And just what exactly is a Native American?
May 5, 2008In the middle of the Reality Based Community complaining about people complaining about terms that aren’t really sexist or racist, this gem is uttered:
(George Will, that fierce enemy of the “politically correct language police,” would no doubt take offense if I referred to his “Mongoloid idiot son.” And he would be right to do so. But if we can and should learn to say “Down syndrome,” why can’t we and shouldn’t we learn to say “Native American” instead of “redskin”?)
Mr. Will would take offence, I am sure, not only because, like most people with Down’s Syndrome, his son is not an idiot(a point neurotypical people seem to have hard time grasping), but also because that sort of talk was known as impolite long before political correctness came into sway. The same thing applies to redskin: outside of football, redskin was always impolite. People who used it knew they were being rude, offensive and were degrading the people to whom they attached the term. (After all, isn’t that the point of a racist term?) The polite terms were, and still should be, American Indians or Amerindians.
The racism inherent in the term Native Americans is something that many people miss. It’s not just the cliched point that Mr. Will, and myself, and Grandmere Mimi, and Jeremiah Wright, and I forget how many hundreds of millions of other people now living were born on the American continents, and therefore are just as native to it as a full blooded Hopi–and not just that equally cliched but equally true point that like the distant ancestors of Mr. Will and myself, and Grandmere Mimi, and Jeremiah Wright, the distant ancestors of the Hopi and all those other people labelled Native American migrated to the American continent from somewhere else–a point recognized by those who use the term First Americans in a pique of ultimate political correctness. The real problem with the term lies in its normal usage, applying to the Amerindian populations of North America, but ignoring such people as the Aztecs, the Maya, the Quecha, and the aboriginal populations of the Amazon and Patagonia. It’s as if only the Amerindians who lived north of the Rio Grande are thought worthy of the term. Perhaps the peoples of the Mexican plateau and the Yucatan and the Andean highlands were thought too culturally advanced to be included–but that still leaves out the Amazonians and Patagonians, and leaves in the Mound Builders, the peoples of the (USA) desert southwest, and the Cherokee and Iroquois, all of whom achieved political/cultural/technological levels at parity with the great civilizations of Central and South America (indeed, if we look at levels of human sacrifice, can’t we say they were more advanced?) There’s no rational for grouping the Amerindians north of the twentysixth parallel differently from those south. There’s only an ill considered term that, when dissected, disrespects a vast swathe of humanity.
