Civilizing Citizens with Couth & Culture

We have had immigration issues since heaven knows when, but it began when those white European invaders started taking over native American lands in order to bring in slaves from Africa to see if capitalism would work with free labor. The art of the treaty was used to bring about this change, and military power was used to ratify everything.

The Doak’s Stand Treaty was invented in my part of Mississippi in 1820 and served as good example of how great a deal this was for the Choctaw tribes whose land was about to be had for plantations. They were “free” to move to Arkansas with the rest of their kind if they would sell their tract of land to white settlers and use the profit to pay for that trip along the trail of tears. For those who wanted to stay put the following article was part of the Treaty: The boundaries hereby established between the Choctaw Indians and the United States, on this side of the Mississippi river, shall remain without alteration until the period at which said nation shall become so civilized and enlightened as to be made citizens of the United States, and Congress shall lay of a limited parcel of land for the benefit of each family or individual in the nation. …

Becoming “civilized and enlightened” involved giving up more than just the land. They had to change their ways of dressing; their religion would necessarily become Christian; and they had to think like the white folk who had stolen their birthrights in the name of some manifest destiny that formed this nation’s core value. Later on, none of this was to be mentioned in history for the sake of critical racial theories.

Many moons ago, one of our kids came home from middle school and let us know that the social studies teacher was skipping the the chapter on Native Americans. His reason: all they do is whine. That’s a pretty critical approach to racial differences, in theory and in practice.

Here’s an enlightening quote from the Library of Congress: “It’s often overlooked that self-government in America was practiced by Native Americans long before the formation of the United States government. And yet, Native Americans faced centuries of struggle before acquiring full U.S. citizenship and legal protection of their voting rights.” Only “civilized and enlightened” Americans, those with couth and culture, enough education to read and write, and some wherewithal, deserve the right to vote!

This also applied to African Americans. In 1961, less than 7% of Mississippi Blacks were registered to vote. And of those few on the voter rolls, only a handful dared to actually cast a ballot. You must remember that the literacy test required a person seeking to register to vote to read a section of the state constitution and explain it to the white county clerk who processed voter registrations. When I went to register to vote during this time, I offered to help an older and obviously illiterate black couple read the state’s constitution. The clerk told me to mind my own business, and that particular voting discrepancy has been my business ever since.

History has a ferocious and finicky way of repeating and contradicting itself. Remember the great horned hoodlum [or ill-clad tourist] in Trump’s militaristic minions who led the insurrection against our nation on January 6? He and his political cronies favor even more voter suppression, pointing to a pitiful deficit in their own couth and culture. Maybe all he and his kind can do is whine.