The latest identity politic row is claiming scalps up and down the Social Justice Frontier. CEOs, editors, Actors, monuments, and institutions are rushing to appease the mob, along with a frequent target – the NFL’s Washington Redskins. But is it for the right reasons?
Related: Smithsonian’s Signs of Systemic Whitness Include Hard Work, Individualism, and Family
The so-called American Indians crafted their “civilizations” like those that came before them, through war and conquest. None of them were indigenous, any more or less than anyone else whose ancestors came here before they were born. But the radical left has long painted our predecessors as indigenous. They are not. Nor should you be surprised to hear that they were not the quaint, peaceful, Disney-esque environmentalists we are lead to believe.
What does this have to do with renaming the Washington Redskins or any other team whose image might include a member of the tribes who peopled North America before the Europeans displaced many of them?
An exhibit at the Smithsonian, curated by Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche), reveals an unspoken truth. All five so-called “Civilized Tribes” (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole) kept black slaves.
“The Five Civilized Tribes were deeply committed to slavery, established their own racialized black codes, immediately reestablished slavery when they arrived in Indian territory, rebuilt their nations with slave labor, crushed slave rebellions, and enthusiastically sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War.”
And their interests were not far different, if at all, from those of any Democrat slaveowners.
“The Cherokee owned slaves for the same reasons their white neighbors did. They knew exactly what they were doing. In truth,” Smith said, the Cherokee and other “Civilized Tribes were not that complicated. They were willful and determined oppressors of blacks they owned, enthusiastic participants in a global economy driven by cotton, and believers in the idea that they were equal to whites and superior to blacks.”
I’m sure BLM will be hitting the reservations any day, and good luck with that, but what cannot get lost in whatever translation of history we abide, is this. The justification for it, and nearly every injustice against groups of people, has been the presumption by the elites that their behavior was acceptable because the targeted groups(s) were not people. Not human beings.
If that sounds familiar, the modern Democrat party uses this excuse to justify killing millions of unborn minority babies – because (they say) they are not people.
It’s an old excuse, and its use is not limited to abortion, nor will it, at any time soon, go out of favor by those predisposed to tyranny no matter from whom or where they are descended. Take Africa, for example. They still buy, sell, and trade slaves today.
When can we expect all these virtue-signallers to head east and make a difference in the lives of actual slaves, black lives that should also matter? They won’t. As we’ve already been told, this isn’t about that; it is about defunding the police even though that will make black lives in America matter less.
