Uncomfortable Shifting

I take my entertainment where I can find it: In the 19th century Latin American class I'm grading for yesterday, the professor lectured on the Mexican-American war. While I was already aware of his general political proclivities, I'm not sure the students had really understood until then. And I'm nearly positive three-quarters of them had never thought twice about the war, and had certainly never thought about the U.S. as an invading and colonizing power. As he described the course of the war, analyzed the racist comments of U.S. officials, explained how the U.S. gained the Southwestern states (and 70% more territory than it had possessed in 1845), there was an extremely audible shifting going on in the room. I don't mean like their little minds were shifting and expanding to encompass possibilities and histories beyond what they had learned from their parents and high school teachers. I mean like physical squirming of the kind I've never seen in a class before, and I thought I'd seen every kind of white student discomfort. It was actually synchronized, he would say something about how we must examine the mission to spread democracy and U.S. exceptionalism in the doctrine of manifest destiny because it may explain things about the mentality of war today: SHIFTY SHIFT SHIFT. Or he would mention how the fact that the U.S. invaded Mexico, sent troops to Mexico City, and forced a "treaty" ceding half of its territory has left complex issues that we are still dealing with now, for example in the current debates on immigration: SHIFTY! SHIFT! SHIFTY! SHIFT! At one point he actually had to halt class to ask a pair of students if they had a question because they were having a prolonged conversation, presumably trying to debunk whatever he was saying with the kind of information one can find in fundamentalist Christian "history" books like "God's Plan for America."*

I assume this behavior was so extreme in part because, though there are many self-professed "liberal" students at this university, they weren't prepared to be implicated in this particular class. If they took the class before this on colonial Latin America, there was a lot of implication of the Spanish and Portuguese, some French and British, but the U.S. wasn't much of a player. So while they may have the politics in theory, they were unprepared to have to deal with the implications of their privilege as (mostly) U.S. citizens. And while some of this (manifest destiny, etc.) is discussed in U.S. history classes, it's different to have been immersed in Mexican and Latin American history for five weeks and look at the U.S. from that position, understanding the repercussions for the people you've been studying, rather than for those who won. The professor actually threw them a bone at one point, saying that they shouldn't feel guilty, they weren't around then, but they need to know what happened so they can have an informed discussion about today's issues. I loved the discomfort. If they're squirming and uncomfortable, it means there's at least a chance, if they're open to it, that they're actually getting the education they ostensibly came here to get. It's not comfy, but it stays with you. Those moments of discomfort are the only thing that can lead to real growth. Politicization is not an easy or comfortable process.

*Sidebar: I actually saw this book once, I think it might have been a two-part series, and what stuck with me was that it had, among other things, the image of a black slave toiling in a field on the cover. God's plan for black people was apparently slavery and inequality, in the service of building "America." Lovely.