blog — July 07

Getting Free of the Master Narrative: A. Naomi Paik’s Introduction to the new edition of “A Different Mirror for Young People”

GETTING FREE OF THE MASTER NARRATIVE
BY A. NAOMI PAIK

Along with my elementary-school classmates growing up in Lubbock, Texas, I learned about the 1836 Battle of the Alamo. At a fort in Texas, which was then part of Mexico, American settlers sought freedom from Mexican oppression. They fought to the death inside the fort, leaving no man standing. (As children, we did not ask how the story was known, if no one had lived to tell it.) We watched the John Wayne film that showed the white cowboys as heroes and the Mexican characters as evil. Now, years later, I think that the adults in the school never considered how this narrative might strike the many Mexican American students and teachers. 

Some of them, I can guess, felt the way I did as an Asian American high-school student when my US-history teacher told our class that Japanese Americans were jailed in prison camps during World War II for their own safety, with their support. I entered high school with more than seven hundred students in my grade, but fewer than three hundred and fifty of us remained when I graduated. Did that fact have something to do with what we were taught? Our education was rooted in what Ronald Takaki called the “Master Narrative.” 

It was not until college that I learned a fuller history of the Alamo. Mexico invited white American settlers into Texas to help take over the territory from Indigenous nations who had long lived in these lands. But when the Mexican state abolished slavery, those white settlers revolted, refusing to give up their human “property.” The Battle of the Alamo and the war for Texan independence was a revolt to preserve slavery. 

It has been decades since I attended school in Texas. It seems the education offered there continues to selectively edit history by the unspoken rules of the Master Narrative. As a college professor, I now use excerpts from Texas history textbooks to teach about how language, including the passive voice, can be used to reinforce those rules. Take this short passage: “Some slaves reported that their masters treated them kindly. To protect their investment, some slaveholders provided adequate food and clothing for their slaves. However, severe treatment was very common. Whippings, brandings, and, even worse, torture were all part of American slavery.” 

What do you notice about this passage? “Masters” and “slaveholders” are identified as acting humanely, with kindness and charity, but they disappear when the passage shifts to the passive voice to describe the violence of slavery. Who treated severely? Who whipped, beat, and tortured? And who was on the receiving end of this brutality? The same textbook called enslaved people taken from the shores of Africa “workers” who “immigrated” to the United States. 

I believe that you, the young person reading this book, deserve better. I trust that you can handle the truth. You’re smarter and stronger than we might think! I know that you can face and learn from the hard parts of our history and use that knowledge to create a better present and future. My belief in you is what motivated me to become a scholar and teacher in the first place. My students continue to drive me to study, discover, and tell the truth, even in those times when the truth is rewarded with punishment. My students, and you, make me brave.

The work of Ronald Takaki, the author of this book, helped make my own work possible. Takaki was part of a generation of scholars who helped build ethnic studies, a field of inquiry born out of social movements that confronted structural racism, the laws and practices built into government and other institutions that keep racial and ethnic inequality alive. Ethnic studies arose as people worked to create a more just and equitable world for everyone. On campuses like the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco State, students, faculty, campus workers, and community members came together to demand education that they could use to serve their communities. Together, they went on strike, shut down campuses, and created their own shared spaces of learning. 

These organizers and activists understood that education and knowledge are tools of power. Like enslaved people who taught themselves to read in secret, and Indigenous people who held to their languages and traditions even when the government used force to erase them, these activists demanded an education that would empower them to make positive change against oppressive systems.

Their opponents who ran those systems understood the power of education and knowledge, too. Blocking education is a way of blocking power. In response to campus protests in the 1960s, politicians took funds away from public higher education to prevent the growth of an educated working class. Making students take on huge amounts of debt not only puts education out of reach for many but also inspires resentment against educated people. But it is an educated population that creates the foundation for a robust democracy. 

This book comes out of this legacy of knowledge, power, resistance against oppression, and building a better world together. It is an effort toward achieving a US democracy like the one expressed in documents like the Declaration of Independence, which states “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” This vision of US democracy is still in a state of becoming. It is yet to be realized. 

As the early decades of the twenty-first century show, our democracy is fragile. All of us must fight for and defend it. Part of that democratic work is understanding US history in all its complexity— the successes and failures, the parts that make us proud and the parts that make us want to do better. Defending democracy requires getting real about why and how we have strayed from core US principles and learning how, as our nation moves forward, we can respond differently to similar challenges. 

The history offered in this book offers many examples of people working together to change the country! One of them was James G. Thompson, a Black soldier who returned from fighting in World War II to fight for equality at home. He and others never stopped believing in US principles, even when they had every reason to do so. As Thompson powerfully stated: “Though these questions often permeate my mind, I love America and am willing to die for the America I know will someday become a reality.” I hope this history inspires and moves you to bring the United States closer to its ideals, to help make it a place defined by equality, liberty, and justice for all. 

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A. NAOMI PAIK is an associate professor of Criminology, Law, & Justice and Global Asian Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago. She published Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II (UNC Press, 2016; winner, Best Book in History, AAAS 2018; runner-up, John Hope Franklin prize for best book in American Studies, ASA, 2017). Her book Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the 21st Century (2020, University of California Press), examines the long-developing criminalization of foreign-born people in the United. Her research and teaching interests include comparative ethnic studies; U.S. imperialism; U.S. militarism; social and cultural approaches to legal studies; transnational and women of color feminisms; carceral spaces; and labor, race, and migration. https://naomipaik.com/