Gary Okihiro

Okihiro Gary

Kwansei Gakuin University Repository

?????????????? 3?2014? 11? 6?From One to Many Peoples : A New History of the USAGary OKIHIRO(Professor, Columbia University)The context as I understand it is that this is the School of International Studies, so you all should be inter-ested in a global world. A kind of complete understanding of the human condition rather than a national one.Or even a regional one. So with that in mind toward a global understanding, I would like to introduce to youthe idea of US history.An ancient Chinese view says America is a country in a far-away place with strange birds and animals. Thatis fantastic. That is amazing because the national history centers the United States. The United States is thecenter of the world, if not the universe. Everything else does not matter ; it’s just about the United States. Butwhen you think about how other people might view the United States as that distant land with strange birdsand animals, you think that is really interesting. Okay, I am a foreigner to that country, the United States. (Mygrandparents migrated to the US from Japan and Okinawa.) I am purporting to write the history of that nationas a foreigner, an outsider to that society. Even though I was born there, grew up there, and I speak their lan-guage and was educated at their schools, I was brainwashed into thinking like them mainly because of my lan-guage (English) and education. Still, I’m an outsider. White Americans still ask me where I come from as ifI’m an alien. And that’s what I want to talk about.E pluribus unum : this is the model of the United States. You see it on the dollar bill. Have you looked attheir money? You know what that means, right? In English, “Out of many, one.” That’s what it means. “Out ofmany, one.” But in my title, I reverse that. “Out of one, many.” The reason for this model of unity obviously isto create a nation and a people. But what it does not depict is the truth about the United States and its forma-tions. And what I think is the historical reality is that the United States began as what we call a settler colony.Now, a settler colony . . . You know what a colony is, right? That is when a nation leaves its place, goes toanother territory and takes that territory, and colonizes it with its people, its government, its forms, and soforth. A settler colony is when those people from that country, the colonizing power, forms a new nation. Ex-amples of settler colonies are the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Those aresettler colonies.Now, as a settler colony, these are foreign people to America. In America, there were already people there?American Indians. And by the way, that’s a false name, right? Because Columbus thought he had found India.The people therefore were Indians. Wrong name, but it stuck. Those native peoples then, American Indians,lived there in America. The settler colony from England took over and became the United States. They createdborders between themselves and the Indians. They built a fence, a line, and they said this is our land and that’syour land. You stay on that side and we stay on our side. When you come to our country, you are a foreigner,you are an alien in our country. So those foreigners said that we belong here. And those people who belongedthere became foreigners. That’s the story that I wanted to talk about.So when the nation began, the United States began after its revolution from Great Britain and its independ-ence, and formed nation, a new nation, right? And that new nation was conceived of as one people. John Jay,? ??? ?who was a graduate of Columbia University where I teach today, and there is a hall there, a John Jay Hall, anda statue outside the hall. He was the first chief justice of the United States Supreme Court. He was also a co-author of the Federalist Papers, which lay the foundations for the republic’s government. He said Americans areone people. Descendants from a common ancestor, speaking the same language, sharing the same culture andreligion. One people. Now, you know that the word nation comes from “to be born.” Nation. “To be born”means you are related by blood. Blood relations. The people of one nation are comprised of one race. That’sthe idea. This is a European Enlightenment idea in the 17th and 18th centuries. Nation, people, one race. Sothose who did not belong to the race are not part of that nation/people/race. So like I said, American Indiansbecame aliens on their own land. That was the case with the United States right up to when the Indians becamecitizens of the United States, first in 1924.That is an interesting concept. When the United States was still a colony in 1669, an African American manwanted to deed the land to his son. The Virginia Colony said that this Mr. Johnson is a Negro, and as a conse-quence, an alien. That is, African Americans were not citizens within the colony. And indeed, in the first Con-stitution of the nation, 1787, Article One specifies the people of these United States. “We the people” did notinclude African Americans. It said we are to ennumerate or count all persons and three-fifths all “other” per-sons. What they were talking about was the representative government where the number of people would de-termine the number of representatives sent to Congress. So you needed to ennumerate or count the peoplewithin the nation. And they said all persons meaning Europeans, and all “other” persons meaning AfricanAmericans. Three-fifths. They were not even one person. And, indeed, in 1854 the US Supreme Court ruled inDred Scott that African Americans were never intended to be citizens of these United States. In fact, AfricanAmericans were property. Property. Possession. Sort of like the land. Only after the Civil War did AfricanAmericans gain their freedom and then they became counted as citizens within the United States. So the 13th,14th, and 15th Amendments that outlaws slavery, that promises equality under the law, and gives AfricanAmerican men the right to vote happened in 1865, 1868, 1870. For most of the nation’s history up to that pointAfrican Americans were not a part of the nation.Q : So you mentioned Native Americans and African Americans. I’ve heard that there were a lot of whiteslaves taken from Ireland. Are the Irish white people?A : That’s a very good question. Because whiteness is an invented social category and whiteness changed overtime. So there were a lot of European indentures. And in fact, there were more European indentures than Afri-can slaves in the early colony in Virginia. And indentured servants were treated just as harshly as slaves, asproperty. For example, I forgot the percentage of indentures who actually died on the passage across the Atlan-tic because of foul conditions onboard the ship. A lot of indentured women were raped by their masters. Andindentures suffered physical abuse.So harsh treatment was uniform across racial lines among African slaves and European indentures. But thoseEuropean indentures were for a limited period of time. Four to seven years after which they gained their free-dom. They were in fact counted as potential citizens even as indentures. So the US Constitution included themwithin the definition of all persons even though they might have been bound and not free.Now that’s a very interesting question because in 1675 in Virginia colony, whites and blacks joined togetheragainst the central or colonial power. They rose up in what is called Bacon’s Rebellion. What the rebels wantedwas land. The land of course belonged to native peoples. But they wanted to expand, to get more land so theycould farm and become tobacco producers. After Bacon’s Rebellion was put down in 1676, the colonial gov-??????????? Vol.4 No.1? ??? ?ernment said that land or property can only be held by white people, not blacks. And what that did was toseparate whites from blacks to prevent them from joining together as a common oppressed class, a group ofpeople.So it is important to remember that race is not constant, and that it requires power to impose. That is thatpeople create races, people create genders. I’m talking about men and women. The definition of men andwomen are created. They are human inventions. And then they are imposed. There are laws against crossing,against mixing, against blurring those boundaries. And there is a reason for that. The reason is control. Humanbeings, regardless, can choose to violate those borders. And we have routinely done that. That capacity to vio-late borders gives us reason for optimism because humans can fight the power.Wait, am I confusing? All right. In 1787 the Constitution, three-fifth of all “other” persons. In 1790 the firstUS Census in fact counted white people including indentures as persons, and African Americans were called“others.” That’s from the first Census in terms of representation as specified in Article One of the Constitution.In 1790, the Congress passed the Naturalization Act. You know what naturalization is? Naturalization is a veryinteresting term. It recalls nature, what is natural. Natural is God given, or by design. It’s the physical law. Butnaturalization is a human act. A conversion of a foreigner to a citizen. Naturalization. That’s the process wherea foreigner becomes a citizen. The 1790 Naturalization Act says only “free white persons” can gain naturaliza-tion. That is, to be a citizen an immigrant had to be a free white person. Freedom or a condition of class orclass status and whiteness, which is a variable category that expanded over time were the requirements for UScitizenship through naturalization. Since 1790 and because of the Naturalization Act, Asians were considered“aliens ineligible to citizenship” right down to 1952. I remember my grandfather after 1952 becoming a citizeneven though he had lived in an American territory for over 50 years before that. He only could become a citi-zen in 1952.Okay, so what I’m arguing is that the nation began as one people. And that oneness was predicated uponwhiteness, which was defined differently throughout the nation’s history but remained constant as a privilegedcategory. In Dred Scott, chief justice Roger Taney declared that white people were the “citizen race” and all“others” or non-whites stood outside that category. The “citizen race.” That’s pretty clear, right? What thatmeans is that the United States consists of one, not many people. But when African Americans, when Ameri-can Indians, when Asians became citizens of the United States, it was an American revolution. It was revolu-tionary because it changed the nature of the nation and its people. It just changed it from one to many. Nowyou think today that the United States is multicultural, diverse, and so forth, right? The myth is that the nationwas always like that. But it’s not true. The US began as one people and hundreds of years later it becamemany. And it became many because people, whites and non-whites, fought for inclusion within that category ofcitizens. They fought for that. Struggled. Died for that right to become citizens. And once they became citizens,they changed the nature of that nation totally. It was a revolution. The American Revolution just simply contin-ued British or settler hegemony in North America. It was not a real revolution. It was a continuation of theoriginal settler colony.Q : President Obama was badly defeated several days ago. I’m specifically interested in Southern culture. Iwas in Georgia and one thing that impressed me when Obama was elected president of the United States wasthe fact that many southern states that composed the old Civil War Confederacy, all the southern states wereopposed to his being elected as president. Do you think southern people are basically even today rather sensi-tive about skin color? I understand that the South has been changed a lot, but at the same time when some new????????????? 3? ??? ?power, when a movement heading for the future arises, some strong power that tries to stop it or that tries todraw it back arises. So the progress of the South seems to be very contradictory. Heading for the future but atthe same time the power of the past is very, very strong. I’m a literature major and I have read a lot of Faulk-ner and southern writers. Do you think even today that sort of contradictory movement still persists in theSouth? I’m sorry my question is not directly connected to your talk.A : I think it is a very interesting and connected question, but it’s also complicated. And let me just answer itthis way. There are regional distinctions within the United States. And the regional differences at least regard-ing race involves the history of race within that particular region. So what I mean is like the US South, the big-gest racial binary is black and white. And the reason is historical ; in some states in fact black people outnum-ber white people. So demographically they mattered a great deal. Economically African Americans mattered agreat deal, too, because labor was principally derived from them, not exclusively but largely. There is also alegacy of the war, the Civil War, which some saw as a kind of northern conspiracy against southern populismor agrarianism. Many whites in the South felt put upon by the North’s capitalist, industrial might. So there is akind of defensiveness also in that regard. But it’s also interesting to know that throughout US history, I think,there is a conflict between unity and diversity. This idea of one people versus many. That is fairly constantthroughout US history. And the reason is because many people feel that diversity harms, threatens the nation.In fact I mentioned John Jay. When John Jay made that declaration about one people, one ancestor, one culture,the title of his article was “Concerning Foreign Dangers.” In other words, he saw diversity as a threat to na-tional unity, and he didn’t mean African Americans. He meant French. Jay believed that foreign influenceswould divide and destroy the nation. That was the idea.So what I’m saying is that diversity and unity has been a pretty recurrent theme throughout US history rightdown to this present day. And I believe that those ideas involve power and the relations of power, whether it ispolitical, economic, or social or as we say cultural. All of those exert power. And I think that history, meaninga unitary history, a history of one people out of many, that kind of history is important for making the citizenssafe for democracy. Make people safe for democracy is taught in schools. We read that in our history booksover and over again. Like Japan is one people, right? One people. One people! Never mind the diversity ofclass, of gender, of ethnicity. No, one people. There is a powerful kind of draw for that. And the power is thepower of the nation state, trying to impose its will on its people. The philosopher Louis Althusser writes aboutthat, how the state and its apparatuses like schools, religion, and so forth influence our consciousness, how wethink of ourselves. So we think of ourselves as Japanese, we think of ourselves in a particular way. LikeAmericans must think in a particular way. And if you deviate from those norms, you become threats to the sta-bility of the nation. Unsafe.I remember very distinctly, after 9/11, when the United States experienced these murderous attacks at threemajor targets, I was in New York City where the Twin Towers collapsed. We could see the smoke from Co-lumbia rising from that wreckage. Thousands of people died in that attack. And right immediately after, therewas a kind of consensus that people had to unite together to support one another, meaning you cannot say theseare not terrorist attacks. You could not say that these were attacks because the United States is an imperialistic,capitalist nation, spreading all over the globe, and maybe that’s why people were upset with us. You couldn’tsay that. You couldn’t say that then. You would be called a terrorist and put in prison without any chargesagainst you. It was simply for national security.In any case, what I’m arguing is that the nation tries to inculcate in people a particular consciousness andthat consciousness is expressed in our language and our ideologies. This is discourse?language and ideology.??????????? Vol.4 No.1? ??? ?That’s what discourse is, okay? Language and ideology. Me speaking English expresses a particular ideology.So the question about the South does not only apply to the South, by the way. You know the feeling aboutObama. He was not even born in America some say. He was born in Hawai`i and Hawai`i is not part of theUnited States. His father was Kenyan. He cannot be a real American. We are going to impeach him, some Re-publicans in Congress have said. This new Congress that’s coming after Republican control of the House andSenate is considering ways to impeach the President. Anyway, that testifies, I think, to the strength of the cen-tral narrative of one people. I think so.????????????? 3? ??? ?

From One to Many Peoples : A New History of the USA (国際学研究フォーラム講演録3: 2014年11月6日)

Okihiro, Gary

Gary, Okihiro

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From One to Many Peoples : A New History of the USA (国際学研究フォーラム講演録3: 2014年11月6日)

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