http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096412730

Mohawk: A racist doctrine ensures racist behavior

Posted: March 24, 2006
by: John Mohawk / Indian Country Today

No one dares say anything negative about Jewish people, even if the comment
is true or partly true. When Steven Spielberg directed a movie on the
reaction to the murders of Israeli athletes in Munich more than 30 years
ago, commentators like neo-conservative ideologue Charles Krauthammer
complained that Spielberg had sided with the Palestinians, which is a
no-no.

Spielberg was criticized even though his movie is not remotely racist.
Others have had their careers destroyed, and recently a historian who
denied the reality of the Holocaust (a bigoted position, no doubt) actually
went to jail. And no one dares say anything negative about black people,
lest they face (often legitimate) charges of racism. And check out Larry
Summers, the obnoxious president of Harvard who ended up resigning
following, among other ill-fated remarks, expressions of female biological
limitations regarding certain academic disciplines.

OK, so you have to be careful when talking about women, blacks and people
of Jewish heritage. There is, for those bigots who need a cause and would
like to vent some racist venom, one group upon which it is perpetually open
season: indigenous peoples, aka Indians! You can, apparently, make racist
remarks about them at will and there will be little or no outcry. This
tendency is so ingrained in the culture that people don't even recognize
racist remarks when they are directed at Indians! They're a freebie! There
are at least two reasons for this. The first is a stain on the American
culture. Racist remarks about American Indians are part of the American
consensus about Indians, a consensus which is at the center of the fabric
of American culture but which today is inadequately challenged.

The first has to do with the mythology, the founding myth, of America. Long
ago, American historians generally reached a consensus by which they
promoted as fact stories that were both inaccurate and mythological in
purpose. The myth goes all the way back to the debates in the Spanish
colonies between Juan Gines de Sepulveda and Bartolome de las Casas.

Sepulveda is the "father of modern racism" who claimed that the Spanish
were entitled to benefit from colonization of the Indians because of the
supposed virtues of the Spanish and the sins and other deficiencies of the
Indians. The first was that the Spanish offered to the Indians the benefits
of Spanish "civilization," a term which those who used it assumed that
those who heard it would understand to designate an entitlement. The
Spanish adorned themselves with the mantle of "civilization." (Forget about
the origins of the word and its connection to cities: "civilization" is now
completely associated with something approaching utopia, an entitlement of
Christian society.)

In land-claim cases in American case law, the lawyers and judges often find
the origins of America's claim to Indian land in the "doctrine of
discovery" and trace it from there. The doctrine was a claim that God had
given all the lands of the Earth to Christendom (later, when the state
system was adopted, the Christian nations); that whenever these Christian
peoples encountered other peoples on previously unknown (to them) lands,
they had "discovered" them and therefore had a right to "pre-emption," the
first right to divest the indigenous of their land because it wasn't really
their land - they were just occupying it until the Christians arrived.

It's a fantastic claim: Since the beginning of time, past the Ice Ages and
centuries before the Bible appeared, the Christians "owned" North America
and the Indians possessed a mere "right of occupancy" which they could
exercise until the Christians "discovered" them and found a way to divest
them of it.

Sepulveda's racism was deeply ingrained with the rhetoric of civilization,
his evidence of Spanish superiority predicated on the Indians' lack of
Spanish culture. The message: You are not us (white Christians) and
therefore you have no real rights. You were born inferior to us; your
cultures are inferior to ours; God gave us rights to all that is yours.
Racism is about culture.

"Civilized" people claim qualities of personality that are nowhere evident
in the Spanish leadership of the conquest. They claimed to be gentle,
cultivated, devoted to the arts. In Christian civilization, the civilized
represent the best assumed qualities of Jesus, including compassion,
generosity, justice and righteousness. Even as Sepulveda was ascribing
these qualities to the Spanish conquerors of his day, the Inquisition was
torturing and murdering innocent people, taking their property and using
the powers of government to achieve robbery, fraud and a great litany of
criminal behavior.

Civilization's children were, upon examination, given to behaviors that
were barbarous. All that talk about superior civilizations, God's will and
"discovery" is just so much racist drivel.

Fast-forward to 18th-century North America. The early English colonists
embraced the Spanish model of superiority due to "civilization." To this
was added the idea of the empty land (terra nullius), including the idea
that Indians were nomads, that they were barbarous, that they lacked
attributes which were imaged to be positive traits of the English. (As a
matter of fact, the historic English lacked exactly those qualities:
honesty, a nobility of purpose and so forth. About the only thing they
could claim is that they mostly stayed in one place most of the year. But
so did many Indians; and anyway, there's nothing wrong with being nomadic.)

Racism in the Sepulveda model involved a false and hypocritical claim to
virtues of Christendom on the one hand, and an absence of virtues among all
others as a group. We know today that the claims to virtue by the English
are unsupported in the historic and contemporary records. In the same way
that the contemporary record does not support that people with strong
Christian beliefs have more stable marriages ("red" states have higher
divorce rates than "blue" states), it is also true that Christians do not
have a history of less violence than other populations. Christian
populations are not virtuous because they are Christian. Like other
peoples, they have to work at it to achieve virtue.

Indian peoples continue to suffer under the pall of racist ideas that are
centuries old. Just last year, the Supreme Court re-affirmed its belief in
the racist "doctrine of discovery" in a land-claim case. In a recent book,
Robert Williams Jr. detailed the use of such language and sources by the
court's former chief justice, William Rehnquist. The book, "Like a Loaded
Weapon: The Rehnquist Court, Indian Rights, and the Legal History of Racism
in America," is interesting reading. If Rehnquist had made those kinds of
statements about other peoples, there would have been a hue and cry. But
because it was directed at Indians, the racism beat goes on unchallenged.

John C. Mohawk, Ph.D., columnist for Indian Country Today, is a noted
author and historian. He is an associate professor of American studies and
director of Indigenous studies at the State University of New York at
Buffalo.