The Study of Racialism

Lill · New User Joined: 21 Dec 2007 {Posts: 43 } Location: Sweden

I surfed the internet and I came across this blog, called: "Los Angelista's Guide To The Pursuit Of Happiness". I think that she is right in everything she's saying in the text, she writes in a funny and direct way. Read more and all the comments at: http://www.losangelista.com/2007/11/myth-of-pure-whiteness.html

gemini072 · Moderator Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 2942 }

Bischoff · Mentor Joined: 20 Jan 2008 {Posts: 395 }

What a very funny sense of humor. Laughing

Powell · Guru Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 2462 }

anonymouse · Wizard Joined: 09 Oct 2007 {Posts: 677 }

Lill · New User Joined: 21 Dec 2007 {Posts: 43 } Location: Sweden

gemini072 · Moderator Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 2942 }

pg 40
Once I asked my part Irish-part Native American mother, who had grown up orphaned and homeless in foster homes as a servant and in a reformatory, why my father's family name, Dunbar, was shared by a black person. In my hight school English class we had just read some poems by the African-American poet Laurence Dunbar. I hoped my mother would say he was a relative of ours. But she said that my Dunbar ancestors were "Scotch Irish" and had once owned huge plantations and many slaves and that the slaves took the names of the masters.

"How do we know we are related to the masters and not the slaves?" I asked.

"Because you are white," she answered, closing the discussion forever. *

* Roxanne A. Dunbar, "Bloody Footprints: Reflections on Growing Up Poor White," in White Trash: Race & Class in America (1997)

Roxanne with celebrated New Mexico writer and poet, Demetria Martinez, who introduced Roxanne at Bookworks in Albuquerque NM

http://www.reddirtsite.com/

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, daughter of a landless farmer and half-Indian mother. Her paternal grandfather, a white settler, farmer, and veterinarian, had been a labor activist and Socialist in Oklahoma with the Industrial Workers of the World in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The stories of her grandfather inspired her to lifelong social justice activism.

Married at eighteen, she left with her husband for San Francisco, California, where she has lived most of the years since, although the marriage ended. Her account of life up to leaving Oklahoma is recorded in Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie. She has a daughter, Michelle.

Roxanne graduated, majoring in History, from San Francisco State College, a working class public institution, but was selected for History graduate school at University of California at Berkeley, transferring to University of California, Los Angeles to complete her doctorate in History.

From 1967 to 1972, she was a full time activist living in various parts of the United States, traveling to Europe, Mexico, and Cuba. This time of her life and the aftermath, 1960-1975, is the story told in Outlaw Woman: Memoir of the War Years.

Roxanne took a position teaching in a newly established Native American Studies program at California State University at Hayward, near San Francisco, and helped develop the Department of Ethnic Studies, as well as Women's Studies. In 1974, she became active in the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the International Indian Treaty Council, beginning a lifelong commitment to international human rights.

Her first published book, The Great Sioux Nation: An Oral History of the Sioux Nation and its Struggle for Sovereignty, was published in 1977 and was presented as the fundamental document at the first international conference on Indians of the Americas, held at United Nations' headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. That book was followed by two others in the following years: Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico, 1680-1980 and Indians of the Americas: Human Rights and Self-Determination.

In 1981, she was asked to visit Sandinista Nicaragua to appraise the land tenure situation of the Miskitu Indians in the northeastern region of the country. Her two trips there that year coincided with the beginning of United States government's sponsorship of a proxy war to overthrow the Sandinistas, with the northeastern region on the border with Honduras becoming a war zone and the basis for extensive propaganda carried out by the Reagan administration against the Sandinistas. In over a hundred trips to Nicaragua and Honduras from 1981 to 1989, she monitored what was called the Contra War. Her book, Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War was published in 2005.