Liars, Allegedly

“I am well aware that a Crow Indian can express great sorrow for me,” wrote Osborne Russell, a native of Maine who was trapping beaver in the Rockies in 1837, “and at the same time be laying a plan to rob me or secretly take my life.”  I sighed, put down my book, and made a note in my legal pad: “O.R. perceives Crow as duplicitous.” In the left margin, where I write one-word labels so I can scan my notes later, I wrote “RACISM.”  It’s a label that appears throughout my notes on fur trappers’ journals.
  
Condemning such generalizations as racist is a reflexive reaction of my generation, I think.  That may be a good thing.  It’s better than immediately concluding that an actor’s race determines his conduct.  But my generation also strives recognize cultural differences.  In Japan, for instance, it’s alright to slurp your noodles.  In the United States, it’s not.  Either system of manners is fine, we believe, and neither set of table norms is superior to the other.  Recognizing that cultural difference, however, is another way of adopting a generalization: Japanese slurp their noodles in public, but Americans don’t.  That, I think, is an unobjectionable generalization.

So it’s okay to generalize about cultures and their views on noodle-slurping.  But if I were to claim that “black people act like criminals,” that would be an objectionable generalization properly condemned as racist.  So, some generalizations are permissible and others aren’t.  The dividing line may lie here: generalizing about norms in different cultures is permissible, so long as it is accurate, while generalizing about alleged propensities of different races, as distinct from cultures, is not.  In other words, it’s okay to note cultural differences, but not okay to imply that race determines character.  For instance, I had a long conversation with a black guy I met in bar in Berkeley who had been born in Sudan but raised in the United States.  We talked about how neither of us gave a damn about soccer, which is what the bar had inexplicably decided to show on TV.  For me to apply generalizations to this guy would have made no sense because he and I were, broadly speaking, culturally identical.  Although he’d grown up in New York and I in Georgia, we were both culturally American and our differences were negligible when compared to –  for instance – the differences between Osborne Russell and a Crow Indian in 1837.  We were racially different but culturally similar, so generalizations were inappropriate.

Osborne clearly generalized about the Crow.  Was my all-caps label of “RACISM” correct?  It is indisputably true that the agriculture-based culture into which Osborne Russell was born differed markedly from the hunting-and-gathering culture of the Crow.  Their cultures diverged about as much as it is possible for cultures to diverge, in fact.  And for all I know, it may have been true that folks from Maine in the 1830s placed a higher value on interpersonal sincerity than the Crow.  Maybe what Russell viewed as “duplicitous” the Crow would have viewed as “sound strategy” – a sort of caveat emptor approach to negotiation.  A little like modern TV ads in which insurance companies present themselves as allies of their claimants.  So when Russell wrote that “I am well aware that a Crow Indian can express great sorrow for me and at the same time be laying a plan to rob me or secretly take my life,” was he being racist?  Was his claim more like generalizing about cultural predispositions to noodle-slurp, or more like generalizing as to the allegedly inherent criminality of a different race?

It’s hard to say.  To begin, we don’t have the Crows’ side of the story – they left no written record of their views of the trappers’ sincerity.  And in part because we don’t have access to the Crows’ perspective, it’s hard to gauge the cultural sincerity of the trappers.  Although by 1837 the federal government and the governments of some states – e.g., Georgia – had been swindling eastern tribes like the Cherokee for years, there wasn’t yet enough of a governmental presence in the west to make governmental swindling a possibility.  That would come years later, when the United States started packing Native Americans onto reservations.  At the time, the trappers were the western representatives of the United States.  One hundred and eighty years after the height of the fur trade, it’s difficult to generalize about the fur trappers’ cultural tendencies.  Were they more sincere, or less sincere, than the culturally distinct Crow?  And if there was a difference in the cultures’ relative sincerity, would it have been racist to acknowledge it?