Three years after the constitution was ratified, the first Congress met and restricted admission into the American community to “free white persons” through the Naturalization Act of 1790. Although the act was modified to include “persons of African nativity or descent” in 1870 and Chinese nationals in 1943, the racial criterion for citizenship was eliminated completely only in 1952, 162 years after the original delineation of the Republic’s members, or, according to the Naturalization Act, the “worthy part of mankind” (Okihiro, 1994, pp. 6-7). Okihiro goes on to talk about the history of Europeans who decided upon manifest destiny that everyone else’s culture was strange and exotic, especially the Asians.
Asians, it must be remembered, did not come to America; Americans went to Asia. Asians, it must be remembered, did not come to take the wealth of America; Americans went to take the wealth of Asia. Asians, it must be remembered, did not come to conquer and colonize America; American went to conquer and colonize Asia (Okihiro, 1994, pp. 28-29).
All one has to do is take a look at history and see the exploitation of all races by the European man. Learning America’s history and the policies that were established centuries ago to create an institutional racism that has allowed white Christian males to dominate others simply because of their color or sex is well documented. This began in the 1600’s and continued overtly until the 1960’s. Since the 1960’s, our society has taken some steps to make an even playing field for all. People gathering together for a common cause and creating a public defiance made these steps possible. The civil rights movement, women’s movement, disability rights movement, lesbian and gay movement, American Indian movement, Chicano movement, and anti Vietnam War movements are examples of large scale organizing that led to new laws, executive orders, funding appropriations, and federal guidelines. Unfortunately, the effects caused by this institutional racism for centuries has taken a great toll on people of color and women, and expecting anyone to catch up in one generation is asinine, especially since it is still not an even playing field.
The dominant culture has been able to use homophobia, sexism, and racism to control the “minority” cultures, which can be defined as everyone who is not a white Christian male, by using them as scapegoats for the dominant cultures problems. I personally believe the root of most, if not all the problems we are seeing today are due to greed.
It is because of this greed that the division of classes is growing larger every day, with the few growing exponentially wealthier and the majority growing poorer. An unjust economic system affects all of us by creating a society that turns in on itself in the fight for survival. Since most of society is getting less and less of the pie, our animal instincts are starting to come out to make ends meat and using any means necessary to achieve these goals.
I believe there needs to be a major change in our leaderships thinking for the survival of the human race or we are going to continue down the current path of fighting with one another, taking advantage of one another, destroying our environment, and holding each other back from living in an utopia. I think Suzanne Pharr makes a wonderful point that in order to achieve this objective we need to get rid of genders. If there are no genders, there will not be any gender roles, and if there are no gender roles people will be able to live free and by the roles they create for themselves. To me, this would be the start of an utopia, and we will grow from there. The reason the Right is afraid of gender liberation is because it would end homophobia, sexism, and racism that would destroy this male dominated society and their plush way of living. I feel white Christian males have made a real mess on our planet, socially and environmentally, and it is about time to evolve our way of thinking to clean this mess up.
The only way to make this change a reality is by building unity among those who know the truth. The problem is we have been fighting amongst ourselves, thus wasting energy that could be used to bring down these oppressions and start the process of redistributing the wealth. We have a long way to go, but there is a movement in this direction and people, including white Christian males like myself, are starting to join the cause.
