Jay Wamsted, who is White, teaches math in an Atlanta middle school where most students are Black. Last year, before Georgia passed a law restricting teaching of "divisive concepts," he overheard several students discussing the Trail of Tears, which they'd learned about in history the day before. The school is built on what used to be Cherokee land.
He joined the conversation, he writes in Education Week, saying, “It is no joke what we did to the Indigenous Americans.”
A student said: “We?”
Wamsted said, “No, not ‘we.’ Me. My people. Sorry about that. It is no joke what white people did to Indigenous and Black Americans.”
"The student nodded, and class carried on," he writes.
If that happened this year, would the new law, which bans "race scapegoating," allow it, he wonders. "Did I perform 'race scapegoating' when I took historical responsibility for the removal of Indigenous Americans and placed it on white people, myself included?"
Wamsted thinks not taking the blame would be dishonest.
Perhaps he's descended from Europeans who settled America and displaced the Natives and exploited slaves. Most "white people" in this country came later. My grandparents arrived in the early years of the 20th century. Of course, they benefitted from everything that had been done before, like all Americans.
Yes, "we", Americans. You enjoy the nation, you acknowledge the past. And you can certainly do your part to ensure such things don't happen in the present or future. Otherwise, it would be "those people" mostly white, since no one is alive today who participated or supported the removal.
Do we blame black Americans for African slavery in Virginia? After all it was Angolan Anthony Johnson, former indentured servant off the WHITE LION in 1619. Sure, they were taken from Africa as slaves on the Portuguese ship, but when traded in Jamestown, they were indentured, not slaves, repaying the debt that brought them here just like Europeans who came as indentured servants. Not modern wealthy sensibilities, but common of …