Page 103 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

•
Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization
94
which led to the racialization/ethnicization of a global division of labor.This hierar-
chical organization of peoples served to transfer resources from subjugated population
groups to dominant groups in the West and to their intermediary groups in the Third
World. In founding the United States, European colonial settlers rationalized the col-
onization and destruction of Native Americans through racist discourse. They de-
41
scribed Europeans as hard workers and more disciplined than Native Americans. The
discourse of racism, work, discipline, and whiteness were combined to rationalize the
42
destruction of Native Americans. While all European settlers were considered hard-
working whites, all Native Americans were considered lazy. European settlers invented
43
“Indian savagery” through the ideology of whiteness. Based on these racist assump-
tions, schools were introduced to assimilate some Native American children—Chris-
tianizing and “civilizing” them and teaching the superiority of Europeans and the
inferiority of Native Americans.
This educational policy was intended to create an educated intermediate class in
Native American society that European settlers could use to implement their colonial
policies.According to Bobby Wright and William Tierney,“The earliest colonial efforts
to provide Indians with higher education were designed to Christianize and ‘civilize’
the Indians, thus saving them from the folly of their ‘heathenish’ and ‘savage’ ways.The
hope was that educated Indians, as schoolmasters and preachers, would become mis-
44
sionary agents among their own brethren.” Later, the ideology of whiteness was used
to commit genocide and/or to create reservations for the remnants of Native Ameri-
cans and to transfer the resources of the indigenous people to European settlers. One
U.S. general wrote in 1868,“The more I see these Indians the more convinced I am
that all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of pauper.Their attempts at civ-
45
ilization are simply ridiculous.” Today Native Americans are the most oppressed, ex-
ploited,and underdeveloped part of American society because of the racist political and
economic attack that historically targeted them and currently continues to do so. Ross
explains that historical evidence “reveals the process of how the ‘savage’ was invented.
Racial oppression, then as now, is not a discrete phenomenon, independent of larger
political and economic tendencies.Twentieth-century laws and their enforcement can
readily be seen as instruments for creating and maintaining social and economic strat-
ification created centuries before. Indeed, past deeds illuminate present treacheries.” 46
The United States emerged through establishing settler colonialism, practicing
genocide, and intensifying two types of labor recruitment systems: wage labor for
Whites and coerced labor for enslaved Africans. The White Anglo-Saxon Protestant
group that founded the United States developed two major stratification systems: class
47
and racial caste systems. While the class system and gender hierarchy were main-
tained to protect the power of rich White males in an emerging White society, the
racial caste system was invented to keep African Americans at the bottom of White so-
48
ciety so that they would provide their labor and other resources freely or cheaply. As
the ideology of whiteness was used to exterminate Native Americans and to transfer
their resources to White society, it also justified slavery for about two and a half cen-
turies and segregation for about one more century.Through the racial caste system,
White Americans imposed on African Americans slavery, segregation, cultural hege-
mony, and colonial domination to keep them at the bottom of a society in which
Whites were on the top.
“The conception of race,” Michael Hunt writes,“defined by the poles of black and
49
white, carried over into American foreign policy.” White racism was invented and