american-holocaust

APPENDIX IIOn Racism and GenocideIn the preceding pages I have referred repeatedly to European and whiteAmerican attitudes toward the native peoples of the Americas as "racist"and to the Euro-Americans' furious destruction of the native peoples ofthe Americas as "genocide." The definitions of both these terms have beensubject to discussion in recent years. Some readers may have wished to seein the text reference to those discussions, but to do so would have necessitatedlengthy digressions that other readers might have found more distractingthan enlightening. Therefore, I have added as an appendix thefollowing remarks.There are various ways in which cultures can construct ideologies of degradation,and such ideologies can be, and are, attached to any number ofcharacteristics that serve to socially transform a collection of individualswithin a culture into a group-gender, nationality, age, sexual preference,social and economic class, religion, and much else, including race. It is racethat is the issue here. And the question, as it has been posed (and answeredin opposing ways) in recent years is this: Did those Europeans and earlyAmerican white colonists treat Indians and Africans as they did at least inpart because of a racist ideology that long had been in place-or was Euro­American racism in the Americas a later development, even a product ofwhite versus Indian and white versus black conflict? In short, which camefirst, the carrying out of terrible and systematic damage to others or theideology of degradation?To some, understandably, this may seem an academic question, in theworst sense of that term. After all, to the American native woman havingher breasts cut off by sadistically gleeful Spanish conquistadors, or watch-