american-holocaust

ON RACISM AND GENOCIDE 277understandings and injustices [that] occurred" while the British were onlytrying "to convert, civilize, and educate [the Indian] as quickly as possible."24During the 1970s and early 1980s, however, a series of books byhistorians taking a second look at these matters reached very different conclusions.Wilbur R. Jacobs, Francis Jennings, Richard Drinnon, and NealSalisbury were only four among many during this time who rang downthe curtain on the view that the colonists in their dealings with the Indianswere kind and gentle souls. 25 Following their work, there remained littledoubt that the colonists were driven by a racist zeal to eliminate the Indians-atleast once the major colonist-Indian wars had gotten under way.But remaining to be addressed was the same question that had for so longentangled historians studying white minds and black slavery: Did the adventurersand colonists bring with them racist attitudes that predisposedthem to such inhumane treatment of people of color, or did those attitudesemerge after and derive from their experience with the people they laterenslaved and destroyed?It should be clear from the discussion in Chapter Six of this book thatSpanish, English, and other European attitudes toward the native peoplesof the Americas were virulently racist long before the settlement of thefirst British colony in North America. Although European mistreatment ofpeople because of a perception of them as racially different is a very ancientpractice, a dramatic shift to a rigid European attitude toward race ingeneral was becoming evident in the fourteenth century with the Church'sauthorization of the enslavement of Christians if their ancestry was non­European, and it escalated from that point forward with an able assistfrom the Spanish doctrine of limpieza de sangre and the other sixteenthcenturyEuropean pseudobiological and religious rationales discussed earlier.It is impossible to read the voluminous Spanish justifications for theenslavement and mass murder of the Americas' native peoples-as well asthe sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century statements of the British onthe same subjects-without recognizing their deeply racist content. Impossible,that is, unless you carefully define racism so narrowly that it is certainnot to be found.And that is what has begun to happen in recent years. Race, of course,is a social construct that different societies create in different ways, drawingon supposedly "natural" characteristics in people that are held to becongenital; racism is the ideological use of such a construct to subordinateand dominate another group. Nevertheless, in scholarly imitation of theman who searches for his lost keys under a lamp post because the light isbetter there-even though he knows he dropped his keys a block away- .Alden T. Vaughan has now invented the idea that racism cannot exist inthe absence of negative statements about another group's skin color. Notsurprisingly, in the light cast by this particular lamp post, he has foundlittle explicit Anglo-American disparagement of Indians' skin color in the