Analysis: Was This Country Ever A Utopia

Neil KC

9/12/15

English 106

Adrianna Radosti

Was This Country Ever a Utopia?

As an American I think that it is very hard to think of what a dystopian society would be like. It seems so foreign to the mentality that we the American people have established for ourselves. We have always valued the ideas of liberty, freedom, and justice that our Founding Fathers established for us. But if you look through our history as a nation, I personally disagree to the idea that we followed these “so-called” steps at all. As a nation I think America’s past represents the closest thing that we may see to what a dystopia may have looked like. It seems drastic to jump to such a conclusion, but significant

historical events such as slavery of African Americas and the treatment of Native Americans has spurred my belief. American past wasn’t built on the foundation of “Milk and Honey” that is believed by us but rather built on the blood and the sacrifices of people. For many minority groups, America has been a place were their basic rights to be human are trampled in the name of progress. While America in the it present day maybe an entirely new country, it’s past still reflects the key aspects of what makes a dystopian society. The history of America reflects my common belief that any restriction of freedom leads to a dystopian society such as The treatment of Native Americans and the slavery of African Americans.
As a nation, America’s past has gone through a lot of issues dealing with the ideas of racial identity and how to handle a mixture of different races and cultures.

This has often lead to conflicts which usually followed by either a certain race of people either being wiped or subjected. If you look back in about 150 years you might notice that you are viewing an entirely different country. Before the-the 21st century, America had a reputation as a place that was unkind to anyone if you were not Anglo-Saxon. For the white majority, America allowed them to have an unlimited amount of freedom. But on the other had for different minority groups living in America was living hell each group had to face struggles that undermined their basic rights to liberty, freedom, and

justice
Native Americans went through hell and back just to survive, they were killed, raped, and kicked off their ancestral land for America.

For the original people of this land, the Native Americans began to soon live in a dystopia. Their culture, their pride as a people was washed away because of the progression of the American culture. Throughout America, racial stereotypes were thrown towards the native Americans like redskins or that they would scalp peoples heads off. This caused the rise in killing and destroying of Native American culture and people. For the white colonist killing of Native of Americans was encouraged, each killing allowed the white colonist to get paid per kill. Which is ironic in a sense because for their freedom and benefits whites had to crush the freedom of the Native Americans. Just the concept of destroying or inhibiting someone else’s freedom sounds dystopia-esque, it sounds like something that came out of 1984 by George Orwell. Look at the Trail of Tears, for example, one of the horrendous forced migration in world history. During the early 19th century, the US government called for a removal of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole tribes from their ancestral lands. These tribes may sound familiar because they were the five largest tribes that adapted to American culture. Over 100,00 Native Americans were forced to move because of the growing population of whites and the value of the land that they held. These tribes were forced

to travel thousands of miles to the west to new areas called the Indian territory. During this forced migration many horrible things happened to the Native Americans, some got sick due to weather and diseases, some starved because of the lack of food, and they were attacked by other native tribes, in total over 4,000 native Americans died during this trip. One supporter of my argument would acclaim author and writer Umberto Eco. In his famous New York time article Ur-Fascism, Embarto talks about that in any dystopian society that the group in charge always tries to exploit differences in other groups and try to restrict their freedom. I fell that this connects to issues of the Native American people because of how much the white majority tried to find differences between them and exploit it for the white advantage. For the Native American people, I think that their ability to survive and evolve through all this pain and suffering. I think it should be commended how strong their resolve to survive and keep their culture alive.
African Americans for most of the history of America were used slaves to the progress of industry in America. America was built on the back of these slaves and while they may have built and forged most of the infrastructure, they didn’t receive any benefits. Like any dystopian society they were considered expendable, something that could be renewed constantly. Because of being slaves they had a lack of freedom, they had no choice where to live, they were not allowed to feel human because of the lack of freedom, they felt demoralized. Think about it how sad it is for an entire race of people to lose their motivation to become more than they taught to be. The freedom of being whatever they wanted was taken from them just to ensure the freedom for other people. These African slaves had no in what happened in their lives, everything from, who they married, who was in their family, and what their name was all depended on their white masters. This sounds like something from a movie, where there is a dominant class that is control and rules over. Like think about these people lost the ability to think like humans but rather be treated like live stocks waiting to be sold and bought. So for about 150 years the African American people never had really self-appreciation of themselves, their language of the African slaves was English but it was shortened more into a “newspeak” format. Umberto Eco would argue that the creation of this shorten language was utilized to “weaken the critical reasoning” of the African people. In another word that mean that the African people were constantly weaken intellectually to stop from uprising.
America is known throughout the world as a place of freedom and liberty, everyone from the planet wants to visit American and bathe in its ideals of society. While America in my opinion maybe a place of opportunity now, for most of its history it was unwelcoming to those it considered different. To many people in America the idea that our history was based on the blood and lives of those who were used, maybe very unpopular but is true. I think we have come to as a people to accept and even embrace our bloodied past, to learn and fix mistakes that had happened 250 years ago.
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