The Age of Racism

Thank you for making it to my third blog post! This week I read up to chapter thirteen in part five in Race, which is more than halfway through the book. This section was extremely interesting to read because it focused on how different groups made distinctions between the races. It addresses the questions "Who is black? and Who is white?" (pg. 135).

In my first blog post, I neglected to talk about my own prejudices, because I wanted to read more about where prejudices come from before I talked about my own. Many of the people in my group started their blog with comments on Aronson's story of his own prejudice and how they could relate. I thought that this would be a good time to address it, given the topic of this section. Like almost everyone I know, I like to think of myself as someone who is unprejudiced and accepting of everybody, but I have my own prejudices that I act on unconsciously. I think this comes with growing up in a small town with very little diversity.

In this section, the definition of white is explored. Aronson combines the definitions of many people to shed light on how the majority sees "whiteness." One of the views he comments on is President Andrew Jackson's. In the 1830s President Jackson was upset with the Supreme Court ruling in favor of the Cherokee, and he said, of the Cherokee, "'They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition'" (pg. 138). If you reverse this statement, "you can see his definition of white: intelligent, hard-working, moral, and interested in self-improvement" (pg. 138). President Jackson's opinion reflected the opinion of the majority in the 1830s. The idea that only white people can be intelligent, hard-working, and moral is absurd to me, but it was commonplace back in the nineteenth century. Some people now still do not think of Native Americans very highly.

Aronson also comments that in America being white was linked with the capacity to be a good citizen. This definition seems like it has carried over to present day. In my English class, we read an article black man's experience with white people's reactions to him on the street. He noticed that people were often perturbed when they saw him out walking on the street at night because they were afraid of him. Had morality and good citizenship not been associated only with whiteness, many people wouldn't have those same fears now. Even I feel a twinge of fear when I have to pass a black man on the street because the message that our society sends out subconsciously is black is bad and white is good.

Later, when a great flood of Chinese came to America, it seemed like the focus shifted from blacks to the Chinese. Congress granted Africans and their descendants the right to become American citizens but passed even harsher laws against Chinese from becoming citizens. In our country, it seems to me like as soon as one prejudice fades away, another one takes its place. We can't seem to go without any sort of prejudice.

This switch of focus didn't last forever. Once the Civil War was fought and won by the Union, slavery was abolished and the focus shifted back to African-Americans. Blacks and whites were allowed to go to public school together, but many Southerners were strongly opposed to this change. With the government no longer on their side, the matter was in their own hands. From the 1890s to the 1930s "nearly 4,000 black men, women, and children were murdered" by lynching. It was such a "big thing" that thousands of white people would gather to see the lynching of a black person.

The crowd of 5,000 gathered to watch the lynching of Allen Brooks, a black man charged with attempted rape. 

Lynching Scene. 10 Mar. 1910. Timeline, timeline.com/
     allen-brooks-dallas-lynching-4fc9132ee422. Accessed 30 Mar. 2018.

I can't imagine watching someone die, much less watching someone murdered in front of me, but for some Southerners, a lynching was a teachable moment: "'fathers [...] took their children to teach them how to dispose of Negro criminals'" (pg. 169). After contemplating all these events, I find it easy to see how the prejudice continues from generation to generation. Lynching was such a large part of the culture that D.W. Griffith made a movie, The Birth of a Nation, that told all of America that lynchings were needed. President Woodrow Wilson praised the film as "'history written with lighting'" (pg. 172). 

The fact that our former president agreed with the idea that lynchings are necessary for our nation shows how embedded it was in our culture, and still is. It is hard to shake that kind of hatred from our foundations when our whole nation was built upon such prejudice and racism. I'll leave you with a question: do you think that there is a way for our country to move forward without any sort of prejudices and biases?

I'm not entirely sure if I do.

The Road to Race

If you made it past my long first post, thank you so much and welcome to my second blog post. My assignment this week was to read another 57 pages of Race. This section was more history-focused, so it wasn't as exciting to read as the first section, but it was still easy to understand like I said in my first blog post. If you're reading along with me, let me know your thoughts about this section.

In this section, Aronson explains some ideas that people had in the medieval days and in the 1800s. Christians in the medieval times believed that "blackness was associated with sin" and "dark skin suggested that these were particularly demonic people" (pg. 74). He describes how people like Bartolomé de Las Casas, the first priest to be ordained in the Americas, believed that Africans were meant to be enslaved because of the "curse of Ham," Ham being Noah's son. Ham's son Canaan was cursed by Noah because Ham looked at his father while he was drunk, asleep, and naked. Confusing, I know. Noah cursed Canaan to be "a servant of servants" of his "brethren" (pg. 100). Back then, Ham was misread to mean dark, brown, or black, so Canaan was also assumed to be black. Christians in the Roman Empire used the curse of Ham to explain why most of the slaves they saw were African, by saying they were Ham's sons: "what is so must be because God wanted it that way, and the reasons were spelled out in the Bible" (pg. 100). Some Christians use the Bible to excuse their horrible behavior, but not all do.

The misreading of the Bible supported slavery and made it so it could continue for much longer than it should have. When people started to question slavery and wanted to introduce new rights for blacks, slave owners turned to the Bible to show how slavery was what God wanted, and some even said that slavery was helping the Africans. Bishop Stephen Elliot of Georgia, a bishop in the 1800s, commented that "thousands, nay, I may say millions, who have learned the way to Heaven and who have been made to know their Savior through the means of African slavery" (Ray). Many people agreed with Bishop Elliot and continued to support slavery. They were not helping the Africans by making them Christian, they were stripping away their culture because they thought it was inferior.

Some people today, even in New Hampshire, still think that black people are inferior and "demonic," like the people in the medieval times and in the 1800s. There is even evidence of this belief in the state of New Hampshire, a primarily white state. In August of 2017, an 8-year-old biracial boy in Claremont was playing in his yard when older white teenagers started calling him racial slurs (Hauser). The older boys put tire swing ropes around their necks and then told the boy it was his turn (Hauser). When he got up on the table and put the rope around his neck, one of them climbed up behind him and pushed him off the table, leaving him hanging there (Hauser). This attempted lynching hit close to home for me because it happened in a town not too far away from where I live and go to school. It is crazy to me that Aronson writes about this kind of racism and prejudice occurring in the medieval times, but it is still happening today. By reading Race, I have become more aware of the prejudices and racism that occurs throughout our country, and if you are reading it, you  probably have too. We, as a country, need to learn from the mistakes that we have made in the past, and understanding where those prejudices come from helps us do that pinpoint the problem so that we can work on it.

People in Claremont gathered to protest racism.

A disclaimer before this post is done, I've only been to church a handful of times. If anything that I have said is offensive or wrong, please let me know, because I want to be correct. I do have pretty strong opinions for someone who hasn't read the Bible.

Works Cited:

Hauser, Christine, and Katharine Seelye. "New Hampshire Investigates Wounding of

    8-Year-Old as Possible Hate Crime." The New York Times, 13 Sept. 2017,

    www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/us/biracial-boy-lynched-new-hampshire.html.

    Accessed 26 Mar. 2018.

Ray, Noel. "How Christian Slaveholders Used the Bible to Justify Slavery."

    Time, 23 Feb. 2018, time.com/5171819/

 christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/. Accessed 26 Mar. 2018.

An Introduction to Race

In my adventure through eleventh grade, I have been taking an AP rhetoric and composition class, which means that I have been reading more nonfiction books recently. Just a few weeks ago, we started our unit on race and were given a choice between three books. My teacher told me that Race by Marc Aronson was an interesting and accessible read, so here I am.

Race is a book about the origins of racial distinctions. Aronson lays the groundwork for his ideas in the introduction to the book. He ponders the question "Where do prejudices come from?" By exploring this question, he develops ethos.

In his first attempt to answer the question by saying prejudices develop in the mind, Aronson builds ethos by citing a psychologist who practices in New York City, who has written many books about prejudice. He uses her insights to answer the question of where prejudices come from, which shows that he has done the necessary research to really try to understand where these prejudices develop. Showing that he has done thorough research, makes him seem more credible to me, and all of his readers because it makes us feel as though he knows more about the subject and has the authority to teach us about it.

Aronson also answers his question from a tribal perspective. In this attempt, he develops ethos by being honest with us. Aronson tells us flat out that he is going "directly against the views of many anthropologists who carefully study" the tribes that he describes (pg. 10). In my opinion, this makes me trust Aronson more because he makes it clear that what he believes is not what many people who specifically study these groups. This makes his readers and me feel as though he is giving us the opportunity to think for ourselves, rather than just going along with what he believes because we think that he is right. It makes him seem more trustworthy because he has told the truth right away, so we can expect that he will tell us the truth throughout the rest of the book.

When Aronson transitions into the first part of his book, he makes important rhetorical choices that seem like they will continue through the rest of the book. Throughout the first part, he uses pictures to amplify the points that he makes. In one section about the Greeks and their ideas about who should be enslaved, he embeds a picture of a vase, on which a Greek lancer is defeating a Persian archer (pg. 37).

Pitcher with Greek Warrior Attacking Persian Archer. Museum of Fine Arts Boston,
     www.mfa.org/collections/object/
     pitcher-oinochoe-with-greek-warrior-attacking-persian-archer-153828.
     Accessed 19 Mar. 2018.

This image is helpful in displaying how the Greeks felt as though they were superior to the Persians, which transitions into the thought that Greeks, like Aristotle, believed that they were superior to all people who were born in different places than they were. The Greeks thought that they should enslave people who were inferior to them. The images that Aronson chooses to incorporate into his book are very well chosen because they make the situation clearer. It is helpful to me to be able to visualize what Aronson is describing, and could help you to visualize the circumstances in the book.

Just in the first 54 pages of Race, Aronson creates a sense of strong place for us, using good rhetorical strategies. He writes his book in a chronological order, which makes it easy to follow along. The chronological order gives the book a good flow. Each new group introduced by Aronson and their ideas about race and slavery are connected to the group he describes before, which make the transitions between each smooth. He starts in Greece with the Greeks and the Jewish, then moves onto the rivalry that brews between the Jews and the Christians, then in order "to understand the world of Christianity built" he moves into Rome (pg. 46). The Jews tie to the Christians who tie to the Roman Empire.

The diction, word choice, he uses also makes his book very accessible. I have been able to get through it without getting lost in jargon about race. While keeping his book easy to read, he is still able to make you think. He asks a lot of questions in order to make you think about what race and slavery do to people: "if his property is human, it is not property. So he must convince himself that the living beings he owns---who cry, bleed, sing, and laugh, just like himself---are not like him at all. But if he succeeds in not caring for them, how human is he?" which is a question that you have to ponder. 

If I’m being honest, I’m not usually a big fan of nonfiction literature, but I have been surprisingly pleased by Race so far. Aronson tackles difficult ideas, but he keeps it simple and straight to the point.