Thoughts on White Hegemony - Forceful Assimilation through Children
I recently got Rabbit-Proof Fence from the library to watch. For those of you not familiar with it, it tells the true story of three "half-caste" (ie, half white, half aboriginal) girls who attempt to escape from an internment camp after being forcibly removed from their aboriginal mothers.
It turns out that Australia had a policy that any "half-caste" children were subject to complete government control, meaning they would be taken and integrated into 'white' society. There was even a bit about how in four generations you could breed the 'black' out of them. This happened for 100 years (1869 - 1969) and is credited with eroding an entire ethnicity and culture. So much so that it's referred to as the Stolen Generations.
But there's no getting on the high horse here if you're a Yank because the US did something similar (as did Canada, but I don't know much of the details so I'm not going into it). The US government instituted specific policies that made it mandatory for Native American children to attend Christian English speaking schools that forbade the use of their languages, cultural traditions, and religions. Many of these were off-reservation boarding schools that used total immersion policies. I'm finding it difficult to discover when such practices ended, though I imagine the 'must learn English' policy is still in place.
Since fiction offers insights into emotional resonances facts tend to lack, I have a short-story rec. If you haven't read it yet, Leslie Marmon Silko's "Lullaby" is a beautifully sad account of the US government taking Navajo children from their parents to raise them with white families. I can find no copies online, but I will say that Storyteller, the book it comes from, should be in most public libraries in the States.
Of course, this beings me back to Althusser's thoughts in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses on the use of education to help create passive acceptance of ideology (or it's more subtle cousin, Gramsci's hegemony). If you can educate (or brainwash) a people into believing that your way of living is the only way, you've won most of the battle in controlling them. This applies to everyone - even middle-class whites who are finally getting a taste of the fact that the US isn't really set up to keep them on top either (though being white does still carry a lot of cultural benefits in negotiating systems of power).
It turns out that Australia had a policy that any "half-caste" children were subject to complete government control, meaning they would be taken and integrated into 'white' society. There was even a bit about how in four generations you could breed the 'black' out of them. This happened for 100 years (1869 - 1969) and is credited with eroding an entire ethnicity and culture. So much so that it's referred to as the Stolen Generations.
But there's no getting on the high horse here if you're a Yank because the US did something similar (as did Canada, but I don't know much of the details so I'm not going into it). The US government instituted specific policies that made it mandatory for Native American children to attend Christian English speaking schools that forbade the use of their languages, cultural traditions, and religions. Many of these were off-reservation boarding schools that used total immersion policies. I'm finding it difficult to discover when such practices ended, though I imagine the 'must learn English' policy is still in place.
Since fiction offers insights into emotional resonances facts tend to lack, I have a short-story rec. If you haven't read it yet, Leslie Marmon Silko's "Lullaby" is a beautifully sad account of the US government taking Navajo children from their parents to raise them with white families. I can find no copies online, but I will say that Storyteller, the book it comes from, should be in most public libraries in the States.
Of course, this beings me back to Althusser's thoughts in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses on the use of education to help create passive acceptance of ideology (or it's more subtle cousin, Gramsci's hegemony). If you can educate (or brainwash) a people into believing that your way of living is the only way, you've won most of the battle in controlling them. This applies to everyone - even middle-class whites who are finally getting a taste of the fact that the US isn't really set up to keep them on top either (though being white does still carry a lot of cultural benefits in negotiating systems of power).