Historical Amnesia in the American South

In Response to James Perry’s The Living Consequences
In this entry, James acknowledges the tendency of Americans to downplay or even ignore the effects of the effects of the hundreds of years of slavery in America. The difference between those memories of the North and the South is distinct in the fact that, with the exception of Traces of the Trade, Northern based slavery is not the focus of many individuals. Widespread Southern plantation slavery has been mutated from the horrific forced labor it was, to a less-offensive period of friendly servitude more along the lines of the “Glory days”. This image of the beautiful South is preserved by naivety toward slavery, as an acknowledgement would mar the region’s celebrated past. The Charleston Museum’s initiative to create such an exhibit is the first step toward presenting and accepting the South’s former culture.
I applaud their actions and support their desire to inform the general public in lieu of ignoring the era as it has been in the past. Much like Katrina Browne’s work, slavery education needs to start somewhere—and what better place than the country’s oldest museum.

In James' blog, he posts an article about the Armenian genocide and historical amnesia. I think historical amnesia is an interesting term, especially when we apply it to our discussion of slavery in class. Someone in class mentioned how when we learned about slavery in elementary school, we were basically taught that the North were the good guys, and the South were the bad guys. Seeing slavery in simple black and white terms just doesn't work. James said that this was one of the main themes of Traces of the Trade, and I am inclined to agree, because it was one of the things that struck me the most.
Like the DeWolf family, I really wasn't aware of the extent of the North's role in the slave trade. Because of what I learned in school, I figured the bulk of the slave trade took place in the South, and that the North was a place full of Quakers and Underground Railroad stops. I have to question why I was taught that this was true. Is it just easier to explain slavery in terms like this? Did the North originally not want to admit to their role in the slave trade and thus their true role was never discussed, even up to today? These questions are something I have to think about, and I wonder if elementary school curriculums will ever be change to reflect a more accurate picture of slave trade

Battle Star Galactica, and the U.N.

James Olmos' and his non-racist approach is admirable. It also makes me want to watch the show battle star galatica all the more. I do disagree with him at one point. There is such things as a latino race, asian race, and etc. Although biologically the differences between each race, and using race as a cultural determinant is racist, it doesn't constitute the non-existance of race. Race is a social construct and the way individuals use race to develop a racist discourse among one another has a terrible reality. James' is well intended but in order for his intentions to be realized. He has to come to terms that it is a socially constructed ideology that pervades even in our times, and expose people's actions and thoughts that are fueled by racist ideologies. Saying that race doesn't exist, is simply masking what people are really doing and saying.

At the end of his speech, where he discusses how caucasians created this idea of race as a cultural determinant in order to subdue and conquer other races, had me thinking that history of racism is a vital part of eliminating racism altogether. As we saw in traces of the trade, the effects of history, is possibly right infront of us and we simply ignore it or don't realize it. In the present, what we can learn from the past should be racism in any form is wrong, and the consequences of being racist is profound. Racism may take on other forms currently but the results are still the same; therefore, the message of history is still the same. It is my hope, however, that in our generation we as society as a whole, can come to grips with this issue and use the power that history has to never let itself be repeated.

Response to Perry's About His Blog

After looking through Jame's blog I was a little confused. It all seems to be news blurbs on recent race developments. Most of the posts seemed rather clinical. I suppose my confusion stems from a dissonance between what I was expecting and what Perry actually writes about rather than my inability to understand the material. I felt that if he was so affected by his journey, enough to maintain a blog dealing with race, that there would be more feelings involved. Instead, it is a running list of the state of race relations in the US.

I don't have much to comment on. Many of the posts are short and purely informational. One thing I would like to see if I were to follow his blog would be his connections to the material. Though the purpose of his blog is stated, it is unclear. I would like him to address why he feels running this blog is important. I don't like the lack of personal experiences in his blog. To me, a blog is a journal of sorts. While it can be used as a media source, I feel it has the most impact when people's reactions and thoughts are recorded. For a few of the posts that I look over, Perry did not give his personal opinion of what he was writing about. I assume that he agrees with the items he is posting, but I cannot be sure. I am left questioning how effective his blog is. I don't know its purpose. While I feel that any sort of exposure of issues is good for the larger public, I wonder how much influence his blog has among those who do not already have reason to be there.

Ultimately, I was hoping to find out why Perry feels this is an effective or appropriate outlet following his experiences seen in Traces of the Trade. I did not and I cannot immediately see these answers in any of his more recent posts. He never says why he felt a blog was a step in the right direction. The link to the post I am referring to in embedded in the title of my post.

Traces of the Trade and it's Results

(Sorry for the delay, forgot all about posting last week's til I went to post this weeks)

Watching Traces of the Trade sparks mixed feelings for me. Yes, the slave trade was a horrible trade. However, for all intents and purposes, its been over for almost 100 years. Of course, there is still racism, but this is a seperate issue in my mind. Racism is something horrible that still goes on today, and still affects people. No one alive today has truly suffered from it, nor gained from it(except possibly some inherited money). But the idea of reparations, to me at least, is a bit ludicrous. It's people who haven't committed a crime paying victims for a pain they (essentially) have not suffered. There are no more people who were alive to be slaves, just as there are no people alive who were slaves.

The anger people still feel about it is slightly confusing, as illustrated by what happened to me. A friend of mine was horribly angry at all white people, insisting his ancestors had been enslaved and their (and his) live ruined because of it. Then, one day, he came to me with a sheepish apology. He had learned his family had freely immigrated to America, not forced over as slaves. This highlights one of the major problems with reparations. How do we determine who gets money? With the lack of records of slaves, will it really be possible to trace out who is descended from slaves and who isn't?

The idea of an apology is still a bit strange. This time, it's people who haven't committed crimes accepting responsibility for the suffering of people who haven't been victimized. Yes, they may be in a rough position in life, but this is more due to racism, and racism is what needs to be addressed and confronted. Bringing slavery back up is essentially avoiding what should be the main issue.

Reparations for something that happened hundreds of years ago is a very tricky subject. If accepted, reparations could have all sorts of other consequences. Could the descendants of a murder victim sue the murderer's ancestors 100, or even 200 years later? Yes, the two cases are drastically different, but the basic premise behind them is the same.

This is not to say I don't understand the troubles the DeWolf's face. They are much more closely linked to slavery. But for the majority of people, there might be no connection at all. Who's to say my ancestors considered slavery immoral and didn't own any? Or that they ran a "stop" on the underground railroad?

Slavery was indeed a terrible thing, but it is one that(for the most part) has been "defeated" throughout the world. I think people need to stop arguing about an issue of the past, and focus more on the issue of the present, racism.

Blog 2 (Racism Conference)

The debate over the UN Conference on racism is a bit confusing to me. With so little of the actual wording of the document released, it's hard to understand exactly why countries are boycotting the conference. All we hear are vague comments about "unacceptable references" to things like Israel and Palestine, reparations, and religious defamation.

When it comes to religious defamation, what exactly is this doing in a conference on racism? And what exactly do they mean by defamation? To some, religious defamation is not only insulting a religion, but also denying that it is true. If this is included, is it really the place of the UN to decide what religion is "right"? On the other hand, if they mean simply insulting a religion, this is an entirely seperate topic and does not belong in a conversation about racism. Race and religion are two seperate things.

I'm not surprised in the slightest that countries would be upset about reparations, especially the US. Our country has always been slow to, if they ever even do, admit they did something wrong. This extends beyond slavery - internment camps for Japanese citizens in WW2 for example. The wrongs committed by our country are quietly swept under the rug, and other things talked about instead. Forgot about what we did to our own citizens - we liberated the death camps!!! This sort of attitude is chronic in this country - ignore the wrong, focus on the good.

The same goes for the talk of Israel and Palestine, though without the actual language it is hard to figure out why. I would guess that the language did not describe Israel as blameless and Palestine as guilty, and that is why it was rejected. Several countries, including this one, have long turned a blind eye to wrongs committed by Israel. To suggest anything other than Palestine is the aggressor and Israel is blameless is always rejected by most of the Western world. (Of course, any suggestion that Palestine is not blameless is generally rejected by the Muslim world) What really needs to happen to achieve peace is for both sides to suck it up and admit guilt. Neither is blameless.

In short, I think the reasons for boycotting the conference come down to political pandering and nothing more. The elimination of racism is too important a task to let petty political squabbles interfere. But then again, this country has never let something like the good of all get in the way of politics, so why be surprised that it does now?

Races and Faces

I visited http://living.jdewperry.com/ and was immediately drawn into the frequently updated entries that deal with modern events. The article I chose was "Facial recognition and “implicit racial bias”"(http://living.jdewperry.com/2009/03/facial-recognition-and-implicit-racial-bias/#more-1388). I chose this article because of a psychology class I had taken where we talked about this subject. Although we talked about a different study in that class, I think this is an interesting subject that does not get a great deal of attention. The study that he talks about is a study about "individual condition" and "categorization condition", while also using ALPS (“Affective Lexical Priming Score”).

He comes to a couple of conclusions about whether the study was really measuring subconscious racial bias. He suggests that the study might measure a person's ability to differentiate between people of different races. I agree with his conclusions and can see how my own background supports his conclusions. He says some of the factors that might influence their test scores are "their demographic characteristics and life experiences... racial diversity in one’s environment, especially as a child." I am of a mixed race, and I do find it easier to distinguish Asian people and white people than other races. Growing up in my town, there were very little African Americans, a few Native Americans, and practically no Hispanic people. My town was mainly white with a small population of Asians. I first started to experience wide scale diversity in college, and not before then. The other conclusion he comes to is that "tests of “implicit racial bias” may be largely measuring perceptual mechanisms... which are quite distinct from prejudice, subconscious or otherwise." I think the tests are not measuring "implicit racial bias", but how you see people of different races in a categorical sense. If you lack large scale exposure to a certain race, I think it is understandable that you will perceive them differently than other races which you were exposed to more.

Brown's Slave-Trade Memorial

This post, "Brown University to Erect Slave-Trade Memorial," from The Living Consequences interested me because it relates so directly to Traces of the Trade and which is probably the result of efforts such as those made by the DeWolf descendants, including James with this blog. I was shocked to read that "James D’Wolf and his family sent out a thousand slaving voyages, more than half of those sent out from the entire country, and brought more than 110,000 enslaved Africans to the New World", a statistic of which I was not at all aware. It definitely shakes up the popular notion that slavery and the slave trade were ways of the South (and limited mostly to the South).

It seems very important that Brown is responding to recommendations from the 2006 report by the Committee on Slavery and Justice, which seeks to understand and spread information about the university's historical involvement with the slave trade. The other reccommendations, which appear to focus mainly on education initiatives both within the university and in the greater community. That such a prominent university would designate time and money to this endeavor is important.

We have not talked too much about memorials in our class, but they stand as real, physical objects symbolizing and evoking our memory and devotion to "never forget." To memorialize something is also to bring it permanently into the public sphere, a process that the DeWolf family was beginning to engage in by the end of Traces of the Trade, and which James is continuing through his blog. Memorials, as generally large, public structures, force us to look and remember. Of course, without also providing education, the public may never fully understand Rhode Island's slave-trade involvement, however, it seems that is the intent of the educational initiatives that accompany the reccommendation for the memorial.

Something else that interested me was the Committee's reccommendation for "a memorial to honor Native American heritage."I think it is wonderful that a committee on slavery and justice would extend its arms to the plight of Native Americans in this country. The violent dislocation, enslavement, and genocide that was inflicted on Native Americans was and (perhaps maybe in its contemporary manifestations) still is vastly unacknowledged in the public's collective understanding. Bringing those narratives to light through memorialization is just as important. I was surprised but deeply appreciative that the Committee recognized the two injustices on the same level, because I think they often are not.

Unemployment for blacks in 2009

http://living.jdewperry.com/2009/03/black-unemployment-rates-soar/

Above is the website I took my information from.

While looking over the website of James Perry, there was one article that struck me as interesting. I guess it struck

me as interesting because i took a class on Race relations last semester and this topic was highlighted throughout

most of the class. James wrote about the unemployment rates of blacks since the recession. This is based on an 

article in the LA Times, so the statistics were based out of California's population. The blog that James posted 

emphasized that the unemployment rates for blacks, "reached levels not seen in decades". Which to me it seems

impossible but true. In his blog he went over the impacts of the Jim crow era which for decades held the blacks

back from accumulating any type of wealth or passing down education opportunities like the people in "Traces of the

Trade". So when the generations over times try to gain any type of status in the US, they have a hard time due to

education opportunities, job training, and their living conditions (are they living in a high crime city area or suburbia).

Not only has this recession impacted lower class blacks, it is now affecting middle class blacks as well.

In my Race Relations class this was a big deal of how there is a white privilege, and that our generation and

also the generations younger than us, do not understand. We have grown up on black and whites are equal, equal

education, values, money, everything. So we do not understand that the generations of blacks have not been able

to accumulate wealth, job status, education opportunities etc, that many whites have. There was also another

key concept that came up in the class that emphasized those who are hired last are the first ones to be fired. So

the blacks in this case were the last ones hired in certain types of jobs, and so in the economy we are in now, they

are the first ones to be fired. 

It is amazing that we are taught in school that we are of equal status of blacks in this country, and hey look

there is a black president. But, in reality there is such a class difference and privilege difference between the blacks

and the whites in this country. That is why it is hard to grasp the concept of being ashamed of your heritage

that is why it is hard to grasp wanting to go through the pain the slaves when through, because the country we are

growing up in today is a country of equals.