Day: April 25, 2019

This article posted yesterday discusses the 1998 hate-crime killing of James Byrd Jr. It was reported that John William King, one of the two men held responsible with a life sentences in prison, was executed. The Supreme Court had declined to issue a stay in the case and King was executed an hour later.

The prosecutors said that Byrd was killed after being dragged behind a truck for three miles in a town in East Texas. The article says that the case brought back a time of lynching and racially motivated killings throughout the South. Byrd’s family said that justice was being served and that he was a danger to society, agreeing with his death. This recent action brings to question to what point do we enact the death penalty to receive justice and prove a point. In addition, these killings have been going on for centuries and are sparked out of fear. The fear has not disappeared, but there has been less news coverage of these hate crimes and society’s understanding of these crimes have changed. It does not make it ok, but simply turns a blind eye. The resurrection of this case and the execution of King brings up several new questions about how our society will deal with race and racial violence in a modern era.

Whether John William King deserved to be killed for his actions or not, it is good to remind society that these issues still remain in our world today and have not been resolved. They are being discussed in new contexts and in new ways, but they allow our society to change. We still need to fight for an end so that these crimes do not happen again.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/04/25/james-byrd-jr-killer-john-william-king-executed-texas-hate-crime/?utm_term=.1eaca70e5315

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“The Danger of A Single Story”

In this class, while this course’s goal is to center African American History as central and part of the larger story of U.S. history, it also attempts to complicate and interrogate the “single story” about African Americans and the US, that is the single story of stereotypes of black criminality and laziness, etc.

That single story is primarily part of what might be called “American exceptionalism.” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes about some of this on page 28, under the heading of “American Exceptionalism.”  Part of that idea is that the US is uniquely special.  More significantly, according this idea,  anyone can thrive in the U.S. through hard work. In that story,  African Americans have not thrived because they do not work hard and because of their negative culture.

Now, this post is also inspired by Kate Read’s blog Selvam Allotey’s comment in response to it. Kate’s blog is titled, “UBUNTU: More Than a Show About Africa.” Now, please read it, because it reflects good understanding of ideas as presented in this course and nicely applies these to UBUNTU, as event sponsored by the African Students Union.

Selvam also connects this event to discussions in class. He writes:

Similar to how the cultural aspects of the Harlem Renaissance was for Black people after WWI, culture is used as a medium of educating others about African culture through an Afrocentric lens. In many instances, the African culture and way of living is depicted from a negative Eurocentric standpoint for capital gains. African countries have always had rich and beautiful cultures, but the issue was letting others see it. The beautiful streets of Accra and Lagos in Ghana and Nigeria respectively were never shown, but hungry children always are. The genocide of Rwanda is splashed everywhere but no one knows how things are now. In the United States, some White people not only try to rewrite the histories and control the portrayal of Black people inland, but they do this to all people in the diaspora. I’m happy for your new discoveries, and Ubuntu mainly highlighted 2 out of 54 countries from the African continent, so theres so much more to see.

Systematic Racism Explained

This morning we discussed the rise of conservativism in American politics and liberal and conservative law and order politics. Part of that discussion is connected to previous lectures on the New Deal and modern liberalism, as reflected in the New Deal coalition and the policies that helped white America during the New Deal era and much of post-War II America.

Here’s a short video that speaks to these transformation and how it related to politics and race in the present:

“Kevin Kruse Takes to Twitter to School Dinesh D’Souza in American History” by Jeet Heer

Dinesh D’Souza gets a history lesson on Twitter. D’Souza has made a specialty of highlighting the undeniable racism of the 1960s Democratic Party as a way to tar the current party. His arguments ignore the way the two political parties switch positions on Civil Rights in the 1960s, with the Democrats embracing Civil Rights and Republicans, under the guidance of national leaders like Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, exploiting racist backlash. On Monday, D’Souza put up a challenge to his critics: