I teach US History to 1877 at El Paso Community College. I am a white settler who grew up in the English colonial town of Cambridge, MA and moved to El Paso, TX. I have an MA in History from Harvard University, which means that I was trained in a traditionally Western academic institution that was built through enslaved labor. Learning alongside my students, I now teach place-based history framed through the perspective of living at the US/Mexico border in 2020.
Using approaches of critical pedagogy, I explore with my students a deeper understanding of white supremacy as foundational to the settlement of the land that is now the US. In addition to teaching history, I volunteer as an advocate and abolition activist with immigrants in detention. White supremacy and abolition movements have both been present in every moment of the continued colonial settlement of this land.
There are many excellent resources on teaching these histories, these are just the sources I’m working with now with relevance to the uprising, in chronological order from early settlement to the Reconstruction period.
We begin and end by reading the poem by Aracelis Girmay, on poetry and history—after joy harjo
We start by asking, when and where is the origin point of how we came to be on this land?
This immediately shows how history-telling is shaped by who the ‘we’ is, and it allows us to question white settler-centric origin myths of traditional US History (eg. Mayflower, Jamestown).
One of the origin stories we converse with is an Anishinaabe creation story, told by Robin Wall Kimmerer, environmental biologist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.
Another origin story we discuss is the 1619 landing of the first ship of enslaved Africans to Point Comfort in the English colony of Virginia, as told by historian Nikole Hannah-Jones through the New York Times 1619 Project in this video (starting at 17:30).
A central text is Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous People’s History of the United States(2015). Dunbar-Ortiz elucidates ways in which supremacy, primacy of private property, and militarized technologies of control were developed in England and Spain preceding conquest and genocide in North America. She talks about major themes of the book in this video.
In the early decades of European ‘exploration’ of ‘America’ (beginning in 1492), religious reformation in Europe led to justification of violent expulsion and genocide of populations of people by the imperial state. The Catholic Reconquista (1492) and expulsion of Jews and Moors (Muslims) in Spain was based on ideas of ‘blood purity,’ intolerance for non-Christians, and anti-Black bias. The Reconquista expanded the orbit of a growing empire based in Castile. The Protestant Reformation in England (1534) was coupled with violent conquest of Catholic Ireland (1536). This expanded domination of an empire based in London.
Both of these instances of colonization within Europe honed techniques of violence which were later used against indigenous nations. Some of the very same Ulster-Scott settlers who forced Irish people into ‘reservations’ and hunted Irish scalps for bounty, then settled in early English colonies in America. The state placed an economic value on lives and exerted control through confining the movement of those bodies. These are two premises that were developed even before racial ideas of ‘whiteness’ and also underlie race-based slavery and incarceration in what would become the US.
The enclosure of common land in England was a process that expanded during the sixteenth century. The privatization and fencing-in of land formerly open to ‘commoners’ is an essential development to understand forms of control in what is now the US. The US/Mexico border fence can be seen from the community college campus where I teach. We ask, what else has been enclosed? as we consider the expansion of this logic of privatizing public goods for the profit of few. Some answers that have come from the class—water rights, immigrants in detention, nations.
The importance of private property and wealth within the logic of white supremacy in the US begins with the assumption that property and wealth belong to white settlers to begin with. We keep coming back to asking, what indigenous land are we now living on? using this interactive Native Land map. Many students had never learned that all land that composes the now-US was taken from indigenous nations through war and genocide, and/or forced treaties based on the threat of war and genocide. We use this Tribal Connections Mapto track cessions of indigenous land which began with the earliest European settlers and continue to today.
The first form of race-based enslavement on this land was settler enslavement of indigenous people, beginning with Columbus’ second voyage. The Teaching Hard History: American Slavery podcast from Teaching Tolerance is a trove of information and teaching tools on indigenous enslavement.
One of the most powerful and most difficult things to hold in mind when studying history is that it could have been different. There were numerous historical periods when Black people in this land exercised rights that were later denied to them for decades or centuries by the White supremacist colonial empire or nation state. One example is the early colonial period, when Black settlers in the colonies exercised rights to own property, own their own labor, and own enslaved people.
White, landowning settler society was threatened by the unified political power of indentured servants, who were both White and Black. From the 1660s to the early 1700s, the first race-based slave codes were passed in the English colonies. In the seventeenth century as today, the white, landowning settler society responds with violence to the power of interracial political solidarity between workers, immigrants, and indigenous people. The New York Times 1619 project on American Slaveryis full of connections between histories of enslavement and lived experiences today.
When we begin studying American Slavery, we ask what other labels could be used to describe people who were enslaved? I cover the chalkboard—mothers, scientists, artists, comedians, educators, doctors, babies, politicians, musicians, etc. etc. This is a powerful video from Magic & Melaninon Americans visiting Gold Coast dungeons which held enslaved Africans before the Middle Passage. We read the poem Middle Passageby Robert Hayden. I also draw on historical memory expressed in contemporary poetry in the anthology Of Poetry & Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin.
We watch these concise Key Concept videos by historians of American Slaveryfrom Teaching Tolerance, on the many different forms of American Slavery in different places and times. Throughout this study, we track patterns in Technologies of Control and Technologies of Resistance. Enslavement is a continuous process, and enslaved people resisted that process at every point and in every historical moment. The Zinn Education Project resource, How the Enslaved Resistedframes forms of resistance that we track: theft and property destruction, maintaining the family, culture/ music/ religion/ & education, resistance at work, running away, verbal and physical confrontation, revolt. All of these continue to be forms of resistance to state violence in the fight for civil rights.
We read from Paul Ortiz’s An African American and Latinx History of the United States(2018), which shows how African Americans brought numerous petitions for abolition to the Continental Congress (1774-1789). Ortiz contrasts the US independence movement with the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), led by self-liberated people who had been enslaved. The Haitian Revolution framed abolition and overthrow of colonial rule as part of the same movement. The US Independence movement could have been a liberation movement, as was the case in other Latin American countries. Instead, white settlers were threatened by a 1772 English ruling that enslavement had no basis in English law, and the US independence movement rather protected the rights only of those elite white men who practiced or profited from enslavement of Black people. Tracy K. Smith’s erasure poem Declarationpowerfully exhibits this. We also analyze Titus Kaphar’s ‘Beyond the Myth of Benevolence,’a portrait of Sally Hemmings behind a portrait of Thomas Jefferson, who enslaved her.
The Mexican War of Independence in 1810 grew antislavery movements which succeeded in abolishing Mexican slavery in 1829 on the anniversary of independence. Mexico became a sanctuary for people enslaved in the US, and a branch of the Underground Railroad ran south across the Rio Grande. A prominent impulse in US conquering of Mexican and indigenous lands west was the expansion of the institution of slavery, which because of its deeply extractive nature, requires expansion for survival. We use a Zinn Education Project resourcein studying the US War with Mexico, which ended in 1848 with the cession of what is now California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and parts of Colorado to the US.
Students have sometimes asked me about my political viewpoints. Rather than claiming affinity with some label along which people are currently divided, I’ve found the Universe of Obligationfrom Facing History and Ourselves to be a more powerful framework. ‘I’ is at the center, and concentric circles indicate the continuum of who we feel responsible towards. It’s a model that can also be used for groups or nations and helps make sense of great shifts in civil rights when the US State has expanded or contracted who falls within its Universe of Obligation. This is one perspective in understanding the Civil War conflict over slavery, and the question of who the state considers as part of the Universe of Obligation is at stake every day right now.
The Reconstruction period which followed the Civil War (1865-1877) is such an amazing political moment because Black people in the US fought for and exercised liberties some of which have not been restored to this day. This was the period of the 13thamendment (abolishing slavery *except after conviction of a crime*), the 14thamendment granting birthright citizenship, and the 15thamendment prohibiting race-based restrictions on voting. During Reconstruction, Black politicians were elected to every level of government and Black witnesses testified before Congress against KKK violence. We use Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s PBS Reconstruction Seriesand Facing History and Ourselves resources on The Reconstruction Era and the Fragility of Democracy, both of which are completely relevant right now.
The Reconstruction Era ended in 1877 when Southern Confederates regained political power and backed virulent racist backlash known as the Jim Crow Era, prompting new forms of oppression which included arrests of and violence towards Black Americans with impunity. The PBS Eyes on the Prize Documentarieson the Civil Rights movement (covering 1954-80) are entirely composed of original footage and incredibly informative right now. We listen to Patricia Smith’s Incendiary Artin clasping connections to today.
The existing abolition movement in El Paso has been largely focused on the abolition of immigration detention and ICE. We draw on syllabus resources on the history of immigration detentionfrom Freedom for Immigrants, an abolitionist organization. This is entwined in the same history of US white supremacy.
And as a reminder, we begin and end by reading the poem by Aracelis Girmay, on poetry and history—after joy harjo