Multicultural Psychology. Jennifer T. Pedrotti
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arose. Through European colonialization and the slave trade in Africa and the Americas, this notion of race would intertwine with class and gender and become woven into the fabric of our developing nation.
Sociohistorical Context of our Contemporary World
Native Peoples
In A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, Takaki (2008) described the numerous tribes whose histories include prophecies and dreams that “had anticipated the coming of the strangers” (p. 27). He recounted a dream from an Ojibwa prophet years before the arrival of the Europeans:
Men of strange appearance have come across the great water. Their skins are white like snow, and on canoes which have great white wings like that of a giant bird. The men have long and sharp knives, and they have long black tubes which they point at birds and animals. The tubes make a smoke that rises into the air just like the smoke from our pipes. From them come fire and such terrific noise that I was frightened, even in my dream. (p. 27)
The dreams and prophesies all ended the same, with loss of native land and “death to the red man.”
Numerous European settlements in what would become the United States recorded early interactions with Native peoples, encounters that saved countless European lives and were key to colony survival. Soon, European desire for more land ultimately led to the genocide (physical and cultural) of Indigenous populations.
Burial of the dead at the battlefield of Wounded Knee
Throughout the Americas it is estimated Native American population size was reduced by more than 90%, from approximately 100 million to nearly 10 million, and land holdings by more than 97% (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2015). Specific numbers for the United States are disputed, but it is estimated that a population of somewhere between 5 million and 15 million Native Americans in 1492 was down to a mere 237,000 by the 1800s. Today, the Indigenous population in the United States is at nearly 3 million, but they are still often seen as an “invisible” people. Their representation in popular culture, when we see their images at all, is either as romanticized (mystical, spiritual, and able to speak to nature) figures or as a tragic vestige of our past.
In a time of increasing public attention to police brutality, it has gone largely unnoticed that, according to the US Centers for Disease Control, Native Americans are killed in police encounters at a higher rate than any other racial group (Hansen, 2017).
The racializing of Native peoples became the justification for slaughter, poisonings, crop destruction, war, and massacres—all for the sake of land. The same people who brought food to starving English settlers and taught them about crop rotation, fertilization, and weed management had a new identity constructed for them—“the lazy savage.” Imagine the cognitive dissonance produced by a human being brutalizing another, especially if that person had helped or saved you. In order to justify our treatment of Native Americans, we had to dehumanize them, make them into something else, “the other.”
Takaki records,
As the English population increased and as their settlements expanded, the settlers needed even more land. To justify the taking of territory, the colonizers argued that the original inhabitants were not entitled to the land, for they lacked a work ethic. … Indian deaths were viewed as the destruction of devil worshippers … [and] what was forged in the violent dispossession of the original inhabitants was an ideology that demonized the “savages” (2008, pp. 41–42).
Figure 2.1 shows a timeline of Native American history.
Figure 2.1 Native American Timeline
African Americans and the Construction of Whiteness: The Intersections of Race, Class, and Gender
The increased immigration of Europeans also signaled the need for increased labor sources. In those early years, a number of ways to meet the growing labor demands were explored—enslavement of Native Americans and Africans, the indentured service of Whites and Africans, and a wage labor force of landless Whites, Native Americans, and free and freed Africans. Before 1676, landless Whites and free or freed Africans married, had children, were friends and neighbors, and worked alongside each other as laborers. Part of the story of the “naturalness” of our racial divide is that it has always been with us, that it is an expected outcome of different people coming in contact with each other. Contrary to that narrative is the reality of our history. There were interracial communities of working-class folks, people who lived and loved and worked and rebelled together. Our nation’s history includes this time of racial integration. So what happened in 1676? Bacon’s Rebellion. It is difficult to fully capture the impact this period in US history has had on our class, gender, and racial present and the intersecting nature of those constructs.
Increased European populations and the profitability of tobacco created a land rush, but the elite, in places like Virginia, wanted to solidify and maintain their growing wealth and political power. Among their efforts, the elite passed laws increasing the length of indentured servanthood, which limited competition for land and increased sources of labor. Landless Whites became frustrated by their economic and political limitations and, joined by free Africans, they rebelled against unfair labor practices and legislative controls. Bacon’s Rebellion was born. Takaki writes, “A colonial official reported that Bacon had raised an army of soldiers ‘whose fortunes and inclinations’ were ‘desperate.’ Bacon had unleashed an armed interracial ‘giddy multitude’ that threatened the very foundations of social order in Virginia.” Ultimately stopped, the rebellion became known as the largest to take place before the Revolution (Takaki, 2008, pp. 59–60).
Following the rebellion, the elites enacted a series of new laws designed to disempower the working class and break up the “multitude.” They did so along racial lines, specifically through the deepening of the racial divide and the construction of Whiteness. If meaning and privilege could be given to the idea of Whiteness, then the laboring class would be divided, and thus pose less of a threat to the elite. The decision was made to concentrate on the African slave trade as the primary source of labor. “What the landed gentry systematically developed after the insurrection was a labor force based on caste” (Takaki, 2008, p. 61).
Slavery required a justification. We could not psychologically manage or ensure broader social buy-in for a system with the level of death, rape, and intentional destruction the peculiar institution of slavery held without making Africans other. Before the Constitution was written declaring that slaves would be considered three fifths human, we developed the ideas and enacted the policies that furthered the process of dehumanization. As we had seen with Native Americans before, Black maleness came to symbolize savagery and violence, and the construction of Black femaleness was formed around sexuality. Following Bacon’s Rebellion, new policy helped solidify these ideas into the minds of the populace and create stereotypes and structural divides that extend into today.
Harsher slave laws were enacted, denying slaves freedom of assembly and movement. Slave militia patrols were established to monitor slave quarters and plantations to prevent runaways or unlawful assembly. It became illegal for Blacks to be educated and for Blacks to carry any kind of weapon. Expansion of the definition of who was Black led to the “one drop rule,” and by 1723, “free property-owning blacks, mulattos, and native Americans … were denied the right to vote” (Buck, 2016, p. 22).
Simultaneously, Whiteness had to be defined and taught to Whites. (There will be more on Whiteness in Chapter 6). A 1691 law worsened the punishment for White women who married African or Indian men, and Buck writes,
A changing panoply of specific laws molded European behavior into patterns that made slave revolt and cross-race unity