My History As An Elective

By Jose Vilson | October 13, 2014

My History As An Elective

By Jose Vilson | October 13, 2014
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The first result from a Google Search I did on Indigenous Peoples’ Day was a racist rant from someone who clearly has a chip on their shoulder for the minimal advances that people of color have made in this country. It reminds me of an old adage used in my college days: white history is taught as a core course in college while other peoples’ history an elective. The idea that Christopher Columbus ought to be celebrated as an explorer and colonizer of a new world while opening the gateway for transatlantic slavery and genocide baffles me. Even more baffling is that I didn’t come into this awakening until I matriculated into Syracuse University, where I was forced to live with, not simply live amongst and walk by, people with different world views and experiences.

Syracuse University isn’t just a university known for Ernie Davis, Vanessa Williams, Joyce Carol Oates, Jim Brown, Bob Costas, Vice President Joe Biden, and Carmelo Anthony. It rests on the land of the Onondaga Nation, one part of the Iroquois Confederacy. Anyone who’s ever driven up to Syracuse has seen the signs, but can willfully ignore these signs because, in a few more miles, one sees the Carrier Dome appear past the high hills. On the Syracuse campus, not unlike other campuses, I learned about computers inside the classroom, and my history mostly outside the classroom.

Except for the few electives I had the chance to take, most of the stories and accounts that pertain to histories of people of color came from outside the classroom.

My fervor for soaking up these histories was evident in the long roster of organizations I either joined, started, and / or led. I met Bobby Seale, Angela Davis, Amiri Baraka through the Student African-American Society. I came into contact with Felipe Luciano, Howard Zinn (!), and Edward James Olmos through Latino Undergraduates Creating History in America (La LUCHA). I deconstructed the model minority myth with Asian activists as a part of Asian Students in America. Radicals on my campus put me onto The Miseducation of the Negro by Carter G. Woodson, Talking Back: thinking feminist, thinking black by bell hooks, and A People’s History of The United States by Howard Zinn in conversations with fellow students, not any formal conversations.

These lessons happened almost nightly. In the middle of coding, I started to look at the decade plus of schooling as a pruning and pressing, a means to get me to access the dominant language, as if learning that the histories of people who looked like me or my neighbor meant nothing except as accessory to the eventual winning of white people in this country. Even those who consider themselves poor would rather be that than Black of any sort while those in the upper echelons lie in their pseudo-allegiances based on color. Whether right or wrong, I soaked up these books and joined all these organizations as a means to fill in a canyon-sized gap in my being.

The curriculum kept saying “You can make it too!” Then I understood manifest destiny. For some, not all.

So when I hear that Seattle democratically voted that Columbus Day would no longer be celebrated, reframed now as Indigenous People’s Day to salute those who’ve been wronged for centuries, I see that as a moment of learning and healing. Are these symbolic gestures enough? No. They never are. But is it a signal to educators to teach other histories, to acknowledge even for a fraction of the year to have these conversations? I can hope.

We’re still waiting for people to fully integrate everyone’s history without prejudice. It also means everyone who’s doing the teaching will have to look at their own teaching with a new set of lens, before we pillage these “alternate” histories as well.

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