On Juneteenth

While the preface through Chapter 2 demonstrates the centrality of slavery and white supremacy to the development of Texas as well as the need for a more rounded narrative that includes the experiences and perspectives of people of color, Chapters 3 and 4 illustrate what attention to these varied experiences reveals about the complexity of history and people alike. Through a discussion of Africans/Black people, non-Anglo Europeans, and Indigenous Americans in North America in Chapter 3 and 4, Gordon-Reed illustrates that reliance on dominant Anglo-American narratives is more about informing white Anglo-Americans’ sense of themselves through a cohesive, albeit partially fictionalized, origin story that renders African, non-Anglo European, and Indigenous people inferior and/or absent. Acknowledging the experiences and presence of non-Anglo people adds more complexity and dynamism to the historical narrative as well as understandings of the present. 

When Gordon-Reed discusses the role of origin stories in the beginning of Chapter 3, she writes “[t]hey inform our sense of self; telling us what kind of people we believe we are, what kind of nation we believe we live in” (58). She also says, “much of the concern with origin stories is about our current needs and desires (usually to feel good about ourselves), not actual history” (58) and that origin stories “seek to find the familiar, or the superficially familiar” (58). These thoughts suggest the predominance of Anglo-American versions of history serve to bolster the special accord given to a particular type of whiteness in contemporary times by over-emphasizing the role of history’s white players and reinforcing stereotypes and narratives about Black and Indigenous people. The over-emphasis on Anglo-American whiteness is significant here because there were other European actors colonizing the Americas before or at the same time as the English. For example, Gordon-Reed discusses the colonization of St. Augustine, Florida, and the establishment of an organized racially-based slavery system there by the Spanish (61) as well as Spanish expeditions across Mexico, into Texas, and on toward the Pacific Coast (68-69). In addition, the French colonized areas near the Great Lakes and in Louisiana (62), and the Dutch colonized parts of New York (62).

However, in the European battles over these lands that would become the United States, the English prevailed. Since the victors tend to dominate the writing of historical narratives, the dominant US historical narrative becomes “the perspective of English-speaking (and White) people” (62). Therefore, even other European actors are written out of the US origin story. The simplified narrative leaves much to be desired in terms of understanding the complexities involved in the development of the United States. As Gordon-Reed writes about this dominant Anglo version of American history:

The world enclosed in that way left out so much about the true nature of life in Early America, about all the varied influences that shaped the people and circumstances during those times. It closes off the vital understanding about contingency, how things could have taken a very different turn (63). 

Thus, what develops are fictions that allow white people to see themselves in a particular way in the present based on the myths they have adopted about the past. The primary myths discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 are the inherent inferiority of Black people and the idea of Indigenous cooperation and intermixture with English settlers as opposed to the actual violence of slavery, settler colonialism, and territorial disputes as well as the ideas of Black noninvolvement in history and that the Indigenous are a people of the past and not alive and active today. 

The idea of Black people’s inherent inferiority is a making of the dominant Anglo-American historical narrative, and it is the basis for the justification of chattel slavery. Gordon-Reed notes, “Because slavery in the United States was racially based, it was easy to graft the legally imposed capacities of slavery onto Black people as a group, making incapacity an inherent feature of the race” (66). There are two significant suggestions here: one, that Blackness automatically equates to the status of enslaved; and two, that white people themselves created the very incapacity they use to justify this false equivalence. However, as Gordon-Reed explains:

To be sure, the institution of slavery itself circumscribed the actions of enslaved African Americans, but it never destroyed their personhood. They did not become a separate species by the experience of being enslaved. All of the feelings, talents, failings, strengths, and weaknesses—all the states and qualities that exist in human beings—remained in them (63).

Stated plainly, slavery did not diminish the humanity of enslaved people nor make them inherently inferior to their white counterparts. Furthermore, not all Black people in North America and involved in North America’s development existed inside the system of plantation slavery on which narrow constructions of Blackness have been based. Gordon-Reed underscores these two points by providing examples of Black people who refute these notions of inherent incapacity and limitation to the plantation, and she centers her examples on the acquisition of language, a “most basic human trait” (63). For example, Sojourner Truth’s first language was Dutch. Yet, “reproductions of her speech were written in the stereotypical dialect universally chosen to portray the speech of enslaved Blacks” (64). Sally Hemings and her brother James spoke French and worked in France in paid positions (65-66). Some of Hemings’ children, fathered by Thomas Jefferson, assimilated into white society and lived as white people, suggesting they could not have spoken “in the dialect universally applied to enslaved people” (65) and been successfully accepted as white. Estebanico, who arrived with the Spanish a century before the English colonized Jamestown, “played a key role as the chief translator between the Spaniards and the Indigenous people because of his great talent for learning and speaking languages” (69).

What Sojourner Truth, the Hemings, and Estebanico share is not only the acquisition of languages other than English and the ability to speak in ways other than the exaggerated dialect ascribed to Black people, but also their lives were not confined to plantation slavery. Sojourner Truth was an abolitionist and women’s rights advocate whose work involved a lecture tour. The Hemings not only traveled outside of the United States and off the plantation, but also lived lives different from that of a typical enslaved person on a plantation. Estebanico, as a key actor in the Spanish expedition, also did not have the experience of plantation slavery. This is not to suggest that those enslaved on plantations did not also have complex and varied experiences, but it is to acknowledge that, while all these people at one point or another experienced slavery, that experience was not the typical plantation experience the dominant historical narrative promotes. In fact, their lives draw attention to the multiple influences and interactions that shaped them, and those influences and interactions are not limited to the English, nor do they imply “the supposed gulf that exists between the races” (67). 

Therefore, white people’s attempt to present the narrow construction of Blackness that collapses Black experience into a monolith is certainly an attempt to justify slavery by implying Black people’s inherent inferiority. Thus, illuminating the varied experiences, or “seeing Africans in America who were out of the strict confines of the plantation—and seeing them presented as something other than the metaphorical creation of English people” (70) counters the dominant narrative and prompts a more accurate analysis of what influences and interactions have shaped the United States and its people as they exist in the present. 

In a similar manner, the English-speaking Anglo-Americans have constructed origin stories that diminish the complexity of interactions with the Indigenous in addition to obscuring the actual violence of settler colonialism. Again, these fictionalized constructions are more serving of white people in the present, i.e., their need to see themselves as good people with an inherent entitlement to the United States, than they are of accurately portraying the historical events that created the United States. As Gordon-Reed illustrates with her discussion of Indigenous history, “the story of conquest had to be leavened with examples of cooperation and, even, intermixture between the contending forces” (79). For example, the idea of a first Thanksgiving that is integral to the story of Plymouth involves “the aid of friendly Indigenous people” (58). Even as more recent and accurate re-assessments of the dynamics between the English and the Indigenous come to light, the Thanksgiving story “continues to shape the attitudes about the beginnings of what would become our country” (59). The story about Jamestown centers on the affair between Pocahontas and John Smith, “to emphasize the triumph of amity over enmity between the Indigenous people and the English settlers” (59). However, again, as historical re-assessment has highlighted, that narrative is “something very different than what actually happened” (59). Yet another story, that of Quanah Parker, which is highlighted in Texas history classes, portrays the kidnapping of Cynthia Parker by the Comanche as an instance of cooperation and intermixture (79-81) when in fact there are forces of settler colonial violence and patriarchy at play (81).

These origin stories serve the purpose of reinforcing white Anglo-American people’s entitlement to stolen Indigenous land while also precluding accountability for the historical atrocities involved in the acquisition of that land. The idea Indigenous people willingly handed it over through high degrees of cooperation and intermixture allows white people in the present to feel good about what was a highly violent and genocidal past. Furthermore, it serves the purpose of relegating that violence and its implications to the past as well as the actual people on whom that violence was inflicted. Gordon-Reed recalls that “even at the young age, I had gotten the message that Indians were part of the past. They had once been in Texas but were there no longer; the same could be said for the country overall” (78). In addition, the later acknowledgment of Indigenous people in the present at the height of the American Indian Movement involved romanticizing Indigenous people and collapsing them into a mythical monolith, as had been done with Black people. This romanticization and mythologizing also served a clear purpose: 

All of this fit with the hippie-themed back-to-the land movement that romanticized Indigenous people as much as taking them seriously. It was also of a piece with earlier responses to Native Americans. After removing them from their land, preventing them from becoming a threat, Americans often claimed to admire the special virtues of Native peoples, who were supposed to possess a unique spirit […] The people who took their land did not appreciate it, or care for it properly. This was almost a half-hearted confession that what had happened was wrong. That didn’t mean the land would be given back to them, of course (91).

Again, the historical and mythical constructions of white people regarding people of color are meant to ease the guilt and justify the actions associated with white people’s origins in the United States. Nonetheless, there is no room for accountability or actual rectification. 

In addition, these neat historical constructions diminish not only the reality of interactions between white people and people of color but also among people of color themselves. There was no natural affinity between Black and Indigenous people, nor among different Indigenous tribes, as people’s present superimpositions on the past would like to portray. Estebanico not only treated Indigenous women poorly but was ultimately killed by Indigenous people during the expedition (69). Indigenous people enslaved Black people and have exhibited the same racist attitudes toward Black people as their white counterparts (82). Different Indigenous tribes fought each other, enslaved each other, and kidnapped women and children as an act of warfare (87-88). Alliances between Black and Indigenous people and among Indigenous people have not been due to any “natural” affinity toward one another but rather they have been political strategies prompted by the racial categories of “white” and “nonwhite” created by Europeans (83). Thus, forging ties based on race has been an act of self-defense (83). 

The point here is the immense complexity and contingency of history, as well as the complexity of human beings themselves, gets lost in the narrative construction that serves particular purposes for white people of the present. Because white Anglo-Americans have been the “victors,” their perspectives of history dominate the narratives that have been constructed and reinforced about the origins of the United States. This construction then involves the portrayal of people of color in particular ways so white people in the present can impede accountability for tragedies that have been integral to shaping the United States and have a sense of themselves as a community. In addition, collapsing the experiences of people of color into a monolithic configuration, as well as leaving their actual experiences out of the historical narrative, allows the simplified narratives to remain intact and to continue coloring people’s understanding of the past. Chapters 3 and 4 complicate this dominant narrative by illuminating the multiple complexities, influences, and interactions that have shaped the United States, and they wrest Black and Indigenous experiences from the oversimplification, stereotyping, and romanticization promoted by dominant versions of US history.