Elizabeth Cook-Lynn rapidcityjournal.com | Posted: Saturday, August 28, 2010 6:00 am
The national crusade of "Take Back America" by tea party activists and the Arizona Legislature is as bigoted as it is absurd. It will catch on in states like Missouri, South Carolina, and the Dakotas.
The crusade is about "illegal immigrants" and the theory of white European immigration as the settlers know it.
It's also about the hostility of a nation that prides itself on being a nation of immigrants, while ironically putting up fences to keep neighbors from Mexico out. It's a little like the gated communities so popular in the cities of our country.
The theory is that anyone coming here since 1900 is not eligible. When White Europeans made up the census of newcomers, when Africans were considered barely surviving slave populations, and indigenous peoples were thought to be inferior and vanishing, it was a world, then, the settlers said, for the "taking".
Today, it is about the need of America to see itself as an all-white majority regime. It is about losing the white-only power maintained for 200 years.
It's about a black president in a white-power country. Tea partiers expect Barack Obama to "show his papers" (birth certificate) in public over and over again because he is a black man who they believe has no right to the presidency.
It is about segregating Indians in 1880, and African slaves in 1860, and "taking" whatever white power has wanted.
Today, it is about despising the notion that America might like to envision itself in the coming centuries as a socialist democracy with real equality for everyone, rather than equality for a few in a continuing thuggish, capitalistic democracy.
Most of all, it is about race and skin color.
Sadly, the tea party gives us the narrative of the offspring of the early immigrants who are coming to the sad conclusion that they can no longer "take" the land and the resources as their forebears did. But their belief that they are entitled to do so is a strong belief in the idea that any worthwhile history in this country is their history.
To "take back America," the cry of the tea bag party, means what it has always meant to early settlers: that they have the right to take America.
This entitlement has always given meaning to settlers in this new land: early Europeans and their offspring who settled on the east coast in the 1700s and 1800s are "real" Americans. The English, German, Scandinavian settlers and the Irish, Bosnians, French, Bohemians and Scottish are the "real" Americans who forged westward.
If there is one thing that the natives who met them at the boat knew, it was how to live in this land without destroying it. They did that for thousands of years, yet the European immigrant has never gotten it.
Their theft and occupation of native lands has, unfortunately, threatened the continent in ways native peoples had never imagined: dust bowls, thousands of nuclear bombs at the ready, decades of war, republicanism, raging and aggressive capitalism, oceans smeared with oil and set afire, and on and on. There is no room for the Indian people who have occupied this continent for centuries.
Make no mistake, this cry of "take our country back" by the tea partiers is about race, skin color and discrimination.
Since no one can credibly claim that the Mayans Aztecs, Yakima, Sioux and the Hopi are illegal immigrants, it is about erasing their histories and substituting them with a new cry from the all non-white settlers of the country: "Show me your papers".
This never works on the long term in a country, nor did it work in Nazi Germany decades ago. It didn't even work when Red Cloud signed a treaty in 1868 at Fort Laramie that said white men had to show their "papers" to get permission to enter the Great Sioux Lands of the West.
Instead of "showing their papers" the U.S. Army was called out to invade the borderlands. Custer did not "show his papers", nor did anyone in his 7th cavalry.
The treaty borders were overrun by "illegal immigrants" and Custer's parade of European militants. Apparently, Custer has won the war in the minds of American settlers everywhere, thus, "taking" America and "taking back" America are synonymous historically.
Like Custer, the tea partiers will take what they can.
The national crusade of "Take Back America" by tea party activists and the Arizona Legislature is as bigoted as it is absurd. It will catch on in states like Missouri, South Carolina, and the Dakotas.
The crusade is about "illegal immigrants" and the theory of white European immigration as the settlers know it.
It's also about the hostility of a nation that prides itself on being a nation of immigrants, while ironically putting up fences to keep neighbors from Mexico out. It's a little like the gated communities so popular in the cities of our country.
The theory is that anyone coming here since 1900 is not eligible. When White Europeans made up the census of newcomers, when Africans were considered barely surviving slave populations, and indigenous peoples were thought to be inferior and vanishing, it was a world, then, the settlers said, for the "taking".
Today, it is about the need of America to see itself as an all-white majority regime. It is about losing the white-only power maintained for 200 years.
It's about a black president in a white-power country. Tea partiers expect Barack Obama to "show his papers" (birth certificate) in public over and over again because he is a black man who they believe has no right to the presidency.
It is about segregating Indians in 1880, and African slaves in 1860, and "taking" whatever white power has wanted.
Today, it is about despising the notion that America might like to envision itself in the coming centuries as a socialist democracy with real equality for everyone, rather than equality for a few in a continuing thuggish, capitalistic democracy.
Most of all, it is about race and skin color.
Sadly, the tea party gives us the narrative of the offspring of the early immigrants who are coming to the sad conclusion that they can no longer "take" the land and the resources as their forebears did. But their belief that they are entitled to do so is a strong belief in the idea that any worthwhile history in this country is their history.
To "take back America," the cry of the tea bag party, means what it has always meant to early settlers: that they have the right to take America.
This entitlement has always given meaning to settlers in this new land: early Europeans and their offspring who settled on the east coast in the 1700s and 1800s are "real" Americans. The English, German, Scandinavian settlers and the Irish, Bosnians, French, Bohemians and Scottish are the "real" Americans who forged westward.
If there is one thing that the natives who met them at the boat knew, it was how to live in this land without destroying it. They did that for thousands of years, yet the European immigrant has never gotten it.
Their theft and occupation of native lands has, unfortunately, threatened the continent in ways native peoples had never imagined: dust bowls, thousands of nuclear bombs at the ready, decades of war, republicanism, raging and aggressive capitalism, oceans smeared with oil and set afire, and on and on. There is no room for the Indian people who have occupied this continent for centuries.
Make no mistake, this cry of "take our country back" by the tea partiers is about race, skin color and discrimination.
Since no one can credibly claim that the Mayans Aztecs, Yakima, Sioux and the Hopi are illegal immigrants, it is about erasing their histories and substituting them with a new cry from the all non-white settlers of the country: "Show me your papers".
This never works on the long term in a country, nor did it work in Nazi Germany decades ago. It didn't even work when Red Cloud signed a treaty in 1868 at Fort Laramie that said white men had to show their "papers" to get permission to enter the Great Sioux Lands of the West.
Instead of "showing their papers" the U.S. Army was called out to invade the borderlands. Custer did not "show his papers", nor did anyone in his 7th cavalry.
The treaty borders were overrun by "illegal immigrants" and Custer's parade of European militants. Apparently, Custer has won the war in the minds of American settlers everywhere, thus, "taking" America and "taking back" America are synonymous historically.
Like Custer, the tea partiers will take what they can.
to see that the Sioux tribe is just as diverse as the rest of the country. Racism is alive and well. Hello pot, meet kettle.
