What is it about?
This article analyzes both historic and contemporary denials of genocide made in southern Minnesota regarding the state's foundational event: the U.S. Dakota War of 1862. Ultimately, it reveals how specious separations between "fact" and "opinion" serve an ongoing regional need to "justify" the unjustifiable: land confiscation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
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Why is it important?
As noted by other commentators (McBrayer, 2015), training students to separate fact from opinion implicitly teaches a form of "doublethink" that diminishes the role moral facts could play in education, thus contributing to a general climate of moral relativism. This article explores the same effect among proponents of a regional settler discourse community that works to keep Minnesotans from fully acknowledging the moral significance of their state's founding on acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Perspectives
My hope is that this article will help white citizens and scholars more readily identify ongoing biases that objectivist discourses mask so that they may then respond effectively when those discourses present barriers to critical social-justice education.
Rick Lybeck
St. Cloud State University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A Public Pedagogy of White Victimhood: (Im)Moral Facts, Settler Identity, and Genocide Denial in Dakota Homeland, Qualitative Inquiry, December 2017, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1077800417735659.
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