Cassady
Tim Cassady
Instructor Louise H. Brown
English 1050
April 17th, 2012
How does our country move forward?
The United States of America is a relatively young country. However, in our short
time as a nation, we have gone through many difficult issues and made great strides in
overcoming them. Our nation has battled issues of race and equality that have
threatened to tear it apart. We have suffered through being a colony of an imperialistic
country and have, in turn, been accused of being imperialistic. Yet, our country has
always found ways to survive and become a stronger nation for it. But we still have not
gotten to our point of arrival, equality for everybody.
Several of our readings throughout the semester have covered the issues of race
and equality. From Frederick Douglass’ biting speech on the fourth of July to President
Obama’s impassioned call for a “more perfect Union”, we have wrestled in this class
with the concepts of equality. Not only do we strive for racial equality, but for equality
among gender, religion, and sexual orientation. I find it disheartening to watch the news
and see just how far we have to go. Two recent news stories have brought these
inequalities to the forefront. The first being the Trayvon Martin v. Zimmerman case in
which a black teen was killed, but the killer was not arrested at the time. George
Zimmerman has since been arrested and charged. This case has included some racial
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overtures and has caused a division in our country. The second is the inequality of pay
between the genders. Today, women in America only make 70 percent of the salary her
male counterpart makes. As far as we have come as a nation, events like these
underscore that there is still a long way to go.
From the very beginnings of American history, we have believed in our own
superiority as a white culture. Discrimination does not always present itself in the form a
physical wrong as it did with slavery, or the mistreatment of Asian immigrants, or the
repression of the Mexican culture in America. In my mind, a far worse form of
discrimination is to disregard another cultures very existence. In Jane Tompkins
reading, Indians: Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History, she is reviewing
researcher Perry Miller and trying to make sense of the discrepancy in history’s
portrayal of Native Americans. She surmises that “It isn’t that Miller didn’t “see” the
black men, in a literal sense, any more than it’s the case that when he looked back he
didn’t “see” the Indians, in the sense of not realizing they were there. Rather, it’s that
neither the Indians nor the blacks counted for him, in a fundamental way (459).” This
attitude gave rise to the concept of Manifest Destiny which is built on the premise that it
is the “white person’s” god given right to expand across this continent without regard to
the Native Americans which inhabited the land before we even arrived. So we pushed
the Native Americans from their land through deceit and force because they just didn’t
count.
Not only did we nearly eradicate the Native Americans through disease, we stole
their lands, cheated them, and forced them onto reservations which we generously
declared “theirs”. We as American’s believe our ideals to be above reproach. We chose
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to gloss over and forget about the injustices we have caused. We do not like to being
reminded of our past transgressions. So when Warren Neidich presented his
photographs in the Contra Curtis visual essay, photography critic Christopher Phillips
deemed it “Neidich’s photographs might be described as attempts at visual sedition, or
local campaigns of “critical disinformation.” (473)” What was the reason for this
‘sedition’? Because Neidich’s photographs were a re-enactment of some of the truly
brutal injustices and abuses we put upon the Native American tribes. The problem with
trying to rewrite or forget about the unsavory parts of history is that you never learn from
your mistakes. This is evident in our handling of slavery.
In a speech to dignitaries, Frederick Douglass asked “What, to the American
Slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in
the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. (484)” At the
time that Frederick Douglass delivered this speech, the slave trade was not only still
legal but a thriving business. Mr. Douglass was calling into question America’s
hypocrisy about celebrating their freedom from the English Empire while at the same
time allowing for the injustice towards his people to go unchecked. We eventually
abolished slavery and many years later gave black people a voice in the country’s
government. Unfortunately, this is a reoccurring theme throughout America’s history.
We did not learn our lesson from the painful practice of slavery. We have engaged in
inequality and unjust practices with just about every ethnicity not of European decent.
Arguably, two of our country’s ugliest periods in history, the issue of slavery and
the treatment of the Indians. They were difficult times to overcome and correct, and
literally tore this nation apart during the Civil War. Having been through these tough
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times, you would hope to learn from the past mistakes and look at the world with clearer
eyes and open minds. However, not even twenty years after the end of the Civil War,
we pass the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. We as a country targeted Asians for
exclusion and interned them on Angel Island. We treated them as prisoners whose only
crime was to want a better life in America but were born in an Asian country. We denied
them acceptance to our country and treated them as lesser people. We did it again
during World War II, only this time we did it to our own citizens. After the bombing of
Pearl Harbor, we rounded up Americans of Japanese descent, labeled them as
potential threats, and locked them up in internment camps.
In today’s America, we still struggle with the questions of equality for all. There is
still discrimination and injustice. Just pick up the daily newspaper and you could
probably pick out half a dozen stories that are related in inequality. Tuesday, April 17th
2012 marked “equality” day in America. While that sounds good, it is not. Equality day is
the day in the calendar that a female worker in this country has finally matched the pay
that a male counterpart made in 2011. Another story you might read is concerning the
Martin v. Zimmerman case in which a black teen was killed because the neighborhood
watch captain thought he was up to no good. Why, because Martin was a black teen
wearing a hoodie? Other stories focus on gay rights in our country, illegal immigration,
border security, class warfare, etc. We fight to keep the “Others” out of our cities and
neighborhoods.
In Mike Davis’s article Fortress Los Angeles: The militarization of Urban Space,
he paints a picture of an unwelcoming city where the disadvantaged are denied a space
of their own, are treatment inhumanely, or sequestered in Skid Row. He writes
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“…deporting them to a poor farm on the edge of the desert, confining them in camps in
the mountains, or interning them on derelict ferries in the harbor – such “final solutions”
have been blocked by council members’ fears of the displacement of the homeless int
their districts. Instead the city, self-consciously adopting the idiom of cold war, has
promoted the “containment” (the official term) of the homeless in Skid Row (296)…”
Instead of helping these disadvantaged people, we want to isolate them, hide them
away. He speaks of business areas as fortresses meant to limit contact with the
unwanted. This isn’t the freedom and equality that our fore fathers had in mind.
Even though we keep repeating our mistakes, and we still struggle with issues of
equality, advancements have been made. In 2008, a black senator from Illinois made a
campaign speech that is considered one of the great speeches on race in our country’s
history. President Obama made this speech to address issues of race and his
association with Reverend Wright, who the Republican Party tried to portray as a
seditious, anti-American figure. He acknowledges that race has been an issue during
the campaign but always believed that there is always hope. He said “… working
together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in face we have
no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union (498).” And that is
the important message that I got from that speech, we need to do it together.
Our country’s history, like every other country that has ever existed, is not
perfect. We have made our mistakes and we have made sincere attempts to make them
right. I cannot predict whether we will ever reach the desired outcome of equality for all.
However, it is up to every individual to do what he or she can to push for this goal.
Whether it through little actions in their own lives or as leaders of a larger movement,
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we can all contribute to a better, more just, future for everyone. As Frederick Douglass
so eloquently said, “But now is the time, the important time. Your fathers have lived,
died, and have done their work, and have done much of it well. You live and must die,
and you must do your work (482).” The issues that face our country, as well as the
entire human race, are not issues to be solved in one generation or one lifetime. They
are solutions that need to be built upon through many generations until we see our
neighbors not in terms of race, religion, or gender but as a people, people with the same
hopes, dreams, and feelings as they do. And that is how we should move forward as a
country. We take it one step at a time.
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Works Cited
Davis, Mike. "Fortress Los Angeles: The Militarization of Urban Space." George, Diana and Timbur, John.
Reading Culture: Contexts for Critical Reading and Writing. n.d. 294-299. Print.
Douglass, Frederick. "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" George, Diana and Timbur, John. Reading
Culture: Contexts for Critical Reading and Writing. n.d. 477-492. Print.
Obama, Barack. "A More Perfect Union." George, Diana and Timbur, John. Reading Culture: Context for
Critical Reading and Writing. n.d. 493-500. Print.
Phillips, Christopher. "Neccessary Fictions: Warren Neidich's Early American Cover-Ups." George, Diana
and Timbur, John. Reading Culture: Contexts for Critical Reading and Writing. n.d. 470-476.
Print.
Tompkins, Jane. "'Indians' : Textualism, Morality, and the Problems of History." George, Diana and
Timbur, John. Reading Culture: Contexts for Critical Reading and Writing. n.d. 456-470. Print.
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