A Quote by Wesley Morris
American popular culture has long been marked by an absence of empathy for American Indians. Westerns doubled as a campaign against so-called savages in a way that desensitized us to the savages we'd become.
Related Quotes
Savages!' he echoed, ironically. 'You set foot on one of the shores of this globe, professor, and you’re surprised to find savages? Where aren’t there savages? Besides, are they any worse than others, these whom you call savages?
In the John Wayne movies, the Indians were savages that were trying to scalp you. That culture has really suffered because of the stereotype you see in those westerns.
There's something deeply rooted in American culture. You can pretty much identify what it was. You take a look at the history. It was internal conquest. You had to defend yourself against what the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, an enlightened figure, called the attacks of the "merciless Indian savages," whose known way of warfare was torture and destruction. Also you had a slave population, you had to protect yourself against them. You needed guns.
Without the restraints of religion and social worship, men become savages much sooner than savages become civilized by means of religion and civil government.
When we affect to condemn savages, we should remember that by doing so we asperse our own progenitors; for they were savages also.Who can swear that among the naked British barbarians sent to Rome to be stared at more than 1500 years ago, the ancestor of Bacon might not have been found?--Why, among the very Thugs of India, or the bloody Dyaks of Borneo, exists the germ of all that is intellectually elevated and grand. We are all of us--Anglo-Saxons, Dyaks and Indians--sprung from one head and made in one image.
The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages - as if the savages weren't dangerous enough already.
Charles Darwin, who had witnessed the
atrocities perpetrated against Argentina’s native
Indians by Juan Manuel de Rosas, had predicted
that “the country will be in the hands of white
Gaucho savages instead of copper-coloured Indians.
The former being a little superior in education,
as they are inferior in every moral virtue.
The standardization of world culture, with local popular or traditional forms driven out or dumbed down to make way for American television, American music, food, clothes and films, has been seen by many as the very heart of globalization.
Western civilization has been at war with tribalism for 3,000 years. And that war was brought to the New World by the English colonists. A very early point in American law Chief Justice John Marshall is asked to decide the status of Indian tribes. And what he does. He calls them savages who lack the same rights as the white people who came over here, the Europeans, and colonized their land under this, what many Americans might regard as an obscure legal doctrine called the Doctrine of Discovery. But it is still the most important doctrine in American constitutional law.
The American culture especially, and Western culture in general, urges us to not only become the best that we can be, but also win against the competition.
They [American Indians] never did straight-up fights. It wasn't about, you know, getting killed in the line of fire. It was all ambush, ambush, ambush, and you ambush somebody, and then you take the scalps, and you - even though scalping wasn't created by the American Indians. It was created by the white man against Indians, and they just took it and claimed it.
I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges, astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc. It does not behoove us, who were only savages and barbarians when these Indians and Chinese peoples were civilized and learned, to dispute their antiquity.
Historically speaking, we went from being Indians to pagans to savages to hostiles to militants to activists to Native Americans. Its five hundred years later and they still cant see us. We are still invisible.
War! When I but think of this word, I feel bewildered, as though they were speaking to me of sorcery, of the Inquisition, of a distant, finished, abominable, monstrous, unnatural thing. When they speak to us of cannibals, we smile proudly, as we proclaim our superiority to these savages. Who are the real savages? Those who struggle in order to eat those whom they vanquish, or those who struggle merely to kill?
Explain to me what Italian-American culture is. We've been here 100 years. Isn't Italian-American culture American culture? That's because we're so diverse, in terms of intermarriage.
With what's happened in the world the last three years, it's easier to see why it's become popular again to diminish and revile Arabs and Muslims in American popular culture.
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