Race in North America by Smedley Audrey; Smedley Brian D.;

Author:Smedley, Audrey; Smedley, Brian D.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Westview Press
Published: 2011-05-31T04:00:00+00:00

NOTES

1 See Kuhn 1962 for one view of the processes of scientific growth. This view and model has its critics. Greene 1981, for example, poses a much broader paradigm that includes the importance of cultural traditions and preexisting worldviews as well as challenges to them from outside the scientific establishment (e.g., political economy) for generating new scientific theories.

2 Hoover 1976, 59. The first Indian Department was established as part of the War Department, under the secretary of war, a telling comment on white attitudes toward Indians as separate nations that had to be dealt with through violent means.

3 The linkage of biology and behavior is one of the components of race that appears so intractable and so aggravating to physically identifiable minorities. It homogenizes all individuals in a perceptible minority category and prevents the understanding of individual differences in culture and behavior. Benjamin Franklin’s admonition against such a view is just as pertinent today as it was two hundred years ago: “If an Indian injures me, does it follow that I may revenge that Injury on all Indians? ... It is well known that Indians are of different Tribes, Nation and Languages, as well as white people. In Europe, if the French who are White People, should injure the Dutch, are they to revenge it on the English because they too are White People? If it be right to kill Men for such a Reason, then should any Man, with a freckled Face and red Hair, kill a Wife or Child of mine, it would be right for me to revenge it, by killing all the freckled red-haired Men, Women and Children, I could afterwards anywhere meet with” (quoted in Jordan 1968, 277).

4 From Tacitus 1942.

5 The interesting exceptions were those few scholars who concentrated their attention on the customs, beliefs, and traditions of “primitive” societies. As early as 1724, Father Lafitau studied the kinship system of Iroquois Indians and others and discovered the kind of similarities in kinship terms that later anthropologists were to call “classificatory.” He saw value in comparing the customs of contemporary savages with those of ancient peoples. Later, William Robertson not only recognized similarities but suggested that they had been caused by independent invention and by developments along parallel lines. Both writers were expressing the early speculative evolutionary themes of eighteenth-century anthropological thought, which presaged fully mature nineteenth-century theories of sociocultural evolution.

6 It is instructive that, perhaps because they could not directly come to terms with their own hypocrisy, Jefferson and many other planters placed the blame for the origination and persistence of slavery on the English king, George III (see Miller 1977.)

7 The classic biography of Jefferson is Dumas Malone’s six-volume work under the general title Jefferson and His Times, published from 1948 through 1981. Another well-known biographer is Merrill Peterson (1962, 1970). John Chester Miller’s work (1977) deals specifically with Jefferson and slavery. The most controversial and perhaps best-known work is Fawn Brodie’s best seller (1974), which has often been scorned by more conservative historians.

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