My Family History

This class has taught me so much about culture and about pride. Everyone I met was proud of whom they are and I admired all of our differences. I learned so much about people in this class than I would have in any other. I can now look at these fellow students and see who they are as person, instead of the color of their skin. Because I am an Irish American woman, I had never realized the impact that racism had on others or how much it still is practiced into today’s society. Takaki really opened my eyes to the history of Irish Americans. I can only imagine the hard ships my family had to go through when they first came to America. I am happy and excited to learn more about my family and really wish I was able to know more about my father’s background. Even though my father was adopted, he was so proud of his family’s background and he looked at it on his own. He had such a passion for his family history and he felt so connected to his background. The people I met during this class have really made me want to stay connected to my ethnicity. My family had to fight against negativity and reticule when they first came here, it makes me wonder how my life would have been back then. I am no longer just another white woman with blinders on. I am an Irish and English American woman who protects her family history and respects others in turn.  

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack By Peggy McIntosh

“As we in Women’s Studies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one who writes about having white privilege must ask, ‘Having described it what will I do to lessen or end it?’”. This is a powerful excerpt from Peggy McIntosh’s article and it is also the perfect support for my paper on white privilege in America. McIntosh describes how men are taught not to recognize the privilege they have over women. They deny that they have any advantage over women’s disadvantages and are in many cases completely blind to it. As a woman it is easy to see these disadvantages because of gender, but as a white woman do I notice the advantages I receive because of my skin color. Just as men are blind to their power over women, white Americans are blind to the power they have over other skin types. She makes a metaphor, unpacking the invisible knapsack, to describe noticing and stopping these day-to-day activities that put us at an advantage over others. She makes a list of normal activities that she didn’t realize before that she took for granted, not thinking how a person of another color may not have those same advantages.

            The list is just a way of making one realize the rights that they have, that someone else of another race doesn’t. She describes how she could move freely to wherever she wanted and that she could fit in nicely and be treated fairly. Her children can be protected from those looking to arm them and they, “will be given curricular activities that testify to the existence of their race”. She isn’t asked to speak for her entire race or forced to prove herself because of it. What McIntosh is trying to tell people is that in order to distinguish between earned power and unearned power we must first realize what exactly separates us. This article gives me a great insight for my paper. I can make my own list of activities that others out of my race don’t receive. By identifying these advantages, I can work on achieving my goals through hard work and not because of the color of my skin.  

McIntosh, P. (1988). White privilege: unpacking the invisible knapsack. White privilege and male privilege: a personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women’s studies Wellesley, MA:

Superiority

            It’s amazing to me how an entire culture could be moved to the brink of extinction by another. Native Americans were tormented and hunted down simply because they were so different and because they didn’t “belong” in the American dream. I can’t imagine trying to survive in a world where everything I owned and all my history and beliefs were taken from me.  Takaki explains, “In 1902, Congress accelerated the transfer of lands from Indians to whites: a new law required that all allotted lands, upon the death of the owners, be sold at public auctions by the heirs. Unless they were able to purchase their own family lands, Indians would lose what had been their property.” The passage completely caught me off guard. The Native Americans had to purchase their own land otherwise they were forced to leave it behind. Imagine living your entire life in a home that your parents built and being told it was no longer yours after your parents passed away. If Native Americans were forced off their lands and given only a miniscule portion of what they used to own that they couldn’t even inherit, what land was supposed to be theirs? Where were they expected to go? White settlers treated Native Americans like they were some pest that they were waiting to die out.

The most obvious connection I made while reading this was the treatment of Jews in Nazi occupied Germany. Just as Native Americans were treated, Jews were seen as a pest and the best way to control them was to move them into a designated land or simply kill them. A book by Yitzhak Arad, titled the Plunder of Jewish Property in the Nazi-Occupied Areas of the Soviet Union, shares this similarity, “Soviet Jews were murdered at killing pits near their homes, and not in distant extermination camps. Consequently, all their money, valuables and other property were left on the spot at the disposal of the local authorities”. This quote seemed like it came directly out of A Different Mirror. The Native Americans were treated so much similar. They were killed, taken from their homes, and their property was then the property of the government. My question is: what makes someone believe that they are superior to another and who gets to decide?

"What right have they to claim the soil which was never their own; When thousands now are starving and evicted from their home?"

Coming from an Irish background, it was really interesting for me to read the chapter Emigrants From Erin. It was startling to read about the struggles Irish immigrants had to go through even before they came to America. I couldn’t imagine having the only form of substance and income, vanish before my eyes. “By 1855, some one million people had died from hunger and sickness.” What was even more astounding to me was that half the people of Ireland could have been fed by English exports. The English had the ability to help the Irish and did nothing to do so. The treatment of Irishmen by the English was so cruel, but what was even more surprising to me was how the Irish immigrants could treat African Americans with the same cruelty. On page 150 this mistreatment is explained clearly, “Frederick Douglass criticized the Irish immigrants for abandoning the idea of ‘liberty’ they returned in their homeland by becoming ‘the oppressors of another race’ in America”. It amazes me that Irish immigrants could mistreat African Americans after experiencing unfair treatment first hand. Blacks couldn’t understand the Irish immigrants hostility, “They resented being told by immigrants to leave the country of their birth and ‘go back’ to Africa, a place they had never seen”.

            It was also intriguing that the Irish would then aid in the expansion of America into Mexican land. I did some research and found that the PBS website had an abundance of information on the Mexican-American war. This war really reminds me of the struggles the Irish endured from the British, “Mexico struggled to maintain control over the vast expanses of land it had inherited from Spain following its long war for independence. Lacking the resources to settle much of its territory and suffering from deep internal political divisions, Mexico looked to the past for its sense of meaning, back to a time when ‘New Spain’ had once promised to be the continental power of the New World.” How could Irish immigrants experience a lifetime of mistreatment from the English and then treat others just as poorly? Were they threatened by the African Americans? Did they feel that they had to act tough in order to survive? How would I treat others if I felt I had to fight to for everything I had? 

http://www.pbs.org/kera/usmexicanwar/ 

What would I have done?

“The Giddy Multitude” opened my eyes to the practices of slavery. This quote astounded me, “What was happening was evident: Africans, unlike whites, were being degraded into a condition of servitude for life and even the status of property.” (page 57) It is so amazing to me how one person could own another person. What is even more surprising to me is how quickly African Americans were separated from the white slaves. White slaves receive less punishment than the black slaves simply because they were different. It didn’t even matter if they behaved better than the white slaves, blacks were still singled out. What even scares me the most about this time is that I have no idea how I would have treated others if I lived back then. I am a young white woman with English and Irish heritage. Slavery was simply accepted, so it scares me to think that I could have easily been a part of this injustice. Here is a quote I pulled from the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, “The fatal poison of irresponsible power was already in her ... hands, and soon commenced its infernal work. That cheerful eye, under the influence of slavery, soon became red with rage; that voice, made all of sweet accord, changed to one of harsh and horrid discord; and that angelic face gave place to that of a demon.” I don’t know how slavery would have changed me if I was a slave owner. Even a woman who treated slaves respectfully fell under the power of ownership. How would power affect me if it was considered to be normal? Many people today are against discrimination, but can all of us say that we would have stood up against white colonists to protect the slaves? We will never be able to know for sure.

My personal experiences with race growing up

I believe for most children, at least in my experience, race is less of an issue than as an adult. I grew up in what my mom likes to call a cookie cutter family. My father, mother, older brother, older sister, twin sister and myself all have natural blond hair and bright blue eyes.  My father was adopted so I do not know anything about where my father’s family came from, but my mother comes from a family of almost 100 percent Irish. So as you can imagine, I can’t go out in the summer to get the mail without needing sunscreen. Well, not really. I have always been very close to my mother who is a very warm and welcoming person so as a young child I never noticed the skin color of the other kids I played with. To be honest, I can’t remember what any of the kids looked like in my classes. What I do remember is a family a few houses down that I would play with all the time. They were an Asian American family and the mother held a daycare in her own home with her family, so there were always kids to play with. I only started noticing differences as I got older. 

Now race wasn’t actually the first difference I noticed about people. When I was seven years old my parents sat my twin sister and I down to explain a condition my father had, called diabetes. They waited this long to tell us because my father had to go into surgery to remove one of his toes. Diabetes is known to cause problems with the feet in particular because blood has trouble reaching this area of the body. Because of his health issues and struggles with diabetes year after year, my father had to use a wheelchair frequently. Now since I saw my father as the funny, outgoing, and hardworking man he had always been, it was weird to me to watch people look at him differently. I guess when some people look at a 6 foot man in a wheel chair, all they see is a wheel chair, but all I saw was my dad. This was a big eye opener for me.  I realized that when I look at people I can’t just look at their appearance, I have to look at who they are as a person.

I noticed more issues with race in high school. Although I hung out with people of different backgrounds, there were many people that criticized others because of the color of their skin. I will forever remember the day when a student drove up to school in his pickup truck carrying a confederate flag and a noose. I will never know how some people can have so much hatred for others. As you can imagine the student was not allowed back to the school and how serious the students were hurt. 

My older sister, known never to follow what other’s tell her she has to do, started dating her African American boyfriend about 5 years ago. Not being in that situation myself, I can only imagine the issues that have deal with from other people regularly. They have a 2 year old son together named Troy. Now I can’t imagine another human being more beautiful than him. It’s very hard for me to understand how people can have so much hate for a person that I can love so much. 

Many times I wish I can go back to when I was young. When life was easy and race wasn’t an issue. Why do people have to formulate opinions about others simply by appearance? I learned young that appearance doesn’t mean anything when it comes to what a person is really like. I may not be able to change how other people judge, but at least I know I give people a chance before I formulate an opinion about them.