I find the relationship between the Native Americans and the Europeans to be very interesting. The European civilization is far more advanced technologically than the Native Americans, yet they struggle with basic survival skills. The Native Americans prove to be the superior group, in that they could easily feed their people, and attaining enough food to get through a tough winter was relatively easy, while the European group had to resort to cannibalism and other horrible methods of survival. The incompetence of the early European settlers however had a terrible effect on the future of the world. The ideas about race being a factor in whether or not someone should be a slave began to sprout here. The ideology of white privilege took form among other horrible things. The white European settlers developed a mindset that they deserved more than the Native Americans, and other people of color, so they took action on this mindset. The European settlers laid waste to many Native Americans and their lands essentially because they were better at the game of survival.
The horrible mindset the European settlers grasped onto is very relevant today. The United States of America has officially abolished slavery and almost everything connected to it, but racism has done anything but gone away with it. The way European settlers and early Americans set a precedent that black people are lesser than white people has permanently affected the mindset of so many people even today. I think it is very important for people to read “drawing the color line,” so people can see the horrible nature of what so many people believe. This chapter outlines slavery rooted in race, and it provides a new perspective to the black lives matter movement today that I think people need to understand.
I totally agree with your comment tying the racism of our past to today’s world, and how people should read this to understand that what is happening today is not so different than what occurred with our earliest explorers. The fact that our country has not fully progressed and transformed since its discovery is sickening and something that needs to change, hopefully with help from new movements and organizations.
I completely agree with your thoughts on this! I think it’s really important to note the cultural dichotomy between the European settlers and Indigenous communities as outlined in this chapter. For me, this provokes questions about the nature of hierarchal societies. To elaborate, the Indigenous cultures described in this section are known to embrace communal ownership and the necessity of resourcefulness, whereas the European settlers on the land were part of an upper class that had the status to be granted the ability to participate in expeditions but was characteristic of an incompetence in basic skills of survival. With this in mind, I really wonder how the relations between European settlers and Indigenous tribes might have developed differently if the colonizers had come from a less hierarchal culture.
I agree that these beginning times of racism are certainly relevant today. Thankfully, slavery was abolished awhile ago, but racism is still so incredibly relevant today. Americans established during these times that blacks and inferior to whites and unfortunately some people still believe that today.