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.