Move over Frederick Jackson Turner. He’s the historian whose “frontier thesis” explained the national nerve tapped by the official closing of the frontier. In “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” an address delivered to a gathering of historians in 1893, he asserted:
This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development. Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. Now the peculiarity of American institutions is the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people — to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life.
What about the argument of David Potter, an influential mid-(20th) century historian whose book, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago, 1954) that the American character has been shaped by the reality and experience of economic abundance? Or Charles Beard, the progressive historian who found class conflict at the core of the American experience?
Forget them all. Our major media have discovered the real central theme of American history. Writing in the New York Times today, columnist Brent Staples declares that “[t]he effort to dehumanize black people by characterizing them as apes is central to our national history.”
I would say that the Los Angeles Times is aping this trend, but I dare not. One of the authors of its contribution today to this growing genre is none other than Prof. Philip Atiba Goff, whom we encountered only a few days ago here and one of whose recent studies, mentioned in his LAT piece today,
looked into the role of the media in death penalty cases. Using data compiled by the criminologist David Baldus, we examined 153 cases in the Philadelphia area in which a defendant was found guilty and statutes allowed for the application of the death penalty, among other sentencing options.
We read every article published about these cases in the Philadelphia Inquirer, from the time the crime was first reported to the sentencing of those arrested, and we tallied the number of ape-related metaphors that appeared in print — things such as “an urban jungle” and “aping a victim’s screams.” Not only were black men and their crimes much more likely to be described in apelike terms, but the number of ape-related metaphors predicted the likelihood that a defendant would be sentenced to death.
The argument here is that Americans have internalized a racist “‘implicit knowledge,’ the result of a lifetime of conditioning, rooted in historical representations of blacks as less than human” and that this “racial programming” is still alive and well.
I suppose if our racial notions are that deeply rooted it would be futile to monkey around with them.
