american-holocaust

270 APPENDIX IIing her infant thrown to a pack of dogs--or to the native man about tobe impaled on a sword of European manufacture, or watching his villageand his family being burned to cinders by Puritans who boasted that "ourMouth [was] filled with Laughter, and our Tongues with Singing" whilethey attempted to exterminate an entire people from the earth-it no doubtmattered little whether the genocidal racism of their tormentors had precededor followed from the first meetings of their societies. 1 If such questionsconcern us now, for reasons other than academic curiosity, they doso in order that we may better understand how such horrors could havebeen perpetrated and how-perhaps-they may be anticipated and avoidedin the future. Moreover, like many other matters of ivory tower pedigree,this one carries with it an inner element of real world political contentiousness.This is why, for many years, addressing it has caused such scholarlydisagreement. That the answer to this question matters can best be seenby reviewing the ways historians have approached the issue first as it pertainsto African Americans and then to Indians.Until well into the twentieth century most white American historiansspent little time arguing over the chronological priority of racism or slaveryin the historical mistreatment of Africans in America. This was so fora reason that by itself is revealing: it was not a subject that lent itself todisagreement because those historians' own low regard for blacks was sosecond nature to them that they simply assumed it to be a natural, justified,and nearly universal attitude, and one that thereby must have longpredated the formal enslavement of Africans. And the formal enslavementof blacks in America, they assumed, certainly began immediately upon theinvoluntary arrival in the colonies of the first Africans in 1619.Although there were some earlier historians who raised questions thathad bearing on this matter, it was not until the 1950s that they began topropose, in numbers and with some vigor, the thesis that slavery had precededracism in America. 2 Working within a social climate to which theycould not have been immune, a climate that was registering a rising chorusof insistent claims by African Americans for equal access to the social andpolitical benefits of American life, these historians contended that slaveryemerged gradually as an institution, following the first arrivals of blacksin North America, and that racism emerged still later, in part as a rationalefor the maintenance of what by then had become a racially defined slavesociety. 3 Although this was an argument not without some documentarysupport, it also was an argument suited to the politics of academic liberalswho then were coming to agree with historian Kenneth Stampp that "innatelyNegroes are, after all, only white men with black skins, nothingmore, nothing less." 4From this political and ethical perspective-in the midst of a civil rights .movement that was attempting to make such integrationist ideals conformwith reality-the liberal historian's notion that racism was, in Winthrop