A Reply to Emma's Blog

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Emma, thank you for saying all of this, because I too am quite fired up. To think that Europeans would consistently come into a new land, claim it as their own, and claim its original people to be backwards just grinds my gears. News flash - just because people don't live the exact same life as you do not mean that they are inferior! That's something that people have always needed to understand, and an issue that still persists today. People consistently have a hard time believing that a person being different than them does not mean inferiority, it just simply means that they are different - no more and no less. 
I was especially getting frustrated in class on Wednesday listening to Stark's lecture. When he started talking about James K Polk is when I started to get heated. This man's main interests were undoubtedly centered solely around white men - but I guess that isn't necessarily different than a lot of people of the time right? He was a believer in Manifest Destiny, which I guess in theory wouldn't have been a bad thing had it just been the want to expand the United State's boundaries. But no, he was convinced that white men had the "God given right" to expand the United States, taking over "uncivilized and "backwards" people. He would portray the Mexicans and indigenous as lazy because they don't use the land for exactly what Polk wanted, and also as dirty and Catholic. These are stereotypes that have lived on today, which makes it all the worse.
I understand that when looking at history we need to take a step aside from out lives right now put ourselves in people's perspectives, but I don't know how I could ever get behind Polk on this. 
I really, really enjoyed your blog!

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