and New York. They were ordered around and mistreated by their employers, and treated like animals. Charles Dickens, (as cited in Takaki, 1993), referred to them and their homes as “hideously ugly women and very buxom young ones, pigs, dogs, men, children, babies, pots, kettles, dung hills, vile refuse, rank straw and standing water, all wallowing together in an inseparable heap, composed the furniture of every dark and dirty hut.” (p. 147) Their bathing and housekeeping habits were not of the same standards as what colonial Americans considered to be “civilized,” which added to the bias against them as dirty and uncivilized people. At one point in 1870, the exploited Irish laborers formed a union and initiated a strike against their employers, demanding better treatment and increased wages. Instead, the labor laws at that time allowed their employers to force them back to work with a 10% reduction in pay!

8 This is another example of historical data that has been conveniently omitted from the textbook publications in our school curricula. We have avoided educating our children (and ourselves) about the creation and enforcement of laws that benefited the Anglo centric and Eurocentric people, and boldly exploited and abused the populations and change the rights and lack of rights of people at will. Congress was so exclusively Anglo-European during these years, there was no one to protest the white supremacy and privilege being put into practice century after century. Around the 1840’s, the United States of America began to expand westward, to California, which we seeked to take from Mexico. Once we took over, it became the place for Mexican immigrants, who, by virtue of their skin color and descent, were considered only capable of being used as laborers. In fact, the stratified “class” system in California at that time held the fairest skinned people at the highest levels, and classes degraded down by increased darkness of skin, from there, with the Native Americans still at the bottom of the lot. The Mexicans worked as personal house servants, ranch hands, and farm laborers, and fought in the war against Mexico, during which we overtook Texas during the Mexican American War. We overtook Texas, much the same as we did land from the Native Americans, by virtue of violent military surges and taking of prisoners. As Ulysses S. Grant himself described, it was through unnecessary violence that we acquired that part of the western U. S. “About all of the Texans seem to think it perfectly right to impose on the people of a conquered city to any extent, and even to murder them where the act can be covered by dark. And how much they seem to enjoy acts of violence too!” And George Meade added, “They have killed five or six

9 innocent people walking in the street for no other object than their own amusement. They rob and steal the cattle and corn of the poor farmers.” (Takaki 1993, p. 175) Herein is yet more evidence that the very treaties and laws we established in our Constitution with regard to murder and theft, were only written for those whom our government decided they pertained to. Our armies, troops, and those under governmental direction were not held to the same laws if it came to conquering those weaker than us, or taking from them land that we wanted for ourselves. Even as we purchased from Mexico the states now known as California, New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona and Utah through Manifest Destiny, the doctrine itself was written to “embrace a belief in AngloSaxon superiority—the expansion of Jefferson’s homogenous republic and Franklin’s America of the ‘lovely white!” (Takaki 1993, p. 176) By the point, the patterns of oppression begun in the 1600’s had followed us all the way to the late 1800’s, and were engrained in the minds of the American population. The next set of immigrants to brave the journey across deep waters to find peace and wealth in the United States were the Asians, who were first imported over by the suggestion of Aaron Palmer, in his effort to help in the building of a transcontinental railroad across the States, and begin farming in California. Within a year of his suggestion, Chinese began to migrate to the United States, but not necessarily for the reasons that the Americans wanted them here! They came seeking safe haven from the conflicts in China that came about as a result of the British Opium Wars, which were the result of Britain smuggling opium into China, in defiance of China’s strict trade restrictions. “China confiscated a large amount of the British Opium, for which Britain harshly retaliated, and went to war with China” (Waley 1958, p. 67).

10 Under the Qing government at that time, many Chinese were forced to pay unaffordable indemnities, and so migrated to the United States seeking economic relief. Much like the Irish farmers being forced from their lands, a similar pattern was emerging in China. Peasant farmers who could not pay their land taxes were evicted, and so many made the long journey to the western United States, hoping for solace, freedom and a richer economy. The American labor brokers took advantage of the Chinese immigrants’ desperate circumstances and circulated literature promising generous pay, housing and food to Chinese laborers, but instead our government instated an absorb anent miner’s tax, taxing their earnings between 25-50%, if they were “unwilling” to become U.S. citizens. Ironically, willing or not, there were laws in place that stated that one had to be naturalized (born in the U.S.) to BE a citizen, so there was no recourse for them but to pay the huge tax. At this time, 24,000 Chinese laborers were working in mines, and due to the excessive taxing of their earnings, were forced to live in tiny, one-room cabins with their rather large families. In addition, in order to meet deadlines for finishing the railroad, they were forced to work through deadly winter weather, under tunnels of snow, well into night. Many died due to hazardous work conditions. Once again, we see that the Caliban could have also been the Chinaman. U.S. industrialists knew that these immigrants came from extreme poverty and oppression, and assumed their illiteracy and inability to consider whether they were truly being treated fairly in our country, since the conditions still appeared somewhat “better” than those which they had left behind in their own land. When they attempted to “unionize” and strike against the unbearable working conditions here, their food supply was cut off and

11 they were isolated on their work camps, and forced to go back to work for their same low paying wages and horrendous working conditions. Judged by their “yellow” skin and the plight of their life before coming to America, we oppressed yet another race different than ourselves, who did not fit the Anglo- or Eurocentric model of white America. The next group of immigrants to America came in the 1890’s, with the arrival of the Japanese. America’s expansionists had crossed over into Tokyo Bay, Japan, and forcing in western trade. With American commerce moving in, Japan imposed stronger taxes to its citizens to strengthen its government and military, which, in turn, forced some Japanese farmers into poverty. Desperate for their survival, many immigrated to the United States, but had to go through stronger governmental screenings in order to leave, than the Chinese had undergone before them. There was also a shortage of female vs. male Japanese, which led to the terribly biased “Picture Bride” system, where relatives of Japanese women wanting to immigrate to the United States sent pictures of them to prospective interested husbands in the U.S. and arranged marriages. This was to insure the “quality” of immigrants, both by the Japanese and American governments. Because these women were then considered better “quality” than the Chinese women, this led to further oppression of the Chinese. Chinese women were restricted to farm and home work, where Japanese women were allowed to enter the work force once they immigrated and married in the U.S. In another form of oppression, the business owners, in order to disallow their workers to form unions and strike, would not hire more than a small number of each nationality of workers. Knowing that the Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, African, and Native Americans always forged bonds with their own “kind” when it came to organizing

12 a labor strike, this was a fool-proof way to be able to continue overworking them and not pay fair wages. It also led to the importing of Koreans to the States around 1903. This came after the Japanese tried to demand more wages and better working conditions. The United States government was aware of the disengagement between Japan and Korea, and thought this a worthy solution. These workers underwent the same patterns of oppression as the other immigrants before them. They labored long hours under treacherous working conditions as farm laborers, and many lost their lives. Unlike the Chinese and Japanese governments, the Korean government did not tolerate the mistreatment of their migrant workers, and in 1905, made emigrating to the United States illegal in Korea. In reaction to losing Korean immigrants, planters then began importing workers from the Phillippines, in order to “discipline and diversify their workforce.” (Takaki 1993, p. 253) Assuming their ignorance, such as the others, based on skin color and a background of economic hardship, and in order to benefit financially, the U.S. planters used a new and creative form of oppression with this group of workers. They decided to breed competition amongst the races, by goading the Phillippino’s to work as hard as the Japanese and “show them up.” Then they would, in turn, threaten the jobs of the Japanese by reminding them that the Phillippinos would work just as hard for less wages, and therefore were justified in cutting the wages of the Japanese workers, or firing them. “To strengthen their authority over their ethnically diverse work force, planters stratified occupations according to race: white occupied skilled and supervisory positions, while Asian immigrants were the unskilled laborers.” (Takaki 1993, p. 253) This allowed the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association to restrict supervisory, or higher wage earning jobs,

13 strictly to U.S. citizens. Another group to emigrate to “freedom and financial independence” was the Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe. They had been severely persecuted minority in Russia, and never intended to return after earning a living here in America. Due to their impoverished state in Russia, they also were assumed to be “Caliban.” As they boarded the boats to venture to the U.S., they were “herded together in a dark, filthy compartment in the steerage.” (Takaki 1993, p. 281) They came into ports in New Jersey and New York, beginning in 1880. Although they were assumed to be ignorant, a large percentage were actually educated. Because they were not citizens, they were forced into factories and paid very low wages, resulting in them having to pack large numbers of people into very small living places and tenements. Some became street merchants, selling goods out of small carts or stands. This was culturally conflictive for the Jewish man, who came from a background where the women worked and labored so that the man could become more educated and study. They had to forfeit their religious and cultural beliefs and conform to the American way of living, and earning a living, if they wanted to survive here. “What the Jewish peddler in America represented was not so much the transference of ‘middle class’ values from the Old World as Jewish adaptation to American culture.” (Takaki 1993, p. 287)

14 Reaction Having heard the harsh tales of the Native Americans, the African Americans, the Mexicans, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Phillippino’s and the Jews from Eastern Europe, the patterns of oppression that each of these ethnic groups underwent in their venture to come to the United States for freedom and for hope, are remarkable. In the country that professes liberty and justice for all, and is founded on the equality of all mankind, the treatment, and the ongoing oppression is both ironic and hypocritical. We welcome other nations, as long as they are willing to forfeit their customs and traditions, their religious beliefs and practices, their families, and their pride, and conform to the American way of life. In order to live here, you must work here, and in order to work, you must earn a wage. In these early days, if you were not eligible for citizenship, you could not be paid a top wage, regardless of the worth of your labor. Thankfully, we have evolved in our systems of fair wages for fair work, and we now have labor laws that protect people from the great exploitation that these millions before us underwent. We also can no longer legally discriminate against employees based on race, although the reality is that such bias very much still exists in our nation. The most important question for us to ask ourselves, in our pride as Americans, is if we can feel proud, knowing the means by which we have acquired all that we have. We must assess whether there is justice and fairness, and if we have preserved the dignity and respect of human life in our practices and policies, both historically and in the present moment. How do we practice what we preach, what we write, and what we proclaim to be the tenet of this great nation we call the “United” States of America?

15 References Author Unknown. (2008). Social Studies: United States History, grade 6. HoughtonMifflin Harcourt School Publishers. Mehri, C. & Skalat, S. (2004). Research perspectives on race and employment in the advertising industry. NAACP News. Prindle, T. (1994). Native American pottery in New England. Available at: http://www.nativetech.org. Takaki, R. (1993). A different mirror. Back Bay Books / Little, Brown & Company. Time Warner Books. U.S. Census Bureau. (2009). Available at: http//www.census.gov. Waley, A. (1958). The opium war through Chinese eyes. Stanford University Press.