Frederickson

This reading about ethnic relations by George Frederickson gave be a better understanding on how the white European culture automatically became the superior race. What I don’t understand is how humanitarians saw Native Americans as being similar to whites minus their savage ways. The essay states that the “Indian problem” was cultural more than racial. If that was the case shouldn’t every race been viewed that way. Every race has a different cultural background, but ultimately is similar in some way. Their effort to assimilate the Native American culture was demeaning and a way to take over cultural identity.

When white Americans were culturally reborn as Anglo Saxons, how did this change their social identity?

Though there was a scale of social evolution, I don’t understand how one race gained control over another, since each race had a different cultural background.

Why was one-way assimilation forced upon the different cultures?

“They rejected theories of social evolution that ranked cultures in relation to a universalist conception of “civilization”” (456). Since each culture was viewed differently, determining who was “civilized” or not couldn’t have been possible. This statement in the essay made me wonder how they created the universal model of civilization.