A history question - Page 2

[reeseccup]

Originally Posted by Ruthla

First of all, I would clarify what they mean by "brown people."

Most people referred to as "black" are actually brown in color.

I agree, I was quite confused, since in our home, if we are generalizing by "skin color", most people with brown tone to their skin are for instance, "the brown lady ", or the pink lady , or the tan lady, or the...well I hope we all get the picture. Our younger kids use discriptive words to explain things a lot, and some things are not quite pc, ie. the fat lady , they do it w/o ill intent, just stating facts in their explination.

Reese

[boysrus]

I am sorry that you feeled persecuted in this forum. I don't think that anybody on this forum blames the good teachers. However, there is no way to guarantee that a child will get a good teacher. When I say that children are not allowed freedom to use the bathroom, the outdoors, or cough drops; I am not blaming the teacher, I am saying it is a system that doesn't work for me. I don't think that teachers have any contorl over it, and I understand why schools have those rules in place. They work fine for a lot of kids who accept it as the way it is. I am just not willing to put my kids there.

I think teaching is an incredibly noble profession. I also know that teachers are limited by funding and time.

Originally Posted by stik

Not to be snarky, but I am a public school history teacher and I would bend over backwards to help a student answer a question like that. It gets at all kinds of ideas about the construction of race and the treatment of non-white people in the US, and it's a great jumping-off point for a meaningful and interesting discussion of diversity.

Which is, in fact, why I click on history threads wherever I happen to find them - in case I have something to offer that might be interesting to someone who wants to learn about it. It makes me sad when I click on a thread to see if I know something worth sharing and find myself painted as a child-hating, curiousity-squelching fascist who lives to deny children access to nature, information, interesting discussions, and bathrooms.

Homeschooling is great, and I'm glad that it nurtures children's naturally inquisitive nature. I can absolutely understand why people do it.

The Smithsonian had an exhibit on this a few years back. It dealt with the impact of Brown vs. Board of Education on a bunch of groups. They might have a web exhibition on the topc if you check their website.

Lyndon B. Johnson taught at a segregated school for Mexican children before going into politics.

My Grandad, who grew up in Oklahoma, told me at one point that there were four social classes where he came from - in order from top to bottom: white, black, Mexican, and Indian. (Please note: he was describing the situation as he saw it. It made him really angry and he fought to change it in a bunch of ways. My grands were super-cool activists against Jim Crow. And my Grandmother was active in the Communist Party.)

The conquistadores essentially enslaved the native population of Mexico through the encomiendas system, under which the Spanish crown granted individuals the rights to control not only land, but the people who lived on it. This was also supposed to be a way of safeguarding the natives' souls - landholders were supposed to see that the natives in their "care" converted to Catholicism.

Asian immigrants to the US played a HUGE role in building the transcontinental railroads. In the photographs showing the completion of this railroad, the workers are cropped out.

There was something more interesting about Asian immigrants that I'm struggling to clearly remember - I'll post again when it comes back to me.

[blizzard_babe]

Public school teacher and HS-ing enthusiast (I'm hoping to both keep my job as a teacher and HS my own future kids... or more accurately, have my DF homeschool them) responding, just because it's a topic that interests me...

I can't respond too well when it comes to slavery times, but I can tell you that in Alaska, The civil rights movement as we know it primarily presented itself as a Native Alaskan - White Alaskan social conflict over schooling. In many cases, small towns/villages with significant White populations would get K-12 schools, while a larger, Native village with more students would get, at best, a K-6 or K-8 school. In addition, some small towns/villages would have two schools, both serving a MINUTE population of students, in order to keep the populations separated. Guess which school went through 12th grade? Eventually, of course, parents got cranky and sued. Their kids had to leave the village and attend boarding schools if they wanted a high school diploma. The Molly Hootch case (Actually called Tobeluk vs Lind... Anna Tobeluk [Toe-beeth-look] of Nunapitchuk was the initiator of the lawsuit... I work at Anna Tobeluk Memorial School, but Molly Hootch was the first name on the suit, alphabetically, so everyone knows it as the "Molly Hootch Case) required that all villages above a certain school-age population have a public school that served all grades, K-12. This was in 1975. Over the next few years, villages got their schools.

If anyone's looking for more resources for teaching about Alaska (beyond the tired Iditarod and Gold Rush themes), here's a great website that has a strong Alaska Native focus... http://www.alaskool.org/. There's a section on racism in Alaska... http://www.alaskool.org/projects/JimCrow/Jimcrow.htm. There's a LOT of good stuff on that site.

[stik]

While I posted a knee-jerk response because of a perceived need to defend myself and my profession, I actually don't see why this thread called for a critique of the public school system in the first place. The OP neither made such a critique nor appeared to desire one. A thread in which a poster celebrated her child's accomplishments in public school wouldn't be seen as a critique of homeschoolers. I'd really rather talk about the history.

What I was struggling to rememebr in my last post actually wasn't to do with Asian immigrants at all - it had to do with a hispanic community and varying constructions of race.

I'm drawing heavily on Linda Gordon's book, _The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction_ here. The book itself is too deep for students below the college level, but I think a mature middle schooler could make good intellectual use of the story.

In the 1900s, in New York City, the Irish were seen as an undesireable minority. The Catholic Church in NYC was under heavy fire for its policy of institutional care for Catholic orphans that resulted in ludicrous death rates for foundling infants baptised as Catholics. (City policy at the time was that foundlings were baptised as Catholic or Protestant in strict order of arrival at police precincts, alternating Catholic/Protestant/Catholic/Protestant. Catholic foundlings went into orphanages run by Catholic charities. Protestant foundlings were cared for by Protestant charities which were starting to experiment with foster care. I can fish out exact infant mortality stats for each form of care if you want, but suffice it to say that many more babies survived foster care.) The Catholic Church and the Irish Catholic community were unwilling to place babies in foster care on the grounds that they might not be raised Catholic, and they might be ill-treated because of their presumed Irish origins. However, the mortality rates pushed them to make changes, and some of those changes involved orphan trains.

Protestant groups had been running orphan trins for a long time, and many cities in the west were used to orphan trains that worked a certain way - a train full of orphans came to town. The orphans were displayed on the platform at the train station and local families interested in taking in an orphan would fill out some paperwork and go home with a child or two. Typically, these children were old enough to work as farm hands or household help. The paperwork involved looked more like an apprenticeship agreement than an adoption.

The Catholic Church wanted to make sure the children in its care went to Catholic homes. Thus, arrangements were made between sending parishes in NYC and receiving parishes throughout the west before children were put on to trains. Specific families agreed to take in specific children. In this particular case, Mexican Catholic families in Arizona were identified to provide homes for Irish Catholic children from NYC.

When the children arrived in the Arizona community (which, iirc, was Bisbee) the community reacted in a way the sending parish in NYC hadn't predicted. White protestant community members were excited to see healthy white children arriving on an orphan train. They were appalled to see these white children going home with Mexican families.

The NYC parish hadn't sent *white* children. "White" meant English or German and Protestant. The Catholic orphanage had sent *Irish* children that no white, Protestant families in NYC had wanted anything to do with. By the time the children had crossed into Arizona territory, that distinction was considered completely meaningless. The local community considered the difference between Catholic and Protestant relatively unimportant and the distinction between White and Mexican extremely important. The distinction between the Irish and everyone else wasn't even a consideration.

The local sheriff organized a posse which removed the children from Mexican Catholic homes. They were adopted by white, Protestant community members. I can't recall how the Catholic Church responded, but I don't think they sent an orphan train to that community ever again.