Thoughts from the think tank

Over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself immersed in a virtual progressive think tank. Well, not exactly. In a think tank, you’re supposed to contribute something novel to the tank. Mostly, I’ve just been soaking up other people’s ideas and letting them swirl around in my brain. I guess that makes me a think tank lurker. This may seem like a bit of a rant. But there you have it: my lurking mind in overdrive.

Most recently, I spent several days at the national conference of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, which, happily, met in Denver this year. My partner and I refer this group as “the radical sociologists.” My kind of people! I attended a bunch of sessions that renewed my hope that progressivism lives on in up-and-coming scholars and that academics can also be activists (and be proud of it … at least in this circle of like-minded academics). Among other topics, I dipped into discussions of the meaning of the concept of “social problems,” the subtle meanings conveyed by chat room conversations among butch- and femme-identified queer folks, the meaning of community recovery following a deadly mudslide in the Philippines, and changing meanings of “acceptance” of LGBTQ folks in religious settings (the last was our own work, presented by a couple of students we’ve been working with). A meaning-full several days, for sure.

The conference found me already in a reflective mood about things sociological, since I had spent considerable time over recent weeks hanging out with such topics here in Boulder. The focus of this year’s “One Book, One Boulder” program is Chief Niwot, also known as Chief Left Hand. The book, Chief Left Hand, is a biography of this Arapaho peace chief and the story of white people’s theft of Indian land in Colorado. In recent weeks, I attended two events in the “One Book, One Boulder” program series, and also visited the Boulder History Museum’s exhibit on the same topic. My first foray into this program a few weeks ago was the multi-media performance, “Rocks, Karma, Arrows.” I left that performance slightly stunned. I’ve known about how badly white “settlers” (a.k.a., invaders) treated the Indians living on the continent as we claimed (a.k.a., stole) more and more land and resources. But the explicit deception and cruelty of that period of history was sort of pinned to a bulletin board in my brain. During this performance, it was pulled down and examined in detail and with an immediacy I’ve rarely experienced.

Then, with that performance as a backdrop, I saw two segments of the film “Race: The Power of an Illusion.” This movie details how “race” became an identity category, which it hadn’t been one before we invented it (“constructed it,” as the scholars say). And then, how the stereotypes and degradations visited on non-white people were systematically shifted from one group to another as we (white folks) decided we wanted the land, the cheap labor, and/or the resources of yet another group. First, we wanted free labor from African slaves, so we created, step by step, a story that made them not just different in skin color but also deficient in mental and moral status. Using the wonders of newly emerging science, we even created (and I do mean created) biological proof of their inferiority. Then, the very same arguments were used to prove that other groups—Indians and women, Eastern European, Italian, Chinese, and Japanese immigrants, among others—were inferior. Funny … these arguments were pulled out just when each of these groups had something whites wanted or risked taking something only white men had.

Maybe the most powerful point in this movie for me was this suggestion: White people could have just acknowledged that we wanted free labor from African slaves and their descendants (or land from the Indians and cheap labor from other groups) and that we had the power to demand it. But we had this problem: the Declaration of Independence says, “all men are created equal.” Now, obviously, this excludes women (one of the battles of the 20^th century), but it should include all these non-white men. So, the trick was to justify their unequal treatment. To do that, we created a story about these groups, one that made them less than fully human. That way, they were not really included in “all men,” so we weren't required to treat them as equals.

It’s an amazing paradox. If we didn’t have this wonderful doctrine, "... all men are created equal," we wouldn’t have had to invent these stories of inferiority to cover up our sins against the founding documents. 

But given our supposed allegiance to this doctrine, we had to somehow paper over two conflicting realities: (1) we believe in equality and (2) our actions are rife with inequality. We pulled this off by simply declaring some people less than fully human.

     

And now, we live with the awful legacy of that process: even when the overt racism/sexism/classism waned (e.g., after slaves were freed, when the Indians were granted sovereignty in their “own” lands, when women got the vote, when labor unions gained equal treatment), those old stories about sub-humanity remained. We could free the slaves, but we still “knew” that they were inherently inferior to white people. We could give women the vote, but we still “knew” that they were inferior to men. The task we’re left with now is to figure out how to erase those old stories when the culture is steeped in them, and we’ve all taken them in with the air we breathe since childhood.

After all this, a visit to the Chief Left Hand exhibit at the Boulder History Museum closed the circle. It reminded me of the deep Colorado connection to this story of race. The the ease with which we've denied the humanity of whole groups of humans—and of their leaders, even those who, like Left Hand, craved, worked for, pleaded for peace. We’re walking on the land we stole from them as if it were our own.

This immersion in the reminder that racism isn’t “long ago and far away” but right here, in my town, in my time—in my self—was unsettling. But it was also energizing, a reminder of my own work yet to be done. Folks who live near Boulder still have a chance to join in this remarkable learning process. The museum exhibit is still open, the book is still available, and more “One Boulder” events are coming up.

Check them out here and jump on in. This think tank can always use more folks who believe in community activism—or simply in personal growth.