As the possibilities of the 21st century appear on the horizon, it seems an appropriate time to look back on and critically analyze the past century which also began with reflection and expectations. Although many people in the United States are sure that "as far as race relations go, things have gotten better," a closer look at examples of material and popular culture from either end of the 20th century illustrates that "things have stayed very much the same."
Some people speak about the shift from earlier blatant to overt forms of racism which might seem to imply that things have gotten better. Instead, It exists a subtle, covert, and possibly more insidious brand of racism that surfaced and created] what has been referred to as America's 'second reconstruction.'
The 'new racism' began to emerge in the late 1970s and solidified in the Reagan era. It has taken the form of social and public policies, sanctioned by the courts and America's political elites. The resulting budget cuts in public education, housing, medical care, and other services that assist the poor ensure that black and Hispanic people remain the poorest Americans. Historically, African Americans consistently remained at the bottom of the social hierarchy, as some immigrants managed to rise to higher levels. Now, new immigration laws prevent "third world" minorities, and particularly "Hispanic" people from becoming a part of the "American Dream."
This more subtle and "new racism" is in reaction to and follows the "racial progress" of the heightened civil rights and black power movements during the 1960s and1970s when black Americans organized nationally and took to the streets to protest racism and oppression. African American's demands for political and social change pushed politicians to begin dismantling the obvious signs of racism. Laws that legislated segregation based on race in education, housing, employment, and suffrage were slowly repealed.
At the beginning of this century, the discipline of anthropology, the "science" of eugenics, and the ideas of social Darwinism continued to build on earlier assumptions and capture the imagination of many people. The relationship between these abstract arguments and concrete culture has maintained a perpetual and vicious cycle, even with a few sporadic doses of antidote. It is important to point out that the negative effect of the white supremacy myth impacts African Americans and Africans in very real ways, and that without social action the mere discussion of racism is ineffective.
This book aims to provide history and context to convince readers to take action and become more vigilant in critiquing the barrage of images and words that influence us every day. The first section provides a broad history of the complex development of ideas and belief systems that form the foundation of racist ideology. In the following two sections, I discuss the background of some stereotypes of Africans and African Americans. The stereotypes of African Americans that are used to symbolically reconstruct segregation and maintain popular opinion have their origins in the images and ideas that first deemed Africans inferior. These ideas are disseminated through images and technologies that allow information to double backward and forwards, and even form new versions of itself. As in earlier eras, stereotypes of Africans and African Americans are often not separated, and they actually target all "black people."
The origin of modern humans has probably been the most debated issue in evolutionary biology over the last few decades.
Modern humans (Homo sapiens), thespeciesthat we are, means 'wise man' in Latin. Our species is the only surviving species of the genusHomobut where we came from has been a topic of much debate. Modern humans originated in Africa within the past 200,000 years and evolved from their most likely recent common ancestor, Homo erectus, which means 'upright man' in Latin.Homo erectusis an extinct species of human that lived between 1.9 million and 135,000 years ago.
At some point in its evolutionary history, our species Homo sapiens ceased to be a nonlinguistic, nonsymbolic organism, living in the world as presented to it by Nature, and instead began to exist in a world that it reconstructs in its mind. Most scientists since Darwin have been content to explain this extraordinary transformation in human consciousness by the operation of natural selection. However, the human fossil and archaeological records indicate that modern human symbolic consciousness is not the culmination of the long trend that natural selection would predict. Instead, it shows that major change in the human past has been episodic and rare and that, as far as can be determined from the archaeological record, the passage from non-symbolic to symbolic cognition is a recent event as well as an unprecedented one. So recent, indeed, that it significantly postdates the acquisition of modern human anatomy as expressed in skeletal structure. It, thus, appears most likely that the biological (neural) capacity underwriting the radically new behavioral model arose as an incidental exaptation in the same process that produced the new skeletal structure of Homo sapiens, but that it lay unexpressed until it was "discovered" using a cultural innovation, plausibly the invention of language.
As the possibilities of the 21st century appear on the horizon, it seems an appropriate time to look back on and critically analyze the past century which also began with reflection and expectations. Although many people in the United States are sure that "as far as race relations go, things have gotten better," a closer look at examples of material and popular culture from either end of the 20th century illustrates that "things have stayed very much the same."
Some people speak about the shift from earlier blatant to overt forms of racism which might seem to imply that things have gotten better. Instead, It exists a subtle, covert, and possibly more insidious brand of racism that surfaced and created] what has been referred to as America's 'second reconstruction.'
The 'new racism' began to emerge in the late 1970s and solidified in the Reagan era. It has taken the form of social and public policies, sanctioned by the courts and America's political elites. The resulting budget cuts in public education, housing, medical care, and other services that assist the poor ensure that black and Hispanic people remain the poorest Americans. Historically, African Americans consistently remained at the bottom of the social hierarchy, as some immigrants managed to rise to higher levels. Now, new immigration laws prevent "third world" minorities, and particularly "Hispanic" people from becoming a part of the "American Dream."
This more subtle and "new racism" is in reaction to and follows the "racial progress" of the heightened civil rights and black power movements during the 1960s and1970s when black Americans organized nationally and took to the streets to protest racism and oppression. African American's demands for political and social change pushed politicians to begin dismantling the obvious signs of racism. Laws that legislated segregation based on race in education, housing, employment, and suffrage were slowly repealed.
At the beginning of this century, the discipline of anthropology, the "science" of eugenics, and the ideas of social Darwinism continued to build on earlier assumptions and capture the imagination of many people. The relationship between these abstract arguments and concrete culture has maintained a perpetual and vicious cycle, even with a few sporadic doses of antidote. It is important to point out that the negative effect of the white supremacy myth impacts African Americans and Africans in very real ways, and that without social action the mere discussion of racism is ineffective.
This book aims to provide history and context to convince readers to take action and become more vigilant in critiquing the barrage of images and words that influence us every day. The first section provides a broad history of the complex development of ideas and belief systems that form the foundation of racist ideology. In the following two sections, I discuss the background of some stereotypes of Africans and African Americans. The stereotypes of African Americans that are used to symbolically reconstruct segregation and maintain popular opinion have their origins in the images and ideas that first deemed Africans inferior. These ideas are disseminated through images and technologies that allow information to double backward and forwards, and even form new versions of itself. As in earlier eras, stereotypes of Africans and African Americans are often not separated, and they actually target all "black people."
Автор: Jefferson Elias Название: Black Face White Racism ISBN: 1801133379 ISBN-13(EAN): 9781801133371 Издательство: Неизвестно Рейтинг: Цена: 2752.00 р. Наличие на складе: Нет в наличии.
Описание:
Racism is one of the longest standing social issues that persist in modern society. A lot of the tension that multi-cultural societies face today comes from our separation into racial categories that have been imposed on one another. Much of our recent history is dominated by race-based struggles. Moving past these ideas would be difficult but maybe if we can expose their true origins: the racist anthropological books, papers, and ideas that have fueled the fires for so long, we can finally end it for good. The ideas of some of the first Anthropologists may have been the leading cause of modern racism. These, rather than some genetic or biological reason is why racism still exists today.
Race is a false classification of people that is not based on any real or accurate biological or scientific truth. In other words, the distinction we make between races has nothing to do with scientific truth.
Race is a political construction. A political construction is something created by people; that is not a natural development; is constructed or created for a political purpose. The concept of race was created as a classification of human beings to give power to white people and to legitimize the dominance of white people over non-white people.
The concept of race as a rough division of anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) has a long and complicated history. The word race itself is modern and was used in the sense of "nation, ethnic group" during the 16th to 19th centuries and acquired its modern meaning in the field of physical anthropology only from the mid-19th century.
Several social and political developments that occurred at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century led to the transformation in the discourse of race.
Political theorists have collectively failed to arrive at a coherent and consistent definition of the term "race". Terms such as "negro", "white", "African", "Asian", "black", are often provided without an accompanying explanation or justification for their usage. Typical "histories" of "racism" tend to betray a general incapacity to visualize or bring to life the non-racialist or pre-racialist character of societies in the "Old World". Moreover, political psychologists that do address "racism" tend to contextualize this phenomenon using passively-constructed language that presents scenarios of an unfortunate racist political behavior motivated by antipathy.
In response, this book advances the following claims:
(a) before the advent of "modern racism", around the globe, and in the geographic spaces of "western Eurasia", the range of "morphological" characteristics was heterogeneous and reflected the cyclical explorations, invasions, and colonization from peoples who were home to what is now known as "Africa", the "Near East", and "Asia" into those spaces;
(b) the term "race" has undergone specific and radically transformative phases in which its meanings have been re-constituted from mere "kinship" to "meta- ancestry", "morphology", "anthropology" and "bio-genetics";
(c) the contemporary meaning of "race" is best conceptualized as a mosaic of constructed micro-differences (e.g. social relations, cognitive-linguistic framework, appearance, ancestry, and self- identification) reified as the markers of intrinsic "racial" distinction, which the subject measures according to a weighted-scale that she uses to ultimately assign self, group, and other membership in one (or more) "racial" group(s);
(d) racial power entails a nexus of power-knowledge whereby authority is enabled to exercise political power to confer greater enabled agency to the social agent by discourses developed by credentialed "experts" working within a field of authoritative knowledge that objectifies that social agent as occupying a subject position that is imbued with empowerment.
Racism is one of the longest standing social issues that persist in modern society. A lot of the tension that multi-cultural societies face today comes from our separation into racial categories that have been imposed on one another. Much of our recent history is dominated by race-based struggles. Moving past these ideas would be difficult but maybe if we can expose their true origins: the racist anthropological books, papers, and ideas that have fueled the fires for so long, we can finally end it for good. The ideas of some of the first Anthropologists may have been the leading cause of modern racism. These, rather than some genetic or biological reason is why racism still exists today.
Race is a false classification of people that is not based on any real or accurate biological or scientific truth. In other words, the distinction we make between races has nothing to do with scientific truth.
Race is a political construction. A political construction is something created by people; that is not a natural development; is constructed or created for a political purpose. The concept of race was created as a classification of human beings to give power to white people and to legitimize the dominance of white people over non-white people.
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