Class, Race, Ethnicity, Gender and Identity in Postmodern Society -- Starting with Race
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Objectives:
Semi-Required Resources I have linked several websites for you to explore this week. You do not need to read or listen to every single word in these presentations. I do ask you to take a look at them. A few are long (Julius Wilson: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City, for example) and I try to indicate what you can skip with no problem in those cases. However, my goal is for you to gain familiarity with race theory, including Black feminist theory and Black class theory. I want you to “pick and choose” in your preparation for class this week. The offerings below provide activists' perspectives on Indian and Black experiences as citizens of the United States -- ranging from auto workers to professors at Harard. Explore, pick, and choose what to read or watch "all the way through" -- but please spend enough time to be able to identify and examine the relationships between the ideas of these leadership figures and the ideas you see in the academic literature in the Week 12 Readings. The readings this week are divided into two groups, those dealing with the experiences of American Indians and those of African Americans. Select one article of interst to you in each group. You do not need to post anything to the discussion board this week before class. Read or watch, think, and look for the theoretical connections between the ideas of the leadership figures in the semi-required resources and the concepts in the academic materials that you choose to read. Focus your analyses on the objectives for this week. I will ask you to give example for each of the five objectives we address this week. Black Experience W.E.B. DeBois is one of the most noted theoreticians in the United States and also an anti-racist activist far ahead of his time. He really invents what we mean by race – moving beyond the simplistic idea that race is a skin color. He sees race as an experience. My favorite reading of his is The Souls of Black Folk, but I link here the “counter-view” -- The souls of white folk. https://loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/Du_Bois_White_Folk.pdf You do not have to read the entire selection. I want you to see how W.E.B. DuBois expressed himself and how he framed his theoretical ideas. Julius Wilson. Being Black and Poor in the Inner City. Wilson is a contemporary theorist, one of the most recognized sociologists. He is one of the key theoreticians in understanding the conjunction of race and class. This is a long video BUT you do not need to watch the whole video. https://fordschool.umich.edu/video/2009/william-julius-wilson-being-black-poor-inner-city?page=12 You do not need to watch the first 3 minutes at all – it’s all introductions. I personally would not watch the first 5 minutes. Nor do you need to watch the Q&A period unless you just want to hear the discussion. Cornell West on the death of George Floyd – interview with Anderson Cooper. Cornell West is a philosopher – for real. His is a more humanist view of race and racism than that of Wilson. However, the two were contemporaries, West being far more apt to state his ideas “firmly,” which of course creates some push-back from many people. https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2020/06/10/cornel-west-george-floyd-cooper-ac360-vpx.cnn Patricia Hill Collins is really in my view the first person to clearly articulate Black feminism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1je9h4zzHc This is my personal favorite feminist theoretician, but you should judge for yourself. You can ignore the first 5 minutes and quit watching if you just get tired. She is trying to “pique your interest” and give you a “broad view of feminist-race theory.” I hope she succeeds. Angela Davis is a civil rights and political activist. This is not a video, but it is a quick explanation of Angela Davis’ contribution to struggles for civil rights, with an emphasis on women’s rights. Given our discussions, I think her ideas about prison may be of interest to you. You can find the video of the whole speech she gave if you want. It is interesting and she has a fascinating life history. https://www.columbiacommunityconnection.com/the-dalles/angela-davis-to-deliver-keynote-speech-at-osus-39th-annual-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-celebration General Baker (Gordon Baker, Jr.) was an organizer and key leader of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, an organization that initiated a period of activism focused on racism in the auto industry. DRUM was the first of several “factory based” organizations – the idea spread from factory to factory. This movement that was highly critical of the policies and leadership of the United Auto Workers (union). This site includes a brief sort of “biography” of Black union activism in the auto industry – a good orientation to what was going on -- but the interesting part is the video discussion with General Baker. https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/2020/06/25/detroit-i-do-mind-dying-2/ If you are interested in the intersection of class and race from the perspective of working-class life in the industrial core of the U.S., you may want to look at this piece from the Washington Post: Democracy Dies in Darkness. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/african-americans-working-playing-and-rebelling-in-detroit/2017/08/11/ac37c3fe-6b0f-11e7-96ab-5f38140b38cc_story.html One of the cultural “levers” that justified slavery and colonization to Europeans and later we here in the United States was the idea that Indian people and African people were not “civilized.” The term tribe rather than nation was and still is used to describe the territorial divisions of Africans. While the term tribe might not be “offensive or demeaning in and of itself,” the refusal of colonists to recognize the nation states in Africa and North America became a primary tenet in racist claims regarding the “developmental status” of African and Indian peoples. This map https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/map/africa-historical-map-1885.htm will give you an idea of the extent of African socio-political organization at the time of colonization. Note that almost all of the area in Sub-Saharan Africa was one group – the Bantu – with some exceptions in the South and the East Coast which had long since become a “mixing pot” of people from south Asia, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean shores. While there are many nation states and subsets of nation states and, of course, individual “cities” or settlements among the Bantu, this is in broad stroke a single cultural realm with common roots in languages, culture, foodways, etc. American Indian Experience This is a very recent presentation by Russell Means, one of the leaders of the American Indian Movement and a key player in the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973. This is his view of what it means to be an Indian almost 50 years after the events at Wounded Knee. The video includes clips from the occupation. https://www.facebook.com/befreeradicals/videos/russell-means-breaks-down-white-supremacy-and-how-it-creates-a-society-where-the/1153615908343403/ The Russel Means video does not dig deep into the causes for the occupation of what happened. If you are interested, here is the link to a much more extensive video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mgI4q8IVNs The dialogue is in Indian languages, but the video includes translated script. Zitkala-Sa was an American Indian author and activist who left the reservation, virtually unheard of when she was young, and became an outspoken advocate for justice for American Indians. She was born in the 1930s – long before any of us were alive. She was particularly attuned to the impacts of white dominant society on Indian women. This is an original document from a presentation about her made in 1994 – produced on a typewriter folks, not a computer. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED371371.pdf If you become interested in Zitkala-Sa, here is a link to a dissertation by Paige Allison Corley at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. [Conley, Paige Allison, "Stories, Traces of Discourse, and the Tease of Presence: Gertrude Simmons Bonnin as Orator and Indigenous Activist" (2013)]. https://dc.uwm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1680&context=etd This site has a good map of the Indian nations and the larger cultural groups that they constituted. As you will see, contrary to popular images these groups had clearly defined boundaries and occupied most of the land in what became the United States. We still use the term “tribe,” but in fact these were highly organized peoples. https://imgur.com/HWaqa9R Just as in Africa, Indian society showed the classic pattern of scalar organization from small groups (like counties) to larger agglomerations (like provinces or states) to very large groups (nations). The “nations” include, for example, Shawnee, Cheyenne, Iroquois, and Paiute. There are also great culture realms in among American Indian peoples, with the greatest differences between huge tracts of land and peoples from Alaska in the north to the tip of South America. The Maya people are an example. Maya extend from the Yucatan peninsula through Guatemala and into Honduras. Many of our place names today come from the original nations. Think about this: Alabama is a state that is occupies the land of the Albaamaha nation. Utah is the land of the Ute nation. And of course Iowa is the land of the Ioway nation. And Winnebago was not a camper originally, but rather a smallish nation on the Mississippi River in what is now Wisconsin. |