How America Bought and Sold Racism, and Why it Still Matters (trigger warnings)

[niyad]

How America Bought and Sold Racism, and Why it Still Matters

Today, very few white Americans openly celebrate the horrors of black enslavement—most refuse to recognize the brutal nature of the institution or actively seek to distance themselves from it. “The modern American sees slavery as a regrettable period when blacks worked without wages,” writes Dr. David Pilgrim, the vice president for diversity and inclusion and a sociology professor at Ferris State University, and the author of Understanding Jim Crow: Using Racist Memorabilia to Teach Tolerance and Promote Social Justice, who has spent his life studying the artifacts that have perpetuated racist stereotypes.

The urge to forget this stain on our nation’s history is everywhere. In Texas, McGraw-Hill recently distributed a high-school geography textbook that refers to American slaves as immigrant workers. At Southern plantation museums that romanticize the idea of genteel antebellum culture, the bleak and violent reality of enslaved plantation life is whitewashed and glossed over. Discussions about how slavery led to modern-day racism are often met with white defensiveness. How many times have black people heard this line? “Slavery happened a long time ago. You need to get over it.”

The truth is when President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, the economic subjugation of African Americans, and the terrorism used to maintain it, did not come to a grinding halt. The Jim Crow racial caste system that emerged 12 years after the Civil War ended in 1865 was just as violent and oppressive as slavery—and it lasted nearly a century. Up through Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, black people across the country, in Northern states as well as Southern ones, were routinely humiliated, menaced, tortured and beaten to death, and blocked from participating in business and public life. Thanks to smartphone and social-media technology, we’re seeing how such violence continues in 2015, 50 years after the height of the Civil Rights movement.

. . . . .

To understand why black kids like these are subjected to so much hostility and abuse, you have to look at the toxic beliefs white Americans embraced during slavery and throughout the Jim Crow era, which still pollute our culture today. These include the absurd notions that black people don’t feel pain, that without strict control black people are inclined to violence, and that black children are not innocents, but wild, unruly animals that need to be tamed. The ugly history of such ideas are documented in explicit detail at the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, located at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, a place Dr. David Pilgrim, the museum founder, sometimes refers to as a “Black Holocaust museum.” The museum is featured in Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s PBS documentary series, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross.

. . . . .

http://msmagazine.com/blog/2015/11/24/how-america-bought-and-sold-racism-and-why-it-still-matters/

[LiberalArkie]

1. ^^^^^^^^^^

[malthaussen]

2. "A regrettable period when blacks worked without wages."

Priceless. You know, I read Black Like Me when I was 12 (the school bus driver, a middle-aged white male, assured me it was "trash," as if I took literary criticism from a bus driver seriously), and I still think it would make nice required reading in schools now. Of course, it would be immediately disclaimed with the "things are different now" meme. The willful blindness that afflicts so many in this country still amazes me, even though I'm old and cynical now, and can see how it reinforces the status of those on top of the food chain.

Slavery. Regrettable and inappropriate (another favorite word). Yep.

-- Mal

[niyad]

3. I see, on a daily basis, how the language is used to convey something other than truth, and it

makes me angry.

humpty dumpty reigns supreme, I guess.

[niyad]

4. . . .