zaterdag 6 maart 2010

The Empire 540

Via AdR:

Who in Future Generations will Believe This?

Zinn and the Art of History

By BRIAN McKENNA

Six days after Howard Zinn’s death on January 27, I asked my class of forty-seven Introduction to Anthropology students about Christopher Columbus. “Take out a piece of paper and respond to this scenario. You are the Director of Community Theater here in Dearborn, Michigan and you decide to produce a play on Columbus’s life. Describe one scene in your play. Why that scene? Be as detailed as possible.”

Of the 47 students, a full 40 (84%) depicted some version that praised Columbus as a great mariner who “sailed the ocean blue” and “discovered” America. One said he landed on Plymouth Rock, another that he addressed the US Congress.

Only four noted that there was murder and enslavement involved, though no scene was explicitly described. The three others said that there was violence but they knew little more. It was all cloudy and vague. No one used the term “genocide.”

I greatly suspect that comparatively few U.S. college graduates know many of the details about what happened.

I tremble as I write

I learned about Columbus’s genocidal activities from Howard Zinn (1922-2010) who, in his telling, introduced me to his chief source, Bartolome de las Casas, America’s first “cultural anthropologist.” A Spanish priest, Las Casas (1474-1566), told the truth (as he knew it) about Columbus’s invasion of the Americas in his insurgent, History of the Indies (Las Casas 2007 (circa 1552). He risked his life to do so.

In his magisterial “Peoples History of the United States” (1980) Zinn carefully relayed las Cases’ eyewitness accounts on how Spanish soldiers killed hundreds of thousands – perhaps millions – of Arawak, Taino and other native peoples through torture, beheadings, forced labor in mines and slicing the hands off of those children who did not uncover the required quota of gold during their allotted three month period. Here’s Las Casas:

“Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides . . . .they ceased to procreate. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desperation . . . .In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk . . . and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fertile . . . was depopulated . . . .My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write . . . .Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it . . . ." (Zinn 1980:7)

Many still do not.

It took about 400 years for Howard Zinn to effectively rebroadcast Bartolome’s ethnographic accounts to a world-wide audience prompting outrage, reaction and horror. And yet, too many US citizens have yet to engage this vital curriculum.

I myself was not lectured on Las Casas in my formal education through graduate school in anthropology (1981-86; 1991-98). I learned about Las Casas and Zinn from social activists protesting US intervention in El Salvador in 1981. I remember two graduate anthropology students ridiculing Zinn for “having no theory” and being “just a storyteller.” They preferred Louis Althusser, popular at the time. Anthropologist Carl Maida shared a similar story. “I completed my doctorate in anthropology at UCLA in 1981, through the Center for Afro-American Studies without having heard of La Casas.”

Today Zinn is known and admired by a good many anthropologists, though I wonder how much and to what degree he and Las Casas are employed pedagogically? The looming question is this, Why did it take a people’s historian to do what conventional anthropologists should have been doing, i.e., educating the U.S. public in a compelling, holistic way about their own radical cultural history?

The Makings of a Critical Pedagogue

Zinn was born and raised in the tenements of New York. A working class organic intellectual Zinn was “the Other” in a U.S. university system that too often reproduces elite cultural capital. A bombardier in World War 2, Zinn was educated at Columbia on the GI Bill of Rights. He then pursued a teaching career and made a searing impact on US culture through his writings and social activism. Along the way he suffered arrests, humiliations, FBI surveillance, poverty, and a famous firing from Spelman College. You can read all about it in his autobiography, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (Zinn 1994).”

“How can you have life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness if you don’t have the right to food, housing and health care?” he said in Artists in Times of War (Zinn 2004:59).

Like Woody Allen’s film Zelig, Zinn always seemed to be where history was happening: on a bus with the freedom riders, marching with Martin Luther King in the 1950s, taking a trip to Hanoi to rescue three US soldiers during the Vietnam War, informing the world about SNCC, assisting Father Daniel Berrigan while underground from the US government, harboring a copy of Ellsberg’s The Pentagon Papers before publication.

Zinn did not separate his social science teaching from his citizenship activism. They were as intertwined as the ramble to a rose. Henry Giroux, a friend of Zinn for thirty years, wrote in a memorial column, “We had grown up in similar neighborhoods, shared a similar cultural capital and we both probably learned more from the streets than we had ever learned in formal schooling. There was something about Howard's fearlessness, his courage, his willingness to risk not just his academic position, but also his life, that marked him as special - untainted by the often corrupting privileges of class entitlement. (Giroux 2010).”

In many ways Zinn and Las Casas are distant cousins. Both exhibited a habit of transgression in their everyday lives and this was reflected in their writings.

The Art of Teaching History

After discussing Las Casas and Zinn for the better part of two hours I give my anthropology students the Columbus play assignment again. Only this time it’s a five-page paper due in two weeks so they can give it some solid thought. Also, this time the context changes. They now become a Detroit-based teacher of high school history and theater. This time they are instructed to conceive of a play (scenes, outlines, titles, sample dialogue) that is heavily based on the historical evidence as revealed by Las Casas.