Of imperialism and expansionism

As a child, one of my favorite films was Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. In ways that I did not fully understand at the time, I enjoyed its meditations on the end of the Cold War as much as its special effects and Klingon make-up. In one scene, a Klingon delegation is dining aboard the enterprise, conversing about what it might mean for there to be a peace agreement between the Federation and the Klingons. Having played a bit where one Klingon character quotes "to be or not to be" and another character cites Shakespeare's Hamlet as the source, the conversation turns to the challenges before the Klingons in making peace with the Federation. Christopher Plummer's General Chang states that "We [the Klingons] need breathing room," to which Captain Kirk responds by suggesting that same statement was made by Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.

I have taken this little jaunt because Kirk's response intimates the fine line that exists between a people stating they "need breathing room" and a people heading out upon a campaign of imperialist expansion. I note this because after reading about the Texas School Board's curricular alterations, it became clear that some of these Texas schoolboard members seem to think that "American expansionism" is somehow benign, noble, and patriotic, while "imperialism" is somehow bad and therefore not an apt description for the U.S.'s nineteenth-century campaign across the continent. I offer up Kirk's observation that to need "breathing room," which as Frederick Jackson Turner long ago described as the undergirding drive of frontier settlement, may also entail "bad," viral, imperialist expansion. While the Texas schoolboard both wishes to rewrite history (and to write out important figures like César Chávez), they are also making semantic distinctions that must mean something in their particular subculture, but they are semantic distinctions that can seem meaningless from another point of view (like say you are Arapaho, Apache, Navajo, Cherokee, etc...U.S. expansionism is the same as imperialism and still has the same consequences). My point here is that the Texas School Board is so concerned with (white) liberal misinterpretations of history that they miss the ways that their own words and views can be misinterpreted by people different than themselves.

In a recent Los Angeles Times editorial, Jonathan Zimmerman notes that we all read history from our particular, biased location, and perhaps it would be fair to demand that U.S. history courses teach "both sides" of U.S. history. Yes, I agree that we all interpret history from a biased standpoint, and that multiple perspectives on history should be presented in class; that more importantly, students should be taught how to think about history and how to read historians critically. That said, I have not fallen so far down the postmodern rabbit hole that I think all readings of history are equally valid because some are just wrong by virtue of what they intentionally hide and leave out. I am also more of a postmodernist than Zimmerman because I think any approach to U.S. history that presumes an overarching narrative can't be good history. In his editorial, Zimmerman posits that there are two sides to the history of the U.S., when in fact there are more, and the only two sides he presents are conservative and liberal patriotism. There are many other perspectives besides just these two, both of which are guilty of eliding certain historical particularities in service of a greater grand narrative. Zimmerman is correct that there are many problems with how U.S. history is currently taught in high schools, but the solution is not to teach less history as the Texas standards suggest.

Rather we must ask more of the generations ahead than have been asked of the generations behind; they must learn the histories we have known while also being taught how to read them critically and how to craft their own perspectives. I think that is some of what Zimmerman is getting at, and that would be a good idea as long as it doesn't presuppose that there are two simplistic sides to U.S. history, a (white, elite, male) liberal view and a (white, elite, Christian) conservatie view. Then perhaps students can critically read the myth of expansionism for what Captain Kirk knew it to be; just because someone claims they need "breathing room" doesn't mean they aren't imperialists. It means that they have a semantic universe where expansionism is somehow neutrally valued while imperialism is valenced negatively, even while an outsider to that semantic universe would not see such a distinction.