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shirkers2018dirsanditan · 1 year

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In a variety of public statements and laws, the offspring of white-black sexual relations were referred to as "mongrels" or "spurious" (Nash, 1974, p. 287). Also, these interracial children were always legally defined as pure blacks, which was different from how they were handled in other New World countries. A slaveholder claimed that there was "not an old plantation in which the grandchildren of the owner [therefore mulattos] are not whipped in the field by his overseer" (Furnas, 1956, p. 142). Further, it seems that mulatto women were sometimes targeted for sexual abuse.

According to the historian J. C. Furnas (1956), in some slave markets, mulattoes and quadroons brought higher prices, because of their use as sexual objects (p. 149). Some slavers found dark skin vulgar and repulsive. The mulatto approximated the white ideal of female attractiveness. All slave women (and men and children) were vulnerable to being raped, but the mulatto afforded the slave owner the opportunity to rape, with impunity, a woman who was physically white (or near-white) but legally black. A greater likelihood of being raped is certainly not an indication of favored status.

The mulatto woman was depicted as a seductress whose beauty drove white men to rape her. This is an obvious and flawed attempt to reconcile the prohibitions against miscegenation (interracial sexual relations) with the reality that whites routinely used blacks as sexual objects. One slaver noted, "There is not a likely looking girl in this State that is not the concubine of a White man..." (Furnas, 1956, p. 142). Every mulatto was proof that the color line had been crossed. In this regard, mulattoes were symbols of rape and concubinage. Gary B. Nash (1974) summarized the slavery-era relationship between the rape of black women, the handling of mulattoes, and white dominance:

Though skin color came to assume importance through generations of association with slavery, white colonists developed few qualms about intimate contact with black women. But raising the social status of those who labored at the bottom of society and who were defined as abysmally inferior was a matter of serious concern. It was resolved by insuring that the mulatto would not occupy a position midway between white and black. Any black blood classified a person as black; and to be black was to be a slave.... By prohibiting racial intermarriage, winking at interracial sex, and defining all mixed offspring as black, white society found the ideal answer to its labor needs, its extracurricular and inadmissible sexual desires, its compulsion to maintain its culture purebred, and the problem of maintaining, at least in theory, absolute social control. (pp. 289-290)

George M. Fredrickson (1971), author of The Black Image in the White Mind, claimed that many white Americans believed that mulattoes were a degenerate race because they had "White blood" which made them ambitious and power hungry combined with "Black blood" which made them animalistic and savage.

from “the tragic mulatto myth,” dr. david pilgrim for ferris state university. the full article is also linked on the list.

disclaimer (also in the list’s description): this goes without saying, but many of these films contain racially offensive material. watch at your own discretion and all that. inclusion of offensive films (obviously) is not an endorsement of their contents or their message.

#published the list juuuuust in time for BHM #i’m off by 6 minutes in posting it on tumblr because i was re-reading the article again lmao #this one been in a long time coming ngl!#letterboxd #lb

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kattimaxx · 1 month

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I am a minor cis girl with white privilege and I KNOW this is just wrong.

YOU HAVE NO EXCUSE!

Genocides, racism, homophobia, transphobia, the government telling women what to do with their bodies, IT IS WRONG.

NO ONE SHOULD BE KILLED.

EVER.

Not because of how someone was born.

Not because of what they choose to do with their own bodies.

NO ONE SHOULD LIVE IN FEAR OF MURDER.

Women should ALWAYS be the ones deciding what should happen with their bodies.

During pregnancy, women have a 32% chance of dying.

Women shouldn't be on birth control. Common side effects can KILL.

Transgenders deserve their rights. Transgenders should NOT be killed.

These are people, they deserved to live.

You CAN'T justify racism.

Jesus wasn't white.

Stop discriminating and stop killing.

#stop killing people #stop israel #stop the genocide #stop trans genocide #stop trans hate #stop abortion laws #reproductive health #female rights #womens rights #transgender rights #trans rights #black liberation #racism needs to stop #no racism #stop racism #skin is just a color #jesus isn't white

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queendom25 · 3 years

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Go Back to Africa!

Southern Oregonians, January is the month of my birthday and National Hot Tea month! The pandemic has made it impossible for me to turn up the way I want to but at least I can serve the “hot tea” on Black history while making the racists mad as I do it. This week’s hot tea is about one of the oldest demeaning phrases republished in the Trumper handbook! It’s time we talk about the period in history America had the idea of “sending the problem away” and how there were Black leaders that agreed and those that disagreed. Southern Oregon, let’s talk about that historical passage to Africa and the audacity that some of the key figures had in this little scapegoat endeavor.

Abraham Lincoln is the figure head that Republicans love to boast about as their Party’s centerfold of equality but I gotta say the narrative is getting old! It was in 1858 that “Honest Abe” stated in a debate against Senator Stephen A. Douglas, “I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.”(Freedman, 2012) The Great Emancipator was just as diet racist as they come but his anti-slavery beliefs were bad for the economy. From 1840 to 1850 The U.S. produced 2 million bales of cotton a year and by the end of August 1860, 5 million bales of cotton was produced where a little more than 1 billion pounds was exported to Great Britain’s factories. There was one man that was fed up with the complacency of abolitionists-John Brown. He was more enraged at the abolitionists that wanted slavery to end peacefully so this true ally was destroying property and disturbing the peace in Virginia to wake people up! The uprising John Brown led in Harpers Ferry ended with him being lynched by the “patriots” of the establishment. Frederick Douglass was a known abolitionist of the time and there was correspondence between him and Brown 2 years before the insurrection. Douglass opposed the plan to begin with and told him to call off the rebellion. Authorities were anxious to get their hands on Frederick Douglass despite the fact that he had nothing to do with the uprising of Harpers Ferry, so he fled to Canada then England. He came back in time for the 1860 presidential election where he stated that Lincoln was, “a man of will and nerve, [who] will not back down from his own assertions...”(Freedman, 2012)

This is the part where political beliefs should always ruin a friendship because Fredrick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln had very different viewpoints of anti-slavery. “Lincoln and the Republicans opposed the expansion of slavery but believed that the Constitution protected slavery in the Southern states,”(Freedman, 2012) while Douglass endorsed Radical Abolitionist nominee Gerrit Smith. There are still some Oregonians that say that the “Stars and Bars” are their heritage and I’m wondering if anyone told them about April 12,1861. This was the date that the Civil War started but more specifically, the rebel cannons opened fire on the American flag at Fort Sumter and replaced it with the rebel flag declaring themselves an independent nation. As we have all seen, there are still supporters of the Confederacy among us but they’re never called terrorists or foreign agents. A key player in the African-American Exodus was Bishop Henry M. Turner who was born free in South Carolina and became a preacher before the Civil War. During the era of Reconstruction he held minor positions in office as a Republican but the upward mobility he wanted for the Black race was denied by white-controlled Georgia because the Legislature refused to seat Black people. The Supreme Court ruling in 1883 that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional was what sealed his belief that white people were vehemently opposed to Black equality. At an emigration convention in 1893 he stated that, “‘For God hates the submission of cowardice. But on the other hand to talk about physical resistance is literally madness...The idea of eight or ten million ex slaves contending with sixty million people of the most powerful race under heaven!’ Obviously the only alternative was a mass exodus.”(Fredrickson, 1995) Lincoln held a meeting in 1862 mostly Black clergymen and promoted the idea that Black people should emigrate to Central America and he went on to say that, “Your race are suffering, in my judgement, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people. But even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race...Perhaps it is better for both of us to be separated.”(Freedman, 2012)

Frederick Douglass was correct in calling Abraham Lincoln a genuine representation of American prejudice because the white mans’ idea of a Black mans’ freedom is lukewarm and the rights of Black women are nonexistent. The handful that raged against the machine of colonialism were not marked heroes of their day but they’re glorified now for doing the bare minimum. The descendants of colonizers are quick to compare a minor inconvenience to slavery but bear no witness to the system that enforces the oppression and continue to profit from it.

Sources:

Abraham Lincoln & Frederick Douglass: The Story Behind An American Friendship Russell Freedman, 2012.

Black Liberation George M. Fredrickson, 1995

Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jennifer Frank, 2006

#black history #liberation #no justice no peace #black lives matter #frederick douglass #abraham lincoln #john brown #southernoregon #medfordoregon #this is america

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bukaters · 4 years

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Here are some recommendations of the books (fiction and non-fiction) that have helped me educate myself on the impact of slavery and the wounding nature of oppression against Black people (some of these fall under postcolonial race/feminist theory)

Fiction:

Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid

Breath, Eyes, Memory - Edwidge Danticat

Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison

A Mercy - Toni Morrison

The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison

Sula - Toni Morrison*

Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo - Ntozake Shange

*I recommend anything written by Toni Morrison, really. She was one of my favorite authors and one of the most important novelists giving voice to Black people (and especially Black women). Her writing is so raw and powerful and uncomfortable - and it needs to be for you to at least begin to grasp a little of what it means to be robbed of your own humanity.

Non-fiction:

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave - Frederick Douglass

The Souls of Black Folk - W.E.B. DuBois

Race Matters - Cornel West (especially relevant these days as this book was published a year after the LA riots in 1992)

Ain’t I a Woman? - bell hooks

Outlaw Culture - bell hooks

Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality - George M. Fredrickson (the only white author on this list - he was a theorist at Stanford University and his field of research was white supremacy and racism. I found a lot of his essays in this book very informative)

There are more, but these were the most influential to me. Feel free to add your own suggestions.

#book recs #books #mine

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thiswaycomessomethingwicked · 6 years

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Do you know anything about interracial marriage in Napoleonic France? Most of what I found are behind paywalls.

Interesting question! I will preface this by saying that my knowledge of race and colonial spaces is focused on 17th century colonial New Spain (what is now Mexico) and the relationship between religion, translation, and colonial identity. I am not a specialist in colonialism, slavery and race-relations in the French Empire.

Ok, disclaimer done.

So, from what I know race in the French Republic and Napoleonic Empire hasn’t really been touched in a big, serious manner by historians until recently. This is part to do with the perception of a “race blind” French citizenship model and perceived “republican universalism” in the 18th and 19th century. That said, this is changing and more historians are becoming interested in how racial relations played out in the Revolution and Napoleonic France as models of citizenship and civic identity shifted.

Some background: interracial marriage in pre-Revolution French Empire was most usually a concern of colonial spaces in an attempt to codify racial lines (this became more intense as the 18th and 19th century advanced). Some legal precedents include: 1711 decree saw the banning of interracial marriages in Guadalupe and 1724 decree saw it banned in French Louisiana. On mainland France the 1778 royal decree banned interracial marriage in France-proper.

During the French Revolution, in 1791 all men in France were declared free, regardless of colour. This was followed, of course, by the 1794 abolition of slavery. Also, post-1791 couples could marry either in a civil union or a religious one but only civil was deemed “legitimate” by the government.

In 1802 slavery was reinstated and in 1803 a Ministerial Decree reinstated the 1778 royal decree effectively banning mixed-race marriage in the metropol (i.e. conitental France/Napoleonic Empire, not the colonies). The 1803 Ministerial Decree remained in effect until late-1818/early 1819 (though there is one petition for a dispensation as late as 1820 in Montpellier). However, if you were living in the colonies it seemed you could participate in mixed-race marriage which is an interesting inverse of previous approaches to racial control.

That said, if you were a mixed-race couple in the Metropol you could apply for a dispensation and be allowed to marry. Considering that the black and mixed-raced population of Continental France was relatively low (around 5,000 people-ish) these records are sparse and hard to find. I know Jennifer Heuer found something like 40? 50? cases of dispensation requests to allow for a mixed-race marriage. And that is from extant documents in the French National Archives. So the actual number, of course, could be higher.

NB: The 1803 edict only applies to those who are black – mixed-race people were allowed to marry whomever they pleased. Basically, an inverse of the later 19th-century US “One Drop” rule. Jim-Crow south had the rule that was if you had any black ancestry you couldn’t marry someone who is white. In Napoleonic France if you had any European ancestry you were allowed to marry a white spouse. Though this distinction was not enshrined in law, it was an administrative proclamation by Claude Ambrose Regnier, Minister of Justice (1802-1813).

Negotiating these restrictions resulted in couples making all sorts of arguments to convince authorities to grant their unions from the need to legitimize children to citing a devotion to French citizenship and having served the French state in some way. This served to highlight the tensions between the values and principles Napoleonic France claimed to represent and align itself with and the reality of racial classifications.

An interesting point Heuer makes is to highlight that both the 1803 decree and the 1778 decree banning interracial marriages come close on the heels of laws restricting access to French territory by black and mixed-race peoples. I would add in regards to marriage in particular, an underlying tension is the perception of white-European women’s bodies as extensions of the Metropol (we see this quite strongly in late 19th century French Indo-china and the Dutch East Indies) and therefore extensions of the Ideal of the State. So part of restricting access to the State, to the Metropol, meant restricting access to the white-European female body in particular.

In summary? If you were mixed-race in the Continental Napoleonic Empire you could marry a white spouse. If you were black you couldn’t. However, you could ask for a dispensation from the government to allow you to marry. In French colonial spaces it seems to be more open.

I hope this helps!

Thank you for the ask! :D

Some sources if you have $$ or university access: Colours of Liberty, edited by Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall “The One-Drop Rule in Reverse? Interracial Marriages in Napoleonic and Restoration France,” Jennifer Heur, Law and History Review “From Mariage à la Mode to Weddings at Town Hall: Marriage, Colonialism, and Mixed-Race Society in Nineteenth-Century Senegal,”Hilary Jones, The International Journal of African Historical Studies“Mulattoes and Métis: Attitudes Toward Miscegenation in the United States and France since the Seventeenth Century,” George M. Fredrickson, International Social Science“The Blood of France’: Race and Purity of Blood in the French Atlantic World,” Guillaume Aubert, William and Mary Quarterly“Négresse, Mulâtrese, Citoyenne: Gender and Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1650-1848,” Sue Peabody, in Gender and Emancipation in the Atlantic World

#history #race #18th century #19th century #napoleonic #colonialism #french empire #napoleonic empire #napoleon #napoleon bonaparte #racism

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italianartsociety · 7 years

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By: Amy Fredrickson

Leone Leoni died on July 22, 1590, in Milan. He was born in Arezzo in 1509 and was the son of a stonemason. He began working in the Ferrara mint, as a goldsmith and medalist; however, his position was revoked when he was accused of counterfeiting medals. In 1537, Leoni moved to Rome where he was appointed as an engraver to the papal mint the following year. In 1540, he was sentenced to row as a galley slave for attempting to murder a papal jeweler named Pellegrino de Leuti. The punishment for this crime was supposed to be losing the right hand. Leoni only served a year of his sentence, and due to his political connections, he was released from the galley. Andrea Doria, who was a respected naval commander, was one such connection that led to his release. In fact, Leoni created several medals and sculptures that resembled Doria, as homage for his help.

In 1542, Leoni moved to Milan and became an engraver at the Imperial Mint. His reputation secured him a place as a sculptor for the Spanish court, where he worked for Charles V and his wife, Isabella. He created sculptural busts and medals. He produced many works for the court, but his most illustrious works are the Bust of Emperor Charles V (1553–55) and Charles V and Fury (1549–53).

The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds an outstanding example of Leoni's oeuvre, a cameo. Correspondence between the sculptor and an agent of Charles V proves that Leoni worked hard on the detailed portraiture of this cameo. Leoni wrote that the stone inspired him to carve a double portrait of Charles V and Philip II, his son. The opposite side is a portrait of Isabella, wife of Charles V and mother to Philip II.

Generously, in 1549 Charles V provided Leoni with a large house in Milan, where Leoni lived and worked. He was given funds to decorate the house, which he transformed into Casa degli Omenoni. Leoni created this house as a tribute to Marcus Aurelius.

In addition to producing artwork, Leoni was also a collector. He procured an art collection that included plaster casts of both modern and antique sculptures. Pope Pius IV gave Leoni permission to make casts of the papal collection. Leone displayed these work in his house, where he held an equestrian portrait of Marcus Aurelius, Michelangelo's Risen Christ, and several plaster casts, including one of the Apollo Belvedere and Michelangelo’s Pietà. Michelangelo even permitted him to make casts in his workshop, such as copies of Dusk and Dawn. This collection was considered Milan's first private gallery. Leoni displayed his paintings in an octagonal room inspired by Roman architecture. On the first floor he displayed Correggio's Jupiter and Io, Jupiter and Danaë, a drawing by Michelangelo, as well as paintings by Titian, Tintoretto, and Parmigianino. His collection in conjunction to the architecture of his house elevated his status as both an artist and collector. Today, Leoni’s house draws attention for its giant statues by Antonio Abondio (1538-1591), which decorate the façade.

When Leoni died, he left his son, Pompeo, a large inheritance. Pompeo followed in his father's footsteps and became a successful court sculptor to Charles V and his successor Philip II. When Pompeo moved to Spain, he took his father's works and the impressive art collection from Milan. He also completed the work his father left unfinished. Since Pompeo took his father's work to Spain, Leoni's style influenced the development of the subsequent Spanish sculptors.

References:

Britannica Academic, s.v. "Leone Leoni," accessed July 21, 2017, http://academic.eb.com.online.library.marist.edu/levels/collegiate/article/Leone-Leoni/47821

Di Dio, Kelley Helmstutler, “Leone Leoni’s Collection in the Casa Degli Omenoni, Milan: The inventory of 1609,” The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 145, No. 1205 (August, 2003), pp. 572-578.

Draper, James David, Cameo Appearances, [adapted from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 65, no. 4 (Spring, 2008)]

Mezzatesta, Michael P., "Leoni." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed July 21, 2017, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.online.library.marist.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T050443pg1.

Further Reading:

Falomir Faus, M., El retrato del Renacimiento, (Museo Nacional del Prado, 2008).

Hill, George Francis, and Graham Pollard. Renaissance Medals from the Samuel H. Kress Collection at the National Gallery of Art. (London, 1967).

Pollard, John Graham. Renaissance Medals. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. 2 vols. (Washington, 2007)

Images:

Leoni Leoni, Self-Portrait [reverse] Andrea Doria, 1466-1560, Genoese Admiral [obverse], Bronze, 1541, The National Gallery of Washington D.C.

Leone Leoni, Medal of Ferdinand I (1503-64) as Emperor Elect, Silver, 1558, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

Leone Leoni, Emperor Charles V (1500–1558) and his Son Philip II of Spain (1527–1598), Sardonyx, 1550, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Leone and Pompeo Leoni, Emperor Carlos V and the Fury, Bronze, 1551-1555, Museo del Prado, Madrid.

#leoneleoni #baroque #17th century #seventeenthcentury #milan #rome #hapsburg #spain #italianart #historyofcollecting #museumstudies #privategallery #micheangelo #thewalters #museodelprado #medals

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suburbanidiocies · 7 years

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White Supremacy by Fredrickson: A Review

Scholarly arguments are not reducible to political interventions. Nevertheless, all historical arguments can have a social impact. We may establish the potential for future alternatives through showing to what extent social factors varied in the past. When we can show how history could have been through concrete examples of multiple examples of parallel+ development we undermine the aura of responsibility free fatefulness that spontaneously accrues around whatever has been done. This opening up of new possibilities seems to be part of George M. Fredrickson’s intention in writing White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History. He wishes to both avoid deterministic narratives that would let South Africa off the hook while at the same time staying away from triumphalist stories which would put the United States on a pedestal. In the second half of his book, Fredrickson successfully shows that white supremacy was much more brutally asserted in South Africa than the in the United States during the period he studies despite the fact that in many ways South African whites had been less successful in establishing themselves as a Herrenvolk (master race) than their American counterparts. The fate of the indigenous population had been far harsher in the United States than in the colonies established around the Cape, making the brutal methods of apartheid unnecessary. Liberalism was far more developed in the United States than in South Africa, in part because in the former there were large areas which could treat the existence of a significant black population as a distant problem. American trade unionism developed in a more democratic fashion in America than South Africa because the creation of an official industrial color line was less necessary in the former than the latter. Finally, Jim Crow was less extreme than apartheid in part because the African population in the United States was a minority rather than a majority In an eloquent flight into the realm of the counterfactual, Frederickson asks us to imagine a scenario where the Native American population had not died off in large numbers due to disease upon their initial encounter with Europeans and colonists in North America had been less numerous than they actually were. American settlers would have faced the same question that plagued South African whites: What was to be done with a population that was too large to be exterminated and whose labor were necessary for the proper functioning of the economy? Faced with this conundrum, the United States would likely have opted for the elaborate system of social control of nonwhites that South Africa embarked on. One may quibble abut the real value of hypotheticals as a way of writing history; nevertheless as a piece of rhetoric this is a very effective point. This argument also shows how Fredrickson is not arguing for the innate moral superiority of America in comparison to South Africa. The greater development of democratic norms in the former was dependent on the thoroughness of the founding conquest. In White Supremacy, liberalism is portrayed as being historically better established in the United States than in South Africa. In Fredrickson’s account, both the American South and the American North gain by comparison with their equivalents in South Africa. Frederickson emphasizes the Boers relative lack of sophistication when it came to the defense of their domination of blacks in comparison to the planters of the Old South. The former, according to the author, had no equivalent to Thomas Jefferson or the other founding figures whose profoundly ambiguous words could be used to articulate an antislavery form of republicanism. Nor were the Boers’ crudely ethnocentric self understanding opened to the influence of universalist discourses like 19th century evangelical Christianity, liberal constitutionalism, or civilizational progress in the way their Southern counterparts were obliged to be by their intimate participation in the rising world system of commerce and ideas. Further, while both the British colonial authorities and the Northerners of the United States were, compared to their opponents, relatively benevolent towards people of African descent, the latter group was much more radical in its application of egalitarian principles. There was no equivalent to Radical Reconstruction in 19th century South Africa. The Cape Town liberalism that was eventually extinguished by rising Afrikaner nationalism only ever extended the franchise to those classified as Coloreds who had a certain amount of property and education. Further, while the results of the American Civil War enshrined colorblind legal equality at the level of constitutional law, South African liberalism was by comparison more local and provisional. What Jim Crow was to the United States, the experience of Cape Town was to South Africa: a tolerated legal exception to the general principals of the dominant society. Later scholarship may wish to emphasize more the extent to which the North engaged in de facto segregation but Fredrickson’s argument has at least prima facie plausibility. Fredrickson argues that the United States, unlike South Africa did not have an industrial color bar. This was in part because America was far more committed to a laisse faire attitude when it came to economic affairs. Businessmen were resistant to committing themselves to hard and fast rules about whom they could and could not hire while the American Federation of Labor preferred to keep the government outside of disputes with management. By contrast, South African enterprises along with the state were far more willing to bend to white working class demands that “their” jobs be protected from nonwhite competition. The closest equivalent to this situation in the United States was the successful closing of the country’s borders to Chinese immigrants. Yet, even this effort did not go so far as to ban nonwhites from participation in certain professions. Further, the security of American white predominance over minorities made certain populations of workers more open to cross-racial solidarity. U.S. trade unionists in the 1930s opened up their ranks to African Americans in part, White Supremacy argues, because ghettoization was deemed sufficient to make bonding with blacks as fellow laborers safe. Finally, Fredrickson makes the argument that the moral legacy of the American Civil War prevented the United States from completely betraying the dream of equality. This is an interesting idea, but unfortunately he does not cite any sources to back up his theory. In addition, those who have studied the use of convict labor in the late 19th century South may say that Fredrickson overstates his case when he asserts Americans opposed all forms of resuscitated slavery. Finally, White Supremacy argues that apartheid was far more total than Jim Crow because it was dealing with a population that was the actual majority in the lands making up South Africa, not a vulnerable minority surrounded by a hostile society. South Africa insisted on the pretense that whites and blacks were members of different nations, a notion that was alledgedly impossible to believe in the United States. Segregation in South Africa was a straightforward case of whites imposing barriers to their own advantage, while in the American South, Fredrickson argues, blacks took the initiative during Reconstruction to create separate institutions of their own. Even the frequency of lynching in the American South is judged by Frederickson to be a symptom of the relative weakness of the Southern racial order. Extra-legal violence was, in this view, necessary to reinforce divisions that were not and could not be asserted in many facets of ordinary life. One perspective that Fredrickson constantly poses himself against is the Marxist approach, or at least the “conventional” version of the same. He is clearly bothered by the notion that racial oppression is an inevitable part of the unfolding of a capitalist society. At one point he openly throws down the gauntlet: "Industrial capitalism may be a major cause of social and economic inequality in the modern world, but it makes little historical sense to view it as the source of the ideologues directly sanctioning racial discrimination.” He goes on to say that it has already been established earlier in the book that color prejudice was the product of premodern attitudes. The presence of racism in modern societies was a result of the persistence of the “old racial” order finding new ways to perpetuate itself rather than the innovations of capitalist progress itself. “Dominant political groups” are not simply economic actors but are also “carriers of prevailing cultural traditions.” This line of reasoning seems to partially contradict his earlier narrative that what has come to be known as white supremacy was originally constructed around the Christian/non-Christian binary and later became reformatted into a white/black paradigm due to the exigencies of economic production. While Fredrickson is certainly not setting up a mere strawman, it can be argued that he is still positing an opponent that is a bit too easy to defeat. Before and since the publication of his book there has been a rich Marxist literature which acknowledges the relative autonomy of race in social history. It is instructive to compare Fredrickson’s approach to that of Zine Magubane in her book Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa. She makes a compelling argument that capitalist expropriation and racialization went hand in hand. Magubane does not distinguish between the “true” capitalism of the free labor type from the “backward” systems of exploitation used in areas that fall outside the rising industries of the core. Instead, Magubane believes the development of the periphery and the metropole went hand in hand with each other not only on the level of commerce but also on the level of ideology through the discourse of race. The forcing of Africans into wage labor was justified on the basis of stereotypes concerning the work habits of people of color. These same notions of antiblackness were imported back into the imperialist center for use against populations closer to home in need of discipline. In addition, Magubane uses Marxism to articulate a sophisticated theory about the role of gender in colonial history. By contrast, Fredrickson does not do much to center the experience of women in his historical account. It may also be argued that Fredrickson replaces one form of crude economic determinism with a determinism centering around demographics. Instead of showing that differing cultures produced different results in the U.S. and South Africa, White Supremacy leans towards making such ideological variations epiphenomena of the ration of settlers to indigenous. Racial competition seems to replace class as the ultimate explanation for social change, leaving little hope for humane and rational political action. This seems to be the opposite of Fredrickson’s intention, but it is the position that his emphasis on the fate of Native Americans leans towards. Through ceding ground to the counterfactual, the text falls into the trap of making the apparent destiny of racial difference all the more real as a social factor.

Fredrickson draws on a wealth of secondary sources, albeit now of a somewhat dated type. In contrast to Magubane, there is a relative absence of primary source voices, white as well as non-white. What may be more deliberate is his lack of interest in theory, Marxist or otherwise. He is setting himself as a “non-ideological” perspective dealing with a highly controversial subject. The differing evaluations of South Africa and the United States, though not entirely unfounded, lead to conclusions which seem somewhat dated in light of recent events. Near the end he says blithely that “the trend in the United States is for blacks and whites to participate on a more equitable basis for a common society.” By contrast, Fredrickson enters into something very much like an Old Testament prophetic mode concerning South Africa’s whites, saying that if they do not willingly give up their privileges “they may end up in the same situation in which nonwhites now find themselves --- as disenfranchised aliens in the land of their birth.” No such ominous words are addressed to the Caucasian inhabitants of the United States. Since the publication of this book, apartheid in South Africa has been broken and African majority rule has become the new norm. The most pressing issue is now how to govern a multiracial society where wealth is still disproportionally in the hands of the settler minority while many nonwhites long for a better life. At the same time, the United States has had both its first black president and the chauvinist reaction represented by the election of Trump. It would be interesting to read what Frederickson would have said about the present state of the two countries he studied. In particular, today he could have focused on how South African and American whites have dealt with their relative loss of status. From the perspective of the longue durée that he was attune to, he might have injected a note of optimism to the present political environment, to the extent that it would be appropriate for a historian to provide such comfort. In any case, Fredrickson’s scholarly efforts were and remain invaluable contributions to the discourse surrounding the role of race in history. It may very well be that, by learning from the past experiences that have been reconstructed by works like White Supremacy, the whites of both South Africa and the United States will find a way to deal with their new status which will go beyond both self-flagellation and racist revaunchism.

#south Africa #united states #white supremacy #history #class struggle

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aparnesh · 5 years

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"Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa"

~ George M. Fredrickson

Published by: Oxford University Press, 1996

Full book in PDF format, 401 pages 31.75 MB, shared via Mega Drive link.

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bookstefangleason-blog · 6 years

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Test Bank for America Past and Present Combined Volume 9th Edition by Divine Breen Deceased Williams Gross and Brands

Instant download Test Bank for America Past and Present Combined Volume 9th Edition by Robert A. Divine, T. H. Breen, George M. Fredrickson Deceased, R. Hal Williams, Ariela J. Gross, H. W. Brands after payment

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America Past and Present integrates the social and political dimensions of American history into one rich chronological narrative, providing students with a full picture of the scope and complexity of the American past.

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Language: English ISBN-10: 0205697062 ISBN-13: 978-0205697069 ISBN-13: 9780205697069

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slowdivers · 7 years

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Commitment to a labour regime under which non-European slaves did virtually all of the menial and subservient work had the effect of lessening the possibility of class conflict among whites by elevating all of them to a relatively privileged social status. This is the implication of [Baron] Van Imhoff's comment [in the eighteenth century] that every white South African thought of himself as a gentleman and considered it “a shame to work his hands.” It was also the cause of what Edmund Morgan describes as a rising “populism” in early eighteenth-century Virginia, at a time when the enslavement of blacks and the decline of white servitude permitted a considerable enhancement of the political and social status of white freemen who were not members of the planter class.

George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History, Oxford University Press, 1980

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queendom25 · 3 years

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Black Liberation in the Black Church

Brace yourselves Southern Oregon because the Why We Can’t Wait challenge is but an appetizer to the cause! Yours truly is working with Black Alliance & Social Empowerment (B.A.S.E) on the project of reading the book Why We Can’t Wait written by Dr. King and comparing the civil rights movement to what we see today. Change starts with action and I encourage everyone to read the book as a stepping stone in their research of other America. With that being said let's talk about the role of the Black church from enslavement to liberation movements because have you seen what’s happened in the Georgia Senate race? We can’t just overlook the historical significance of a pastor from the spiritual home of Dr. King competing with a Senator that confidently poses in pictures with known white supremacists.

It’s no accident that the key players from Reconstruction to Black Power have been men of faith. In 1865, Reverend J.W. Wood of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church introduced a series of reforms considered “radical” including the right to vote for Black people, “Without exaggeration, it can be stated that almost every Black minister was something of a politician, and that every aspiring Black politician had to be something of a minister.”(Marable, 2015) The foundation of modern Black politics rests with the Black church and in 1910 there was a decrease in clergy. It was W.E.B Dubois that stated the Black church was an expression of the “Negro’s soul” and organizational ability but he along with other key figures had choice criticisms of the church.(Marable, 2015) Historians and sociologists alike that specialize in 20th century Black liberationist ideologies, have traced the ambivalences that set Black Christianity apart from the mainstream and debate on whether it’s been an obstacle or a blessing in the struggle for liberation. V.F. Calverton for example, declared in 1927 that the Judeo-Christian ethics of submissive behavior and tolerance towards Earthly oppressors only sustained white racism and exploitation of labor power from the Black proletariat. An unsettling number of ministers were silent as Dubois, Paul Robeson, and other socialists and progressives were arrested with tarnished reputations but the buy out of other Black ministers was the most despicable! If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s to follow the money which always pays corporate interests instead of the laborer. Henry Ford was among many capitalists of his time to pay off Black ministers for their influence to convince the Black working-class to accept low pay and reject unionism. Tokenism is no stranger to the pulpit so the real question is when will the general population focus on the politics of the person instead of their color?

In the early stages of my personal involvement with the cause, I came across a unique Christian bigot with the sexist, transphobic, and homophobic attitude to match. Interacting with him on social media made me realize my own intersectionality and how this bigot’s melanated skin is more detrimental than a Black Trump supporter. He boasted that he rejects Western Christian doctrine because the Ethiopian bible was the true path as he “corrects me on my learned self-hatred.” The doctrine that he’s referring to dates back to when the “Ethiops” joined the Crusaders in the war against Islam and just like a toxic breakup, the Europeans ghosted the Africans after the fact as the slave traders made their big debut. As a Black woman in America I realize that my heroes will contrast dramatically from that of male counterparts both Black and white. While W.E.B Dubois could labeled as the feminist of his time, he still talked about the emancipation of women in his essays as he invited Margaret Sanger to contribute to the pages of his periodicals. Margaret Sanger was the peak of white feminism that’s responsible for the Negro Project. This “ally” used Black stereotypes in order to reduce fertility in African American women. Religious Black separatists often referred to her work in later years to sway my melanated sisters from participating and who could blame them? But as Dubois noted, “The mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear their children properly.” (Washington, 2006) Thanks to Dubois’ advice Sanger recruited ministers like Dr. King to promote such a project.

The liberation of Black people has never been so cut and dry but the deliberate lack of knowledge within American textbooks ought to be incriminating. Replacing representation with tokenism should’ve been clear to us from Kamala Harris to Kelly Loeffler and from ministers on capitalist payroll to Ben Carson. We are still met with indifference as women of color and members of the LGBT+ community on the topic of basic human rights including adequate access to medical care. We may have avoided the full cancelation of “democracy” by voting out Donald Trump but the Black caucus has not forgotten the “jungle” that Joe Biden thinks we belong in.

Sources:

How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America Manning Marable 2015.

Medical Apartheid Harriet A. Washington 2006.

Black Liberation George M. Fredrickson 1995.

#mlk #medfordoregon #no justice no peace #black lives matter #southernoregon #w.e.b. du bois #human rights #kelly loeffler #kamala harris

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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An important intellectual debate is currently playing out involving the French ambassador to the United States — and a late-night comedy host.

During a Monday monologue, Daily Show host Trevor Noah made a joke about France’s World Cup victory. Alluding to the fact that 80 percent of the French team’s players were of African descent, he quipped, “Africa won the World Cup.”

“I get it, they have to say it’s the French team,” said Noah, who is black and South African. “But look at those guys. You don’t get that tan by hanging out in the south of France, my friends.”

French Ambassador Gerard Araud took offense to the comments, and sent a letter to Noah on Wednesday afternoon outlining his complaints. “By calling them an African team, it seems you are denying their Frenchness,” Araud wrote. “This, even in jest, legitimizes the ideology which claims whiteness as the only definition of being French.”

That evening, Noah fired back in a web segment, defending his original joke and arguing that Araud was actually erasing the identity of his nation’s players. It’s a powerful monologue, despite Noah’s attempt to imitate a French accent at the beginning, and deserves to be watched in full:

Ultimately, this isn’t an argument about one joke. It’s a debate about two competing visions for how liberal societies should handle diversity and racism.

Araud is coming from a traditional French perspective, and his argument can’t be understood without grasping the very aggressive vision of assimilationism that’s been dominant there for decades (arguably centuries). Noah understands this, and in his response offers a critique of traditional French approaches to diversity from a progressive, multicultural point of view.

The core issue at stake is deep and philosophical: a divide over the fundamental role of diversity in democracy, one that explains, among other things, a major part of the debate over “identity politics” currently raging inside the United States.

So even though this incident started with one comedian’s joke, it’s worth taking quite seriously — as it tells us a lot about modern politics.

French Ambassador Gerard Araud at the UN. John Moore/Getty Images

The core of Araud’s response to Noah’s initial joke was to argue that the comedian doesn’t really get what it means to be French.

“France is indeed a cosmopolitan country, but every citizen is part of the French identity and together they belong to the nation of France,” Araud writes. “Unlike in the United States of America, France does not refer to its citizens based on their race, religion, or origin. To us, there is no hyphenated identity, roots are an individual reality.”

This approach to race, which may sound bizarre to American ears, reflects widely divergent histories: George M. Fredrickson, an eminent historian of race in France and America at Stanford, dates the origins of the Franco-American disagreement over race all the way back to independence. For a complex of reasons — ranging from differences over the role of the state to the two revolutions’ differing experiences with religion — America developed a national culture centering on liberal tolerance, whereas revolutionary France focused more on building a shared sense of national identity and unified culture.

The two countries diverged further as they developed. Because France had no large, domestic slave population, preferring instead to enslave Africans in its colonies, race never became the fundamental cleavage in its politics. While both countries experienced mass immigration, immigration to the United States has featured much more non-European migrants (until, roughly, the end of colonialism in the mid-20th century). It was also far easier for immigrants to the US to become citizens without learning the local language and culture.

The result of all of this was that French national culture came to view matters of diversity and immigration as issues centering less on tolerance than on assimilation. As Fredrickson puts it:

Recognizing the role that race has played in producing group inequalities, the United States has adopted race-specific policies such as affirmative action and electoral reforms designed to promote greater representation for minorities. After a brief experiment with multiculturalism in the 1980s, it would appear that France has decisively rejected “the American model” and resolutely returned to an assimilationist approach to the diversity created by the new wave of immigration.

This history means that traditional French liberals — the camp in which Araud is best situated — have a very particular approach to race and racism.

They believe that the best way to convince French citizens to accept diversity is to convince French whites that Muslims and people of African descent are every bit as French as they are. Playing up their ethno-religious differences, they believe, only serves to distance them from their essential Frenchness. What’s worse, they argue, it fuels a narrative on the French far-right that people who aren’t European by blood can never truly become “French.”

Hence why Noah’s joke about “Africa” winning the World Cup rankled so much. Benjamin Haddad, a French scholar at the Hudson Institute who has worked for President Emmanuel Macron, told me that it sounded like the rhetoric he hears from far-right party leader Marine Le Pen.

“His [Noah’s] original skit, ‘you don’t get that tan in the south of France,’ is Le Pen level stuff,” explains Haddad. “Many French cringe at this debate because it’s been a far-right talking point for 20 years.”

Trevor Noah is, of course, coming from a different perspective. A black South African man working in the United States, he’s steeped in the culture of two countries whose entire existences were defined by race and racial oppression. Both nations have, in different and distinct ways, developed official cultures of multiculturalism — a celebration and accommodation of racial differences, rather than an erasure of them — as a means of trying to reconcile racial tensions.

Noah’s response video is essentially an extended defense of this model and a head-on critique of traditional French assimilationism. For one thing, Noah argues, the French model erases the positive pride that Africans, both on the continent and in the diaspora, feel in their common heritage.

“Coming from South Africa [and] watching the World Cup in the United States of America, black people all over the world were celebrating the Africanness of the French players,” he said. “Not in a negative way, but rather in a positive way going, ‘Look at these Africans who can become French.’ You know what I mean? It’s a celebration of their achievements.”

“When I’m saying they’re African, I’m not trying to exclude them from their Frenchness but include them in my Africanness”

In Noah’s view, insisting that you can’t hyphenate your identity — that you can’t be French-Algerian, but must be either French or Algerian — cuts people off from a valuable sense of pride and community. It’s a vision that strips people of who they are, and of what matters to them, in the name of “assimilation.” A quote from Count Stanislas–Marie–Adélaide de Clermont, offered during the 1789 French National Assembly’s debate over the legal status of Jews after the Revolution, helps sum up what Noah finds objectionable about the French model:

To the Jews as a nation, one must refuse everything; but to Jews as men one must grant everything…there cannot be a nation within the nation.

The idea that you cannot have a Jewish community in France, only individual Jews stripped of their Jewish identity, sounds profoundly offensive (at least, it does to this Jew). But Noah argues that Araud, and French national culture, hasn’t moved on from this 19th-century view — that insisting that hyphenate identities are impossible is stripping communities of their core, essential identity.

The point about the far right, Noah argues, is missing vital context. The same line — “these are African players” — means something very different when it’s being said by a black comedian than by a racist French politician, and that audiences are smart enough to understand why:

I believe context is everything. There are certain things that you can say — like, when I say to my friends, ‘What’s going on my nigga?’. And if a white person came and said the same thing, yeah, there’s a big difference. When I’m saying they’re African, I’m not trying to exclude them from their Frenchness but include them in my Africanness.

So the issue here, contrary to Araud’s point, isn’t that Noah fails to understand the French model. It’s that he thinks it’s wrong.

End of the argument with @Trevornoah He didn’t refer to a double identity. He said »they are African. They couldn’t get this suntan in the south of France ». i.e They can’t be French because they are black. The argument of the white supremacist.

— Gérard Araud (@GerardAraud) July 19, 2018

My own view — cards on the table — is that Noah is the winner in the debate. Araud continues to restate his basic position, even in the tweet above sent after Noah’s response was released, without grasping the subtlety of Noah’s points about context and identity.

But I’m less interested in point-scoring, at least right now, than I am in pointing out the stakes of the argument.

While Araud’s specific arguments are grounded in French identity and history, his basic starting point — that the best way to approach issues of race is a kind of colorblind emphasis on what unites us as citizens — is the same argument that underpins liberal critiques of “identity politics” in the United States.

After the 2016 election, Columbia University professor Mark Lilla wrote a New York Times essay, “The End of Identity Liberalism,” making an argument similar to Araud’s (a piece that also follows a long tradition of liberal handwringing about identity in the US). In the piece, Lilla even cited his time taking a sabbatical in France as formative of his opinions on this subject.

American liberalism’s emphasis on identity and difference, Lilla argues, is destroying the foundations of democracy in the country — helping the far-right in precisely the way that Araud says:

The standard liberal [view] for nearly a generation now has been that we should become aware of and “celebrate” our differences. Which is a splendid principle of moral pedagogy — but disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics in our ideological age. In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.

Lilla proposed replacing “identity politics” with a “post-identity liberalism,” one that speaks “to Americans as Americans … a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one another.” His proposal, in short, is to Frenchify American liberalism.

Critics of Lilla’s position replied that this would be electorally ineffective — Democrats need minorities, and need to appeal to their particular identities to get them — but, more fundamentally, that it would be wrong.

“What we find in the backlash by liberals against progressives is nothing other than a betrayal of the true and full values of liberalism,” Stanford professor David Palumbo-Liu argued in a Vox essay. “Liberals like Lilla would have us turning back the clock to compete for the leadership of what one might call an ‘off-white America,’ with issues of race and gender and other minority positions relegated to the background.”

This is a more explicitly political twist on Noah’s position. The comedian is arguing that stripping French World Cup players of their Africanness means separating them from an important part of themselves; the professor is arguing that removing identity politics from liberalism is to remove the specific concerns of marginalized groups from the political docket. Both believe that a colorblind liberalism is one that has blinded itself to important parts of what matter to individuals from minority groups.

What’s really at stake here, then, isn’t just a petty feud between public figures — or even a culture clash between two men of different backgrounds. Instead, it’s a profound debate splitting liberals in increasingly diverse democracies — both in Europe and the United States.

Original Source -> Trevor Noah’s feud with France over race, identity, and Africa — explained

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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