Categories create hierarchies says humanities professor

Jeremey Dobbins
DM Staff writer

America has yet to fully enact the vision that all men are created equal, according to Mary E. Stuckey, an associate professor in the department of political science.

Stuckey, the recipient of this year's outstanding humanities teacher award, introduced the lecture, held Tuesday night, as a "celebration of research and the teaching that flows from it," indicating the importance of research in teaching any material. Her lecture, titled "Dreaming of America: Presidential Rhetoric, Diversity, and American National Identities," presented the idea that American identity is characterized by the tension between inclusion and exclusion in society.

"When we create categories like 'race' and 'gender' or 'civilized' and 'savage,' we are creating hierarchies," she said, and these hierarchies carry political meaning, including some and excluding others.

She said that American identity was composed of Martin Luther King's anger as well as his dream, noting that the anger of groups excluded from the nation's business was as much a part of American identity as the dream of American unity. "That pain and anger are as much a part of our national identity as are the celebrations of the freedom and ideals that mark our national history," she said.

"America is a nation ... founded on a set of principles," Stuckey said, pointing to the ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence. "All men are created equal in their claims of justice, and government exists to give them that justice" is the basic philosophy behind those principles, she said, quoting G.K. Chesterton.

She also pointed out the president's importance in making these principles a part of the national discourse, in that the president alone can "set the national agenda, and alone, he defines the nation." She pointed to Lyndon Johnson's ability to make African-American civil rights a part of the national discourse and agenda.

Despite progress, American institutions of power remain largely patriarchal, Stuckey said. She pointed to the progress in women obtaining the right to vote, but few women are yet to be found in most of our governing institutions.

One of the primary focuses of her lecture was on dichotomy of the Jacksonian Era of American history, which clearly showed this tension between inclusion and exclusion. As she said, Andrew Jackson was the president responsible for the inclusion of the "common man" in national politics, and yet this same president was responsible for the removal of Native Americans from the domain of the United States, responsible for such injustices as the infamous Cherokee Trail of Tears. Thus, this "explosion of [democratic] participation was premised on Indian Removal and Indian genocide," she said, since it freed up more land for American expansion.

Stuckey concluded by saying that the steps toward equality that the United States has enacted have been implemented "slowly, incrementally, and...painfully" over the course of time. "If there is a singular national identity..., it lies more in the faith we have in asking, and asking, and asking again" for further inclusion and further realization of our ideals, she said.

Dr. Stuckey's speech was sponsored in part by the Mississippi Humanities Council.