Young Black men in their late twenties or early thirties living in urban America, lost and abandoned, aimlessly walking and hawking the streets with nothing behind their eyes but anger, confusion, disappointment and pain. These men, running the streets, occupying corners, often are beaten beyond recognition, with scars both visible and internal. These men, Black men-sons of Afrika, once strong and full of the hope that America lied about-are now knee-less, voice-broken, homeless, forgotten and terrorized into becoming beggars, thieves or ultra-dependents on a system that considers them less than human and treats them with less dignity and respect than dead dogs. I am among those men. I will never forgive White people for what they have done to Afrikan-American me, women and children. This is our story, and this time we are not asking for or waiting on apologies and…
The video made me feel as there is more to know about slavery, than what is presented through word of mouth and classrooms.…
For example, Christina Comer, a decadent of J.W. Comer learned that her grandfather was a former slave owner, then a prison owner who bought African criminals, using them as cheap labor. In addition to all the other brutal ways he treated his workers. Christina was brought to tears, stating that she “didn’t leave the house for two days.” Another example was of the child of a man who lived around 1890, she was told of how her father was mistreated for believing that African Americans were just as good as anyone else. Her stories act as a good secondhand resource, and gives good emotional weight to the documentary’s…
How does this Feminist theory resonate with me? Watching this video made me think about myself a young black single mother out here all by myself trying to take care of my son and daughter with a little help from my child's father. I can relate to her working hard and long hours just to make sure that I could keep the basic…
As famine led to civil turmoil in central and western Afro-Eurasia, bands of pastoral nomads from the Inner Eurasian plains increasingly endangered the societies of the riverine cities. Transhumant herders advanced on the cities seeking provisions for themselves and their herds. The ability of nomads and transhumant herders to adapt more quickly to the changing environmental conditions became the facilitator for the rise of new territorial states, which would adopt new skills that allowed them to flourish in the new environment.…
Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution were historical milestones in which the ever controversial topic of racial equality was first challenged. In theory, these two movements laid the groundwork for a racially equal United States of America. A country in which every member, regardless of skin color, or race were to be treated equally under the eyes of the law and to one day be treated as equals within all realms of society. As historic and powerful as these movements were, they did little to quell racism and unfair treatment of African Americans in the United States. Following these two movements and the ending of the civil war, African Americans continued to be harshly mistreated by members of white America, as numerous members of the African American race were threatened, falsely accused of crimes, beaten, raped and killed as a result of Jim Crow laws and the Southern tradition of lynching, or hanging African Americans. Mat Johnson’s graphic Novel, Incognegro, chronicling the trials and tribulations of Zane, an African American journalist who pretends to be white to expose the brutal reality of segregation against African Americans in the South, is a graphic manifestation of both the historical accuracy and cultural reality of segregation and brutal mistreatment of African Americans within the Jim Crow South. Johnson’s vivd dramatizations of African Americans being brutally murdered by lynching, African Americans, “passing,” as whites, and African Americans being unfairly tried under the eyes of the law, sheds historically accurate light on an important, yet swept under the rug tradition of a time when racial segregation against African Americans served as a cultural identity that came to define cultural…
Watching the film I feel repentance for the woman and their stories but at the same time it makes me reflect on the victims and their families. It makes me ask the question, does the end justify the means? Because these stories are so close to home, we tend to…
As one of the largest grassroots movements in the country, Black Lives Matter is a reaction to the dehumanization of Black people, a call to action against societal and institutional racism, as well as a rebuild of the narrow, conventional liberation movements that too often marginalized women, queer, trans, disabled and undocumented immigrants from within the movement. As such, it does not limit its scope to the alarmingly high poverty, incarceration and extrajudicial killing rates, but it includes grievances specific to those that usually take the back seat in those movements. Black Lives Matter calls for society as a whole to end racial discrimination, to acknowledge the contribution of Black people to it, but also for Black folks and their…
Neil Smelser defines cultural trauma as “a memory accepted and publicly given credence by a relevant membership group and evoking an event or situation which is (a) laden with negative affect, (b) represented as indelible, and (c) regarded as threatening a society’s existence or violating one or more of its fundamental cultural presuppositions.”(Eyerman 2001: 2) Much of the work done related to cultural trauma and the Black American experience has been rooted in the days of slavery, which serves as a public memory for many Black Americans. While this public memory has rooted many Black American experiences, cultural trauma of Black Americans can be rooted in more current contexts. The three articles mentioned above find a way to root themselves in structures similar to that of slavery—state violence—while basing themselves in more recent forms it. In Black Queer Life, Shaka McGlotten focuses on how the different interpretations Black queerness, including violence, help define it. The Sojourner Syndrome looks at the lives of Black women in the Bluff, a poor black neighborhood in Atlanta, to try to understand how structural systems, not only individual choices, affect their HIV rates. We All Are Oscar Grant explores the ways that public mourning occurs within a system that supports state-sanctioned violence. These articles, though focusing on different things, incorporate the use of cultural…
Painter Aaron Douglas, the "father" of African Art, stated in 1925, "Let 's bare our arms and plunge them deep through laughter, through pain, through sorrow, through hope, through disappointment, into the very depths of the souls of our people and drag forth material crude, rough, neglected. Then let 's sing it, dance it, write it, paint it" ("Harlem Renaissance" 1, par. 4). These words of triumph and strife epitomize the state of living during the Harlem Renaissance in the United States. Liberation, cultural pride, and expression in the arts embodied this period in American history. Beginning at the end of World War I and continuing on until the brink of the Great Depression of the 1930 's, feelings of both acceptance and segregation contrived discord between blacks and whites living among one another. Effecting black Americans as well as America in general, this movement had a profound impact on our country that to this day is apparent in everyday life.…
This scenario was all too common for African Americans all throughout the United States in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. More specifically, 4,743 innocent African Americans were killed during this time period (“Lynching Statistics”). This atrocity only furthered African American resentment towards their white oppressors, which made their rebellion a very violent affair.…
Since the mid 1980’s, collective efforts to define deviant music have focused increasingly on two genres heavy metal and rap music. Most of these claims assert that heavy metal and rap music represent a type of audio pornography that endorses sexist, violent and anti religious behaviors. Musical genres such as jazz and blues and the rock and roll of 1940’s and 1950’s were believed to have contributed to teenager’s moral disintegration. In addition to rock music, performers of newer popular styles, particularly heavy metal and rap, have recently come under attack for their perceived potential to negatively influence young audiences. In a 1985 standing room only United State senate hearing, several prominent political families rallied testimony to the harmful effects of pornography and violence present in the lyrics of heavy metal music. Rap music was lambasted just five years later when a recording by a group called 2 live crew was declared obscene by a federal court in Florida and the members of the band were arrested.…
Even though the entire movie was very interesting to watch and exposed very sad facts, there were some parts that stood out from the rest and deeply affected me. Towards the very end of the movie where one of the participants who had a colored ribbon on admitted that even though he was not happy with the way that his equals were being treated, he still choose to remain quite because he did not want to be picked on afterwards and simply became the part of the racist act by allowing that to happen.…
Enslaved Africans and their enslaved descendants made countless contributions to American life, politics, economics, and culture. To understand the history of them, people need to understand these two books Up from Slavery and Invisible man. These two works depict two outstanding theories of Black community to different periods of time. After the non-stoppable efforts, African American community though has got significant improvement; however, they are still having got many issues to solve. In fact, it’s not by chance that many young black men have been shot by police recent years. These events cause the question about whether there are still existing inequality, discrimination or racism inside the America society even in the early 21st century.…
Before delving into the extended metaphor that Amiri Baraka drew out, it helps to have a firm understanding of the institutionalized violence at work against the Black race. Since colonialization of the Americas and the introduction of slavery, violence against blacks has…