|
by Robert Jensen
Ever since the movie “Fargo” came out a decade ago, my ability to mimic the
Scandinavian-inflected accent of my hometown and home state of North Dakota has
been a guaranteed way to elicit laughter during my public speaking.
That joking ended earlier this month, when I realized -- in a painfully public
manner -- that my use of that North Dakota accent was in a small but undeniable
way supportive of a white-supremacist account of the history of this country.
The story of that episode illustrates not just the depth of the pathology of
white America but also a way we white folks can -- with self-reflection and
help from others -- start to transform ourselves.
For those who have never seen the 1996 movie or heard a white person from the
Dakotas or Minnesota (despite the title “Fargo,” which is the largest city in
North Dakota, the film is set in Minnesota), the accent has an amusing
sing-songy quality and trademark phrases such as, “Ah, geez” and “Yah, you
betcha!” In print it may not sound particularly funny, but with the right
delivery it can be a crowd-pleaser.
That is, it’s a crowd pleaser in certain crowds -- such as an audience at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where I was speaking, and where few
are likely to think much about real Dakota history.
I was at the university to participate in a panel on racism and white privilege,
a subject about which I’ve written a book, making me an alleged expert. In my
introductory remarks I made reference to my upbringing in North Dakota and the
accent made famous by the movie, using it for a bit of comic relief in a
discussion of a difficult subject.
On that panel with me was D. Anthony Tyeeme Clark, a professor of American
Indian Studies at that university and a citizen of the Sac and Fox Tribe of the
Mississippi in Iowa. Although I didn’t poll the audience, I’m pretty sure Clark
was one of the few indigenous people there. (Clark told me later that of the
100-plus students and faculty who have self-identified as American Indian on
campus in recent years, about 15 to 20 are citizens of Indian nations or tribal
members, and even fewer are tribally connected.)
In his remarks, Clark spoke about the racism in that university’s continued use
of a caricatured Indian mascot, Chief Illiniwek, which is a constant reminder
of the arrogance, ignorance, and cruelty of the dominant white culture.
[For examples of this manifestation of white supremacy, see websites in support
of the mascot’s use at http://www.honorthechief.org/ and
http://www.chiefilliniwek.org/. Resources on efforts to force the university to
stop using the mascot are at http://www.iresist.org/,
http://www.retirethechief.org/, and http://www.prairienet.org/prc/prcanti.html.
The statement of American Indian Studies faculty and the staff of the Native
American House at the university is at http://www.nah.uiuc.edu/statements.htm.]
In the course of his talk, Clark made reference to the fact that in the United
States, English is a foreign language. That remark set off in my head a chain
of thoughts that left me resolved to never again joke about a North Dakota
accent.
Let’s start with the obvious: While some of the indigenous people killed or
displaced by Europeans and their descendants learned to communicate in English
with the settler-colonizers, they did so in a second (or third, fourth, or
fifth) language. English is not a native language in the territory we now call
the United States -- it’s the language of a colonizing people who pursued a
genocidal strategy to acquire that territory and its resources. Though I’ve
spent some time reading about that history, it had never occurred to me think
of English in that way; being part of the dominant group in a society allowed
me to avoid those kinds of obvious, and harsh, realities.
As I sat at the table next to Clark, I realized what his remark meant: I don’t
really speak with a North Dakota accent, and to label my speech as such is to
obscure that history of European colonization and barbarism toward indigenous
people. What would a real Dakota accent, North or South, sound like? Nothing
like the characters from “Fargo,” that’s for sure. That white Dakota accent is
mostly Scandinavian, transplanted through colonization.
As all this ran through my head, I realized I should scrap my planned closing
remarks and use my last few minutes to face this issue. I told the group that
I was embarrassed that for so long I had not recognized these obvious points. I
was emotional and probably not being all that clear; I looked out at the
audience and saw that I wasn’t explaining it well. So I went to the blackboard
and wrote “North Dakota,” and then erased “North.” What’s left? “Dakota.” Who
are the people today who really speak with a “Dakota” accent? Their ancestors
aren’t from Scandinavia or any other part of Europe.
Those people were -- and still are -- the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota, usually
collectively referred to as the Great Sioux Nation. Their languages are part of
a family that linguistic anthropologists call Siouan or Siouan-Catawban, which
is still spoken on the Great Plains of the United States and parts of southern
Canada.
I don’t speak any of those languages. I can’t reproduce the accent with which
those peoples speak. In other words, I can’t do a real Dakota accent. I can
only do the settler-colonizers’ accent.
In my home state, we took not only the land of the people of those nations but
their name as well, and we then pretend that we are Dakotans. It’s perhaps a
small point, but an important one: I am not of the Dakota people. I am of the
people who tried to exterminate the Dakota and who colonized their land.
And what of those original colonizers and their descendants? I can hear my
people in North Dakota saying something like this: “Hey, most of those
so-called colonizers were relatively poor farmers from Scandinavia and other
parts of northern Europe who came to the United States to scratch out a living
and who built a prosperous life through a lot of hard work.”
Fair enough; those folks did work hard under arduous conditions. In my family,
the last immigrant from Scandinavia was my paternal grandfather, who came from
Denmark as a teenager and worked hard his whole life as a blacksmith, mostly in
North Dakota and Minnesota.
But no matter what the stories of our families, two things are unavoidable.
First is that the land on which those immigrants worked so hard was available
only because of a genocidal campaign that eliminated most of the indigenous
population. Second is that the majority of those immigrants and their
descendants never challenged that injustice. Like most European immigrants who
came here without much privilege, they accepted what was to be a privileged
place in a white-dominant society by embracing white supremacy.
It’s easy for me to sit back, writing this essay, to make all these obvious
points about the white supremacy that exists out there, in the world. But the
fact remains: For years I have used the “Fargo” joke without any thought to
those very same points. This is a story not only of the crimes of the past and
present, but of how I -- like so many white people -- can both know these
things and ignore them at the same time.
So, what triggered all this as I sat on the panel at the University of Illinois?
The simple answer is, Tony Clark.
Because the logo of the main university in my home state, the University of
North Dakota, is the racist “Fighting Sioux” caricature, I have been studying
the issue of American Indian mascots and nicknames for some time
[http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/fightingsioux.htm]. Much of what
Clark said was familiar to me. Yet there was something about his clarity,
honesty, and passion that got to me. His presentation forced me to remember
that what is for me a political issue is for him and other American Indians
today also a lived reality. Clark, his Indian colleagues, and other citizens of
a variety of Indian nations -- students, staff, and faculty -- walk every day on
that campus and look at t-shirts and posters with a caricature that remind them
that the dominant white culture doesn’t really much care about them.
The discussion that day made me uncomfortable, and for that I am grateful to
Clark. Like anyone in a position of dominance, it’s easy for me to grow
comfortable with injustice, even when engaged in political activity to resist
it. Listening to Clark that day I learned some things, but just as important is
that I had to confront an emotional reality; it was the combination of that
knowing and feeling that led me to recognize what was wrong with the jokes I’ve
been telling about my home state’s accent.
In the context of all that must happen for the United States to become a truly
just multiracial society, this struggle of mine over a marginally funny joke
might seem fairly inconsequential, just a small step in one person’s struggle.
But the bigger lesson is that I wouldn’t have taken the step (1) if there had
been no forum in which I could hear Clark speak, (2) if Clark had not been
willing to be generous in offering to the group his knowledge in such honest
fashion, or (3) if I had run away from my feeling of discomfort.
For people with privilege in an unjust world -- whether it’s men in relation to
women, the setter-colonizer in relation to indigenous peoples, white people in
relation to people of color, the rich in relation to working and poor people,
or U.S. citizens in relation to the country’s domination of the rest of the
world -- it’s imperative that we invite into our worlds those on the other side
of that privilege, not to make us feel good but precisely to challenge us to
have the courage to feel uncomfortable.
If we can’t do that, there is little hope for the world -- and no hope for our
own souls.
---------------------
I am grateful to Professor Clark for his comments and suggestions, which are
reflected in this final version of the essay. For more information on his work,
see http://www.nah.uiuc.edu/faculty-Clark.htm.
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin
(http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html) and a board member of the Third
Coast Activist Resource Center (http://thirdcoastactivist.org). He is the
author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and
Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights Books).
He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.
Recommend this article... |
Writings 
Subscribe to this comment's feed
