Module 1 – Getting Started with American Government

Overview

Module 1 for the first week of the course includes a page giving an overview of the Module’s content and the week’s activities. It is reproduced here:

Purpose of this Week’s Topic

• An honest and thorough study of American Government is not possible without seriously re-examining the society and history that gave rise to it.
• This course will attempt to do just that — by focusing, initially but not exclusively, on two groups of people:1) Native American Tribes2) Enslaved Africans.

Each group was essential to the country’s early success and development as an economic power. It allowed the colonists to cast off the shackles that bound them to England and chart the course of their own independence.

Without the land that was acquired from Indigenous peoples (American Indians or Native Americans) and without the labor forcibly taken from black Africans, the rise of the American system and the wealth this country enjoys today, would not have been possible. And yet these groups, exploited from the beginning by Europeans arriving in North America, were systematically excluded from the framework of rights, privileges and opportunities that made the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution so revered for the lofty principles of freedom and equality. That exclusion has left a lasting legacy of systemic racism that continues to harm the descendants from those groups, and that harms the Nation and its people as a whole.

The Start of Slavery

The first Africans were forcibly brought to North America at Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. This began one of the most disgraceful chapters in American history, a chapter that is still being written today. One hundred and seventy years after the arrival and enslavement of the first Africans, slavery itself was embedded into the Nation’s founding document, the U.S. Constitution (though the word “slavery” was carefully avoided by use of euphemisms).

Slavery finally met its demise in the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th Amendments to the Constitution following the Civil War, which abolished slavery, guaranteed equal protection of the law to former slaves, and granted voting rights to former male slaves, respectively. These amendments, and civil rights laws passed by Congress after the Civil War, led to an 11-year period called Reconstruction, which saw emancipated African Americans in southern states gain political and economic power. But when federal troops withdrew from the South, white political leaders took it as a signal that they could deny equal rights to African Americans without fear of federal interference. This allowed the White Supremacy that had created and maintained slavery to continue in different forms: discriminatory state laws that denied black males the right to vote, and Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation of blacks and whites in nearly every part of social life and allowed unbridled terrorizing (rape, murder, lynching) of black communities by white citizens (KKK, Red Shirts and others). Slavery had been abolished, but the systemic racism that lay at its foundation had not.

After 80 years of enduring and fighting back against these oppressive conditions in clear violation of their constitutional rights, in the 1950s their struggle against discriminatory policies began to see some results from the government: the Executive branch (desegregation of the military), the Supreme Court (desegregation of public schools), and later by Congress (civil rights and voting rights laws). While African Americans have made significant gains in recovering their civil rights, significant injustices continue today, especially in areas of voting rights, wealth gaps, incarceration of Black men and boys, and police violence.

Continued Struggles and Inequities

The murder of George Floyd, a black man, at the hands of white policemen in Minneapolis in plain sight and captured on video by a bystander, is just one in a long line of killings of unarmed black men by police in recent years. Even a black U.S. senator from North Carolina, Tim Scott, a Republican, has spoken out about being stopped frequently by police simply because he was driving a new car in the “wrong neighborhood.” The protests across the nation over the death of George Floyd were a continuation of a long tradition of direct action and mass demonstrations in civil rights battles against racism.

Before European arrival in North America, the continent had a thriving population of upwards of 100 million Indigenous people (Indians), living in hundreds of different locations, speaking a multitude of different languages and having diverse sets of spiritual beliefs and cultural practices. It was not the “empty landscape” often portrayed. They also are mentioned in the Constitution, but were not beneficiaries of its rights.

African Americans and Native Americans were not the only groups excluded by the Founders or their successors. Other groups – women, the poor, Asian Americans, Latinos, LGBTQ – have their own unique histories of struggle against discrimination and violence. The American story, however, is not simply a tale of exclusion and persecution of certain groups. It is also a story of how these groups struggled, and continue to struggle, against all odds to take what had been denied them, and to demand that the American government guarantee to them what had already been guaranteed to white men for so long.

Whether based on race, ethnicity, gender, national origin or sexual orientation, discrimination persists in society, and these groups continue to fight for their civil rights – for equal treatment under the law.

Other Important Themes

Democracy at Risk – We will also examine the January 6 (2021) Insurrection at the Capitol and other ongoing actions that pose a threat to the survival of American democracy, and what can and is being done to resist them.

Fact vs. Fiction – We will look at The Big Lie, QAnon, Critical Race Theory and other issues that reflect the epidemic of mis- and dis-information that plagues our ability to function as a civil society. You will learn how to critically read and analyze information to determine for yourself what is true or false and the extent to which the information is slanted by bias.

What Can You Do?

Some or all of you may be part of the newest generation to emerge in our society – Gen Z. You and your generation will eventually carry the responsibility for deciding in what direction these struggles proceed. The outcome may well determine whether the American Experiment in democracy – “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” – continues.

Classroom Lessons and Activities

The Module lists the following Discussion assignments (Nos. 1.1 and 1.2) as the primary activities for the week. No chapters in the American Government textbook are assigned for reading in Week 1, as the focus is on introducing the DSJ theme.