Hate kills! the consequences of bigotry

Minority studies: a brief text: part vi—hate kills!

Consequences of bigotry

As with many aspects of society, there are consequences of racism. One consequence is expulsion which is the removal of a minority group from inside national boundaries to outside national boundaries. Some examples of expulsion are the “Trail of Tears” and the pogroms carried out against the Jews by Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish Cossacks, and the “alien” relocation of more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans during WW II.

The trail of tears

In 1838 and 1839 the native American people called the Cherokee were forcibly removed by military force from their traditional lands east of the Mississippi River and along the Blue Ridge Mountains of Georgia. By the time of their expulsion from the United States and resettlement in Indian Territory in Oklahoma the Cherokee were a highly assimiliated/Europeanized group. They had stable agricultural settlements, bilingual schools where children learned both Cherokee and English, and their own written language and newspaper.

According to the New Georgia Encylopedia (External Link) :

In the 1820s and 1830s Georgia conducted a relentless campaign to remove the Cherokees. Between 1827 and 1831 the Georgia legislature extended the state's jurisdiction over Cherokee territory and set in motion a process to seize the Cherokee land, divide it into parcels, and offer the parcels in a lottery to white Georgians. The discovery of gold on Cherokee territory in 1829 further fueled the desire of Georgians to possess their land. The following year Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which authorized U.S. president Andrew Jackson to negotiate removal treaties with Native American tribes. Ross and other leaders fought government efforts to separate the Cherokees from their land and appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In Worcester v. Georgia (1832) the Court held that the Cherokee Indians constituted a nation holding distinct sovereign powers, but the decision would not protect the Cherokees from removal.

The Cherokee called this illegal, forcible removal The Trail of Tears because they were force-marched in the winter without sufficient clothing, shelter, or food. More than 4,000 people died along the way. Ibid.

Japanese exclusion and expulsion

From the 15 ^th century through the 19 ^th century, Japan was a xenophobic, feudal society, ostensibly governed by a God-Emperor, but in reality ruled by ruthless, powerful Shoguns. Japan’s society changed little during the four centuries of samurai culture, and it was cut off from the rest of the world in self-imposed isolation, trading only with the Portuguese, Spanish, English, and Chinese, and then not with all of them at once, often using one group as middlemen to another group. In the mid-19 ^th century, (1854), the United States government became interested in trading directly with Japan in order to open up new export markets and to import Japanese goods at low prices uninflated by middleman add-ons. Commodore Matthew Perry was assigned to open trade between the United States and Japan. With a flotilla of war ships, Perry crossed the Pacific and berthed his ships off the coast of the Japanese capital. Perry sent letters to the emperor that were diplomatic but insistent. Perry had been ordered not to take no for an answer, and when the emperor sent Perry a negative response to the letters, Perry maneuvered his warships into positions that would allow them to fire upon the major cities of Japan. The Japanese had no armaments or ships that could compete with the Americans, and so, capitulated to Perry. Within thirty years, Japan was almost as modernized as its European counterparts. They went from feudalism to industrialism almost over night.