Summary Of Our America By Marti

In examining Martí’s essay, ‘Our America’, there is an implication that the intellectual elites in the United States perceived racial difference that meant inability. Martí suggests that ‘the European nor the Yankee could provide the key to the Spanish American riddle’ leading to the creation of ‘bookshelf races’. Referring to the race problem as the riddle of Latin America, Martí is suggesting that race was a problem for predominantly white societies, which they could not resolve. It is interesting that these nations are the large powers of the modern colonial world. Martí implies that the alternative for North American intellectuals was to creation a myth of racial inferiority, which is evident in a variety of literature. Starting
as theories, one of which Martí references explicitly, this formed the foundation of racial science in the United States. For example, Stephen Gould outlines a number of theories which drew evidential basis from the Bible. Martí notes that United States elite showed a ‘wicked and unpolitical disdain for the aboriginal race because of higher virtue, enriched with necessary blood’. Research from Gould suggests that the notion of ‘necessary blood’ is linked with United States research aiming to understand the origins of species. Using the story of Adam and Eve, United States intellectuals, therefore, suggested that blacks and other races must have different origins creating a distinction between blood lines. Furthermore, Martí suggests that these theories continued to develop in order to entrench a racial hierarchy in society. He notes that the ‘theorist and feeble thinkers string together and warm over’ the construction of these ideas concerning race. This statement suggests that creating these ideas allowed a sense of security, warming through North Americans.