The Manhattan Purchase and Multiculturalism

Who hasn't heard the story of the infamous Manhattan Purchase? It goes something like this: In 1626, a group of West India Company merchants led by Peter Minuit swindled Manhattan out of the hands of its natives for a mere $24. Like the legends of George Washington and the cherry tree, the glories of the Emancipation Proclamation, or the Kennedy family, this story has been subsumed into our Western consciousness in all its misinterpreted glory. The next time someone tells it the way you've heard it before, keep these facts in mind:

The Dutch currency of the 17th century was the guilder. To estimate the value of what Minuit was offering the natives for their land in contemporary terms, a New York historian converted guilders into dollars and came up with the figure $24. The problem is that this was calculated 165 years ago. Since then, the value of your dollar has gone down more than 99%, and what was $24 then would now be worth almost $2400. Add to this the extreme cheapness of unsettled land in a continent still bursting with it, and you may begin wondering who was swindling whom. It gets better. The natives of the northeast were known to make bead-like pieces out of seashells to use as jewelry and currency.The time and labour involved in carving and filing the shells into these decorative pieces was immense. As a result, each individual “bead” was worth a small fortune. When the Dutch offered hundreds of beads as part of their payment for the land, the natives suddenly found themselves exorbitantly enriched. If I were faced with the choice of either continuing to squat on my undeveloped land, or moving into the vast interior with overflowing coffers, I would have done just like the natives did. Maybe that's just me.

The irony of this story isn't only how it's been misconstrued, it's what it says about our multiculturalist mentality. In the name of protecting oppressed minorities we presume to think for them. We know what's in their best interest, whether it's what they want or not. In this case, we assume that the natives must have been extremely gullible to willingly sell the Dutch their land, when in fact they were making a rational decision to "get rich quick." Similarly, we don't think that Jews who vote Republican can be true Jews. Female politicians can't be touched - unless they're pro-life. Blacks who frequent tea parties have been misled by conservatives. Clarence Thomas, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Alan Keyes and other African-Americans can't have made an intelligent decision to embrace free markets, they must have been beguiled by the white establishment. The multiculturalists insist that all these exceptions to their heavy-handed rule are simply naive individuals. In the end, who's truly naïve? At least the arrogance of the “white man's burden” vilified the native cultures alone. In its contemptuous disdain for universal truth, postmodernity vilifies both the white man's culture and the native's intelligence.