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Originally posted by blugiant
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I would LOVE to hear their answer.
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Tell that to the person discriminating against you the next time you are denied an opportunity or profiled due to race.
I would LOVE to hear their answer. -
There is a difference between studying to learn and grasp concepts and answering the same questions posed by the same boardites who are supposed to know better.Originally posted by blugiant View Post
Notice that you have not called Jah_Yout out on his convulted argument to skirt the issue.
Originally posted by jah_yout View PostOriginally posted by jah_yout View Post
of course i'm "black"---colloquially/philosophically speaking that is, because my skin color is not black...but in this time it is understood as a term to describe me racially---the term has also been applied to some folks of east-india, pacific islanders like papua new-guineans & original australian & others at different times...if skin color is the basis then any of the afore-mentioned can be "black"...if modern-day philosophy is the basis then a person of pale pinkish-yellow skin tone can be called "black"---again a term signifying a color
that is not the only reason some blacks don't like it--- some oppose it on the same grounds they opposed terms like colored, neegrow, n!66&r, person-of-color, etc.
a lot of confusion & misrepresentation has come out of the term "black" as well as "white" as racial designations
This isn't just an example of doublespeak...a new term quadruplespeak would have to be invented to cover this one.
Woods stars on Oprah, says he's 'Cablinasian'CHICAGO (AP) - When Tiger Woods was asked in school to check one box that best described his background, he couldn't settle on one. Perhaps that's because there wasn't a box for ''Cablinasian.''
That's the word that best describes his background, a blend of Caucasian, black, Indian and Asian, the 21-year-old golf star said on ''The Oprah Winfrey Show.''
Woods said it bothers him when people call him an African-American.
''It does,'' he said Monday during the taping in Chicago. ''Growing up, I came up with this name. I'm a 'Cablinasian.''' Woods' race has often been an issue in a game played predominantly by whites. It was brought to the forefront again when Fuzzy Zoeller referred to him as ''that little boy'' and urged him not to put fried chicken or collard greens on the menu of the Champions Dinner next year at Augusta National.
Woods is one-fourth black, one-fourth Thai, one-fourth Chinese, one-eighth white and one-eighth American Indian.
Last edited by Tropicana; 01-04-2014, 12:35 PM.Comment
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mii figgar yuh ann jahyout avinn lover spats so mii stay out aff oonno lovefestOriginally posted by Tropicana View Post
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diffarance ways aff learninns tings? ar yuh seyinn dat cantinuallee rereadinn da bible, koran, torah, etc.. is bout studyinn to learn ann grasp concepts ann natt bout da cantinual reinforcinn aff cancepts? so yuh defininn da cantinual reinforcement aff aff biblical cancepts as studyinn fe grasp concepts ann repeatelee answarinn aff da same qwestians as diffarant cah de same boardites ar supposed fe kno bettar? mii guess da pastors doan ask similars qwestian repeatedlee fe reinforced cancepts. sey repition is a way fe brainwash ann yuh shood natt xxpect blakk peeps fe undarstand concepts aff blakk ann oyinbo unless continual repitition is invalved cah blakks ave been brainwash cantinuallee fe more dan 400 ears. dat like tellinn a yuths imm fe goo church everee week ann studee oyinbo bible ann den xxpectinn imm fe ovatand y sum peeps bunn fiyah pon oyinbo bible aftah earinn wan lecture. y yuh tink even pon yah manee intelligent peeps cantinuallee keep askinn repeatedlee wat mekk a parsan blakk? dat qwestian in da addar tredd was da motivation fe diss treddOriginally posted by Tropicana View Post
tropi itt like fiyah pon holidays ova overcomsumpshan aftah a wild peeps can chatt bout oww dem teefinn da yuths sweetee money using psychologee ann guilt cah dem ovatand da argument dat was repeated ova ann ova again. tropi mii neva figgit wan phd woo tried fe tell mii ow fe do mii jab based pon oww dem taught imm oldar son woo was inn "honor class." aftah mii dunn mekkinn da bwoy cantinual repeatinn ting mii yuths scored hiyah dan imm oldar brother pon test ann imm faddar mekk imm showed imm oldar oww fe do certain tings bettar. ow cood imm yuth woo was supposedlee less advanced educationallee ann natt inn honor out score imm supposedlee more educationallee advance brother woo was inn honor. den dat pain inn darass faddar force miseducators fe tekk imm youngest son out aff "honor" ann putt imm widd mii cah imm sed imm saw da result. xxpectinn peeps fe gitt ting aftah wan thyme iss weak cantinuallee repeatinn qwestians iss bout cantinuallee challenginn learned cancepts aff wat mekk a parsan blakkComment
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woo funds oyinbo psuedo-science? oyinbo? dat implicateshan iss dat itt natt value free butt blakk peeps use dem psuedo-science arguments like itt universal sintinn.Originally posted by Tropicana View Post
tropi oyinbo used psuedo-science fe mekk argument bout race, blakk inferioritee ann relegate blakk to sub-human status ann wen dose arguments ave shown to ave no merit now dem usinn psuedo-science fe argue dat race ave no merit fe cantinue fe relegate blakks to inferioritee status. imagine blakk enslavement, oyinbo use oyinbo psuedo-scientrixxsficc argument fe justifii y itt morallee rite. imagine smalleer brain, related to monkey, more animal like so blakk ar sub-human, oyinbo science justifii racism. oww psuedo-science iss still being used fe legitimized racism ann wen blakk repeat oyinbo psuedo-science argument as fact iss bout da cantinual ann evolvinn nature aff programminn blakks. dat y blakk peeps will used da argument dat race ave no basis accardinn to science wild dem being discriminated againstComment
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No no no we divorce LONG time. I do plan to go back to court though and claim 50% of his dub CD collection....Originally posted by blugiant View Postmii figgar yuh ann jahyout avinn lover spats so mii stay out aff oonno lovefest
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Dis noh mek NO sense. The concept of race pre-dated the African Trans-Atlantic Slave trade and slavery in the Americas.Originally posted by blugiant View PostComment
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One perspective:
The significance of History. In the middle of the 20th century, a new generation of historians began to take another look at the beginnings of the
American experience. They spent decades exploring all of the original documents relating to the establishment of colonies in America. What these scholars discovered was to transform the writing of American history forever.
Their research revealed that our 19th and 20th century ideas and beliefs about
races did not in fact exist in the 17th century. Race originated as a folk idea and
ideology about human differences; it was a social invention, not a product of
science. Historians have documented when, and to a great extent, how race as
an ideology came into our culture and our consciousness. This is the story that I
will briefly tell here. (One of the first of the publications and perhaps the one with
the greatest impact was a book by Edmund Morgan entitled, American Slavery,
American Freedom [1975]. It is the detailed story of Virginia, the first successful
colony. On its publication it was hailed as a classic that has inspired numerous
other historians.)
Couldn't copy the rest:In 1619, the first Africans arrived. There has been some debate about who they were, but we know that they had Spanish or Portuguese names and
were already familiar with European culture. In the US it is widely and popularly
believed that the colonists brought Africans to the New World as slaves from the
beginning and that Europeans were “naturally” prejudiced toward Africans
because of their physical characteristics, specifically dark skin. Historians now
hold that true slavery did not exist in the early decades of the English North American colonies (see Allen 1997, Fredrickson 2002, E. Morgan 1975, P. Morgan 1998, Parent, Jr. 2003, among others). Englishmen were unfamiliar with
the institution. They saw their society as a free one, based on free labor, and
believed that English laws had terminated all forms of slavery centuries before
their arrival in the Americas. But they were familiar with many forms of bond
servitude which they saw as unfree labor, and some men who purchased
headrights to laborers treated them as if they were slaves for life. Masters were
often brutal; they flogged servants for disobedience, or cut off their ears, or put
skewers through their tongues. But the settlers were also callous and cruel
toward one another. Often servants were called slaves, and a distinction
between servitude and slavery was not at all clear.
Consequently, the first Africans who arrived in Jamestown were not
initially or uniformly perceived as slaves (Parent 2003). They were assimilated
into the colony as laborers under varying contracts like those of Europeans.
Some Africans worked off their debts and became freedmen. A few ambitious
men obtained land and livestock, built substantial houses, married, and
established themselves as well-to-do planters. Some became entrepreneurs and
engaged in trading and other commercial activities and had business dealings on
an equal footing with whites. One famous family, that of Anthony Johnson and
his two sons owned more than 440 acres of land; they also had headrights for,
(that is, owned) three Africans, three Europeans and two Indians as servants.
They exercised the same rights as propertied Europeans. They participated in
the assembly, the governing body of the colony, voted, served on juries, and
socialized with white planters. Like their white counterparts, free black property owners were often contemptuous of government, arrogant and insulting toward those considered their social inferiors, assertive of their rights, and prone to
fighting. In fact, numerous court records provide clear evidence that these 17th
century Africans did not act differently from whites of the same social class.
Edmund Morgan wrote, “There is more than a little evidence that
Virginians during these years were ready to think of Negroes as members or
potential members of the community on the same terms as other men and to
demand of them the same standards of behavior. Black men and white serving
the same master worked, ate, and slept together, and together shared in
escapades, escapes, and punishments” (1975, 327). “It was common for
servants and slaves to run away together, steal hogs together, get drunk
together. It was not uncommon for them to make love together” (1975, 327).
No stigma was associated with what we today call intermarriages. Black
men servants often married white women servants. Records from one county
reveal that one fourth of the children born to European servant girls were mulatto
(Breen and Ennis 1980). Historian Anthony Parent (2003) notes that five out of ten black men on the Eastern Shore were married to white women. One servant girl declared to her master that she would rather marry a Negro slave on a
neighboring plantation than him with all of his property, and she did (P. Morgan
1998). Given the demographics, servant girls had their choice of men. One
white widow of a black farmer had no problem with remarrying, this time to a
white man. She later sued this second husband, accusing him of squandering
the property she had accumulated with her first husband (E. Morgan 1975, 334).
In another case, a black women servant sued successfully for her freedom and
then married the white lawyer who represented her in court (P. Morgan, 1998).
By mid-century, the colony was in a crisis. A few men from among the
earliest settlers had taken over most of the fertile land; they had established large
plantations and grew tobacco to make huge fortunes. Poor servants who
achieved their freedom found it difficult to acquire land. The freed poor and
servants, which now included Europeans, Africans, mulattoes, and a few Indians,
became unhappy with their lot and especially the corruption and abuse of power
on the part of wealthy men who ruled the colony. They threatened rebellions,
plundered their neighbors, showed contempt for colony leaders, and generated
unrest throughout the settlement.
In 1676, the most famous rebellion took place. Led by Nathaniel Bacon,
this uprising of thousands of poor workers was the first major threat to social
stability. The rebellion dissipated after the death of Bacon, but British royal
commissioners sent out to suppress the uprising realized that the population at
large had supported the rebellion and were “sullen and obstinate.” On one
occasion they faced a dissatisfied rabble of “400 African and 600 or 700
European bond laborers, chiefly Irish” (Allen 1994, 218). They soon recognized
the need for a stratagem to prevent such occurrences in the future and ensure
that a sufficient number of controlled laborers were made available to plantation
owners.
The decisions that the rulers of the colony made during the last decades
of the 17th century and the first quarter of the 18th century resulted in the
establishment of racial slavery. They began to pass a series of laws separating
out Africans and their descendants, restricting their rights and mobility, and
imposing a condition of permanent slavery on them. Africans were now being
brought directly from Africa. They were different from earlier Africans in that they
were heathens, that is, not Christians, and were unfamiliar with European
languages, customs, and traditions. Some colony leaders began to argue that
Africans had no rights under British laws and therefore could be subject to forced
labor with impunity. After 1672, British ships entered the slave trade and the
numbers of people shipped directly across the Atlantic greatly increased.
There were critical reasons for the preference for Africans. As early as the
1630s, planters had expressed a desire for African laborers (“If only we had
some Africans!”). Records of plantation owners in the Caribbean and in the
colonies of Virginia and Maryland reveal the fact that Africans were initially
considered a civilized and docile people who had knowledge of and experience
with tropical cultivation. They were accustomed to discipline, one of the
hallmarks of civilized behavior, as well as working cooperatively in groups. They
knew how to grow corn, tobacco, sugar cane, and cotton in their native lands;
these crops were unknown in Europe. And many Africans had knowledge of
metal work, carpentry, cattle-keeping, brick-making, weaving, leather tanning,
and many other skills. Colonists soon realized that without Africans, their
enterprises would fail. They often wrote, “We cannot survive without Africans!”
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Another perspective:
Historian Frank Snowden, looking at black-white contact before the sixth century A.D. found that although there is an "association of blackness with ill omens, demons, the devil, and sin, there is in the extant record no stereotyped image of Ethiopians as the personification of demons or the devil."3 In ancient Greece and Rome "the major divisions between people were more clearly understood as being between the civic and the barbarous," between the political citizen and those outside of the polis, and not between bloodlines or skin color.4 Most scholars now accept the viewpoint that in the ancient world "no concept truly equivalent to that of 'race' can be detected in the thought of the Greeks, Romans, and early Christians."5 Rooting human variation in blood or in kinship was a relatively new way to categorize humans. The idea gained strength towards the end of the Middle Ages as anti-Jewish feelings, which were rooted in an antagonism towards Jewish religious beliefs, began to evolve into anti-Semitism. These blood kinship beliefs rationalized anti-Jewish hatred instead as the hatred of a people. For example, Marranos, Spanish Jews who had been baptized, were considered a threat to Christendom by virtue of their ancestry because they could not prove purity of blood to the Inquisition.Beginning in the eighteenth century, at the height of the Age of Enlightenment in Europe, these ideas were applied to explaining the diversity of humankind. This was driven in part by the experiences with new peoples during colonial exploration, the need to rationalize the inferiority of certain peoples as slavery took hold in European colonies, and the development of a new science to assess and explain diversity in all species. The Swedish botanist and naturalist Carolus Linnaeus also made lasting contributions to the race concept at this time. Linnaeus's "natural system," which became the basis for the classification of all species, divided humanity into four groups: Americanus, Asiaticus, Africanus, and Europeaeus. But while the term race existed before the 18th century, mostly to describe domesticated animals, it was introduced into the sciences by the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1749. Buffon saw clearly demarcated distinctions between the human races that were caused by varying climates. Buffon's climatological theory of difference was infused with notions of European superiority. To Buffon, the natural state of humanity was derived from the European, a people he believed "produced the most handsome and beautiful men" and represented the "genuine color of mankind."
The Swedish botanist and naturalist Carolus Linnaeus also made lasting contributions to the race concept at this time. Linnaeus's "natural system," which became the basis for the classification of all species, divided humanity into four groups: Americanus, Asiaticus, Africanus, and Europeaeus.
If racial science is science employed for the purpose of degrading a people both intellectually and physically, then beginning in the 19th century, American scientists played an increasingly active role in its development. Scientists like Samuel Morton, Josiah Nott, and George Gliddon offered a variety of explanations for the nature of white racial superiority meant to address the nature of physical and intellectual differences between races, the "natural" positions of racial groups in American society, and the capacity for citizenship of non-whites.
At the core of this work, known as the American School of Anthropology, was the theory of polygeny, the belief that a hierarchy of human races had separate creations. Samuel Morton's experiments on cranial capacity and intelligence sought to demonstrate this theory. Morton collected hundreds of skulls from around the globe, measured their volume, and concluded that the Caucasian and Mongolian races had the highest cranial capacity and thus the highest levels of intelligence, while Africans had the lowest cranial capacity and thus the lowest levels of intelligence.
More than a century after Morton's death, the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, using Morton's same experimental material and methods, could not replicate the earlier findings. Gould concluded that Morton's subjective ideas about race difference influenced his methods and conclusions, leading to the omission of contradictory data and to the conscious or unconscious stuffing or under-filling of certain skulls to match his pre-ordained conclusions.6 Indeed, the case of Samuel Morton illustrates how social conceptions of human difference shape the science of race.
At the dawn of the 20th century, explanations for racial difference based on measurable and observable physical traits such as cranial capacity and skin color gave way to a whole new way of thinking about the subject. Race instead came to be understood as a reflection of unseen differences that the scientists of the time attributed to the recently discovered factors of heredity. As ideas about racial differences became rooted in biology, genetics came to provide the formative language of modern racism.
This geneticization of race - the idea that racial differences in appearance and complex social behaviors can be understood as genetic distinctions between so-called racial groups - was shaped, in large part, by the eugenics movement. According to Francis Galton, the founder of the movement, eugenics promised to give "the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing over the less suitable."7 This could be done either through positive eugenics in which certain groups were encouraged to breed with one another; or through negative eugenics in which certain groups or individuals would be denied the right to reproduce - either through sterilization, as was the case in the United States, or through genocide, as was the case in Nazi Germany. Under the guise of this biological banner, eugenic racial science exerted a diverse and far-reaching influence. It became a powerful ideological force in Nazi Germany, influenced the creation of eugenic sterilization laws in the United States that resulted in at least 30,000 sterilizations, stoked racial hatred in early 20th century America, and became a scientific buttress of 20th century American racial ideology. For the first three decades of the 20th century, many geneticists advocated eugenic ideas and helped to shape the movement.
Beginning in the 1930s, an increasing number of geneticists, anthropologists, and social scientists began moving away from typological and eugenic descriptions of human difference to view races through the lens of population genetics and evolutionary biology. This approach rejected a eugenic notion of fixed genetic differences between so-called racial groups, and instead understood human races as dynamic populations distinguished by variations of the frequency of genes between populations. By rooting the meaning of race in genetic variation it became more difficult (though still possible) to argue that one race or another had particular traits specifically associated with it, or that one individual was typical of a race. Furthermore, the four or five racial groups identified by 18th and 19th century scientists now varied depending upon the genes and traits examined by geneticists. Theodosious Dobzhansky, the evolutionary biologist whose work between the 1930s and 1970s had a tremendous influence on the way that scientists thought about race, concluded that the number of human races was variable depending upon what traits were being examined. In fact, he believed that the concept of race in the context of population genetics and evolutionary biology was a scientific tool for making genetic diversity intelligible and manageable in scientific study. In other words, while human differences are real, the way we choose to organize those differences is a methodological decision and not one that reflects an underlying evolutionary hierarchy or the conservation of racialized traits through the admixture of populations. This new approach was brought about by new findings in genetics that demonstrated genetic variation was much more common within species than once thought and by the development of what is known as the evolutionary synthesis in biology, a "Darwinian fusion" of population genetics, experimental genetics, and natural history.8 Finally, changes in the concept of race were influenced by a growing cadre of scientists who were generally more liberal on matters of race than their predecessors.
At a June 2000 Rose Garden ceremony, President Bill Clinton, flanked by genome sequencers Francis Collins and Craig Venter, announced the completion of a draft sequence of the human genome. Collins, head of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and Venter, then President of Celera Genomics, offered their genomic data to the world - enhancing our understanding of human biology and holding the promise of to helping public health and medical professionals prevent, treat, and cure disease. On that day Venter and Collins emphasized that their work confirmed that human genetic diversity cannot be captured by the concept of race and demonstrated that all humans have genome sequences that are 99.9% identical. At the White House celebration Venter said "the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis."9 A year later, Collins wrote: "those who wish to draw precise racial boundaries around certain groups will not be able to use science as a legitimate justification."10 Yet, since the White House announcement, there has been an increase in claims that race is a biologically meaningful classification.
The upsurge of claims that race is a useful taxonomic concept for humans seems to be driven by several factors. First, genomic technology has enhanced our ability to examine the 0.1% of nucleic acids in the human genome that, on average, vary between individuals. Some scientists are relying on the race concept to make sense of the genetic variation in this small sliver of our genomes. Second, the history of the biological race concept suggests that race is deeply embedded in scientific thought and that racialized thinking shaped genetics in the 20th century. This history continues to shape scientific thinking about human difference. Finally, the critical task of understanding and reducing known disparities in health has researchers looking at all possible explanations, including genetic ones, for disparities in health outcomes. Fueled by programs such as the National Institutes of Health's "Healthy People 2010" and CDC's "Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health," the search for the underlying causes of these disparities is a national healthcare priority. The renewed focus on race and genetics suggests that an analysis of the complex relationship between individuals, populations, the environment, and health may be surrendered to a racial worldview.
It would be silly to think that science will somehow extricate us from a racial quagmire. Despite advances in scientific thinking on race, racism and the belief in races persist. Racism is too complicated to be eradicated by science alone. Nonetheless, scientists do have much to offer to the debate over the nature of race and racial classification, and we would all be the better for listening to what they are saying. Geneticists Kelly Owens and Mary-Claire King recognize this, writing that: "Of course, prejudice does not require a rational basis, let alone an evolutionary one, but the myth of major genetic differences across 'races' is nonetheless worth dismissing with genetic evidence."11Comment
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You are dealing with 3 very different scenarios:Originally posted by blugiant View Post
- repetition to aid learning
- continual study of the Bible fe deepen understanding
- discussing the same topic over and over again with someone who is supposed to know better but who based on his quadruple is trying to distance himself from the concept of blackness.Comment
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A third perspective.
The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages’ – a two-part article – questions the widely held belief in canonical race theory that ‘race’ is a category without purchase before the modern era. Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries – chronicles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon law, statuary, illustrations, religiou scommentary, and architectural features – the study considers racial thinking, racial law, racial formation, and racialized behaviors and phenomena in medieval Europe before the emergence of a recognizable vocabulary of race. One focus is how a political hermeneutics of religion – somuch in play again today – enabled the positing of fundamental human differences in biopolitical and culturalist ways to create strategic essentialisms demarcating human kinds and populations.Another focus is how race figures in the emergence of
homo europaeus
and the identity of Western Europe (beginning as Latin Christendom) in this time. Part I – ‘Race Studies, Modernity, and theMiddle Ages’ – surveys the current state of race theory, and puts in conversation race studies andmedieval studies, fields that exist on either side of a vast divide. Part II – ‘Locations of Medieval Race’ – identifies and analyzes specific concretions of medieval race, while continuing to develop
that ‘race’ is a category without purchase before the modern era. Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries – chroni-cles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon law, statuary, illustrations, religious commentary, and architectural features – the study considers racial thinking, racial law, racial formation, and racialized behaviors and phenomena in medieval Europe before the emergence of a recognizable vocabulary of race. One focus is how a political hermeneutics of religion – somuch in play again today – enabled the positing of fundamental human differences in biopoliticaland culturalist ways to create strategic essentialisms demarcating human kinds and populations.Another focus is how race figures in the emergence of
homo europaeus
and the identity of WesternEurope (beginning as Latin Christendom) in this time. Part I – ‘Race Studies, Modernity, and theMiddle Ages’ – surveys the current state of race theory, and puts in conversation race studies andmedieval studies, fields that exist on either side of a vast divide. Part II – ‘Locations of MedievalRace’ – identifies and analyzes specific concretions of medieval race, while continuing to develop the theoretical arguments of Part I
This is important:In 1218, Jews in England were forced by law to wear badges on their chests, to setthem apart from the rest of the English population. This is the earliest historical exampleof a country’s execution of the medieval church’s demand, in Canon 68 of the FourthLateran Council of 1215, that Jews and Muslims be set apart from Christians by a differ-ence in dress. In 1222, 1253, and 1275, English rulings elaborated on this badge for the Jewish minority – who had to wear it (men and women at first, then children over theage of seven) – its size, color, and how it was to be displayed on the chest in an ade-quately prominent fashion. In 1290, after a century of laws that eroded the economic,religious, occupational, social, and personal status of English Jews, Jewish communitieswere finally driven out of England
en masse
, marking the first permanent expulsion inEurope.
2
Periodic extermination of Jews was also a repeating phenomenon in medieval Europe.In the so-called Popular and First Crusades, Jewish communities were massacred in theRhineland, in Mainz, Cologne, Speyer, Worms, Regensburg, and several other cities.The Second Crusade saw more Jew-killing and the so-called Shepherds’ Crusade of 1320witnessed the genocidal decimation of Jewish communities in France. In England, a trailof blood followed the coronation of the famed hero of the Third Crusade, Richard Lion-heart, in 1189, when Jews were slaughtered at Westminster, London, Lynn, Norwich,
Stamford, Bury St. Edmunds, and York, as English chronicles attest.
A carved tympanum on the north portal of the west fac¸ade of the Cathedral of NotreDame in Rouen (c. 1260) depicts the malevolent executioner of the sainted John theBaptist as an African phenotype (Fig. 1), while an illustration in six scenes of Cantiga 186of
Las Cantigas de Santa Maria
, commissioned by Alfonso X of Spain between 1252 and1284, performs juridical vengeance on a black-faced Moor who is found in bed with hismistress; both are condemned to the flames, but the fair lady is miraculously saved by theVirgin Mary herself (Fig. 2). Black is damned, white is saved. Black, of course, is thecolor of devils and demons, a color that sometimes extends to bodies demonically pos-sessed, as demonstrated by an illustration from a Canterbury psalter, c. 1200 (Fig. 3).
In literature, black devilish Saracen enemies – sometimes of gigantic size – abound,
Last edited by Tropicana; 01-04-2014, 08:28 PM.Comment
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The Story of Race Transcript
How did the idea of race begin in America? The answer can be found in the long and complex history of western Europe and the United States. It is that history—influenced by science, government and culture—that has shaped our ideas about race.
When European colonists first arrived on North American shores beginning in the 1500s, the land was already inhabited by Native Americans. The Spanish, French and English encountered frequent conflicts with indigenous people in trying to establish settlements in Florida, the Northeast area bordering Canada, the Virginia colony, and the Southwest.
By the 1600s, English colonists had established a system of indentured servitude that included both Europeans and Africans.
But by the time of Bacon’s Rebellion in the mid-1670s—an insurrection involving white and black servants against wealthy Virginia planters—the status of Africans began to change. They were no longer servants who had an opportunity for freedom following servitude, but instead were relegated to a life of permanent slavery in the colonies.
In the 1770s, English colonists in the U.S. became involved in a rebellion of their own—this time the opposition was the British Crown.
But while the colonists battled the British for independence, they continued to deny Africans their freedom and withhold rights to Native Americans. Ironically, one of the first casualties of the Revolutionary War was Crispus Attucks, a runaway slave of African and Indian parentage.
Before the idea of race emerged in the U.S. European scientist Carolus Linneaus published a classification system in System Naturale in 1758 that was applied to humans. Thomas Jefferson, was among those who married the idea of race with a biological and social hierarchy. Jefferson, a Virginia slave owner who helped draft the Declaration of Independence and later became President, was influential in promoting the idea of race that recognized whites as superior and Africans as inferior. Jefferson wrote in 1776 in Notes on the State of Virginia, "…blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind." Scientists were among those who were influenced by these ideas, and began to develop their own theories about race.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, scientists, influenced by Enlightenment philosophers, developed a system of categorizing things in nature, including humans.
Although Carolus Linnaeus was the first to develop a biological classification system, it was German scientist Johann Blumenbach who first introduced a race-based classification of humans, which established a framework for analyzing race and racial differences for the next hundred years.
By the 19th century the debate over race centered around two theories: one theory was that different races represented different species; the other was that humans were one species and that race represented variation in the human species—a view that was compatible with the teachings of the Bible.
Among those who espoused the multiple species theory, or polygeny, were Philadelphia physician Samuel Morton and European scholar Louis Agassiz. Their work was popular in the mid-19th century. The most prominent scientist who believed in monogeny, that all humans were one species, was Charles Darwin.
By the mid-19th century scientific debates over race had entered the mainstream culture and served to justify slavery and mistreatment. Some, like plantation doctor Samuel Cartwright tried to explain the tendency of slaves to runaway by coining the term, drapetomania, and prescribed whipping as method of treatment. Though there was resistance to slavery in both the U.S. and Europe, scientists, for the most part, continued to advance theories of racial inferiority.
The abolitionist movement of the 19th century sought to humanize the plight of African slaves in various ways, to influence political power and public opinion. The resistance to slavery and the image of Africans as sub-human can be found in protest hymns like Amazing Grace, which was written by John Newton in 1772 in response to the horrors he witnessed working on an English slave ship.
One of the ways that race played out in popular culture was in the publication in 1852 of the most widely read novel of its time, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which depicted a more realistic portrait of slavery and tried to humanize slaves.
The 19th century also marked a period of widespread racialization—not just of African Americans—but of Native Americans, Mexican Americans and Chinese Americans as well. Much of the racializing of non-Europeans, and even the Irish, served an economic and political purpose. African slavery, for instance, provided free labor and added political clout for slaveholding states in the South.
Taking Native American land and belittling Native American cultures was made easier by defining Native people as savages.
At the end of the 19th century, the U.S. experienced another wave of European immigration. This time the immigrants were southern and eastern Europeans and their presence challenged ideas about race, specifically who was white and who was not. Unlike earlier European immigrants who were mostly German, Scandinavian and Irish, these newer immigrants were Polish, Italian and Jewish, and brought with them customs and traditions that were different from their European predecessors.
They were often the victims of discrimination. Even U.S. immigration policy tried to limit the number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe by imposing quotas.
At the beginning of the 20th century, African Americans migrated north for factory jobs that opened up during World War I and to escape the violence in the South.
Between 1889 and the early 1920s, roughly 50 – 100 lynchings a year took place in the U.S. While blacks were mostly the victims, Italian Americans, Asian Americans and Jews were also lynched. Even in the North, blacks encountered racism as they competed with whites for jobs. Several northern cities—St. Louis, Tulsa, Detroit and Chicago among others—were the sites of major race riots from 1915 to the early 1920s.
During the Depression, some race scientists sought to justify economic and social inequality by attributing certain characteristics such as criminal behavior, work ethic and intelligence to race, using a theory of genetic inheritance. In other words, you were poor or a criminal or less intelligent because it was in your genes.
This idea was the basis for eugenics. Charles Davenport, the director of the Eugenics Records Office, was among the scientists who promoted these ideas. The eugenicists' expert testimony was influential in getting Congress to pass the Immigration Act of 1924 and provided the social framework embraced by Nazi Germany.
By World War II, the U.S. had expanded the racial categories in the census to include various ethnic groups, among them Mexicans, Japanese, Indians from Asia and Philippinos. These categories and the demographics associated with each group would be used to limit immigration as well as provide the statistical data to analyze racial discrimination in the U.S. that followed in the post-war era.
The 1950s and 60s were a time of enormous social change in the U.S. Discrimination and institutional racism were being challenged at every turn. To some extent, the racial and social hierarchies that had long been accepted were being contested. And perhaps more slowly, attitudes about race and racial difference were beginning to change.
The way we view race and ethnicity today is far more complex than the simple categories in the first U.S. Census. In fact in the 2000 census the "mark one or more" standard allowed for 63 possible racial combinations, reflecting the diversity of the country. By the year 2010, the U.S. population will barely resemble what it was 400, 100,even twenty years ago. That means we will probably have to reconsider the term race, and whether it is relevant to describing who and what we are.
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