GENERATIONS OF
STRUGGLE: Notes on an endless process,
Part One
"The legacy of slavery continues to resound in our
national conversations on race, economics, and the criminal justice
system. ….'Generations of Struggle
[Perspectives on Race and Justice from Reconstruction to the Present]' presents three critically acclaimed works,
one film and two books, that provide a continuum from the aftermath of slavery
to contemporary society, posing questions about our institutions, the changes
in race relations, and the enduring challenge to equality for all citizens." With these words, Jakilah Mason, the African
American Resource Collection librarian at the New Orleans Public Library,
welcomes us to a four-week long process ( May 25, June 1, June 8, June 15) of
resisting the implicit anti-intellectualism of life in the United States of
America. We are asked to first define
for ourselves what "institutionalized racism" might be in 2017, to
ponder how it has tremendous impact on the criminal justice system and the
educational system. Ms. Mason invites us
to have an intergenerational
conversation that is moderated by Dr. Robin Vader (Xavier University of
New Orleans).
The conversation focuses on
- Slavery by Another Name --http://www.pbs.org/video/2176766758
- Gaines, Ernest J. A Lesson Before Dying. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
- Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015.
The conversation focuses also on the Constitution of the
United States, Article XIII, Sections 1 and 2:
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,
except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly
convicted, shall exist with the United States, or any place subject to their
jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress
shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
We shall have a conversation regarding an experiment in
democracy and the rule of law. The shape
of the conversation is determined very much by the knowledge of American and
African American histories (narratives) we bring to it or don't bring. As we engage in civil and civic discourse with
passionate attention, our literacy as American citizens is utilized and
enlarged. We test ourselves. We renew our commitments and obligations as political
animals. "Generations of Struggle" is a remarkable instance of education
in a public sphere.
It is appropriate that we are having this conversation in
the opening months of the Age of Trump and in the divisive, energy-draining
climate of post-truth, fake news, political circus, and ideologically-motivated
disruption of morality and ethics. If Americans
refuse to examine both the liberal and conservative dimensions of daily life in
our nation, they are complicit in benign genocide. "Generations of Struggle" may help
us to understand why the contemporary drift in our nation from democratic
struggle into a deadly struggle with fascism is the human equivalent of climate
change in Nature. Nature is amoral, and some people opt to be amoral. Is our imitating the motions of Nature the mark of the will to be nihilistic and
stupid? Is the conversation, as a shared narration inscribed by elders and
youngsters, an existential struggle not
to totally abandon hope and faith in our American humanity?
DISCUSSION NOTES
Session 1, May 25:
Introduction
Understanding of "institutionalized racism"
vary widely according to one's economic status, education, and direct
experience of history as process and narration.
The old can't forgive and forget as easily as the
thoroughly Americanized young believe it is possible and right to do. The generational tension can be discussed and
clarified, but it cannot be eradicated.
We are connected by bonds of distrust, suffering , misery and doubt.
Yes, we can empathize with people from different periods
in our history. Empathy is relative and
quite temporary. We empathize for an
hour, a day, or a week and then rapidly return to a state of caring primarily
for ourselves.
Read Habits of the
Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (1985) by Robert N.
Bellah et al. for some, but not conclusive, evidence that in matters of race
relations, American citizens are severely limited in making moral sense of
their lives.
Read The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in
An Age of Diminishing Expectations (1978)
by Christopher Lasch for its critique of American capitalism and why it may be
the case that "the moral discipline formerly associated with the work
ethic still retains a value independent of the role it once played in the
defense of property rights" (236).
It is as easy to abolish "Institutionalized
racism" as it is to abolish once and forever the phenomenon of terrorism.
Reading and interpretation of A Lesson
Before Dying and Between the World
and Me can teach us much about human limits and uncertainty.
Session 2, June 1:
Slavery By Another Name and the Criminal Justice System
Refer to Black's
Law Dictionary, Michelle Alexander's The
New Jim Crow : Mass Incarceration in
the Age of Colorblindness (especially pages 30-35 --summary discussion
of Douglas Blackmon's Slavery by Another
Name), Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism
in American Life, John Barry's Rising
Tide (comments on conscription of black labor), African American Mosaic: A Documentary History from the Slave Trade to
the Twenty-first Century by John
H. Bracey, Jr. and Manisha Sinha
(especially letters by Warren S. Reese and S. D. Redmond on forced labor
in the New South, pages 121-125)
Keys: slavery, criminal justice, Jim Crow, domestic
terrorism from Reconstruction to the present , illegal definitions of criminal
offenses, fear of revenge, peonage, pensio,
labor, crime and punishment, criminalization of the young,
"neoslavery" as a distributive property in the lives of Americans,
Christianity and morality as cognitive quicksand; consideration that not all African Americans between 1865 and
1945 were trapped.
Criminal justice system = network of courts and tribunals
which deal with criminal law and enforcement. The word "justice" is a
theoretical construct that does not exist in actuality and its application is
always a matter of relativity and situation.
Jim Crow
----minstrelsy; negative stereotypes
of African Americans and reinforcement of
stereotypes by way of entertainment from the 19th century to the present ---Who
has persuasively accounted for the psychological damage that governs
contemporary behaviors? Who has
accounted adequately for the continuing resonance of Birth of a Nation (1915) in the American mindscape?
Peonage = servitude compelling persons to perform labor
in order to pay off a debt. Thus,
"neoslavery" was made possible by use of the loophole in the 13th
Amendment to extend antebellum right of the slave owners to the post-Civil War
owners of the means of production North and South; sharecropping and tenant
farming particularly in the Mississippi Delta---See Margaret Walker's journal
entry on the Delta, January 28, 1941.
Historical studies of the Mississippi Delta yield epiphanies about the
still unbroken cycles of peonage.
Dr. Vander draws attention to capitalism as economic
matrix
The Latin word pensio
= payment (rent) for the use of a thing directs notice to the rented prisoner
who was reduced to being a thing rather than person. Even in 2017, convicted felons are dehumanized,
demonized "things."
Criminalization of the very young, racial profiling
---utter denial of innocence among black children. The young are no longer criminalized for the
purposes of labor; they are criminalized for the purposes of ethnic cleansing.
Domestic terrorism ---the KKK and other hate groups
documented by the Southern Poverty Law
Center. Explore www.splcenter.org for
information about these groups and about the work SPLC does to fight hate,
teach tolerance, and seek justice.
Prisons in Louisiana [Angola] and Mississippi [ Parchman
]; prisons and labor in prisons; the school to prison pipeline.
Fear of revenge ---Oddly, the justifiable resentment of
freed women and men was rarely transformed into acts of violence against the
Other, against so-called whites, many of whom were their unacknowledged kinfolk. More frequently, the self-hatred birthed
within the peculiar institution of enslavement was violently turned inward not
outward. There is a reason. People of African descent are less likely than
people of other ancestry to fully embrace COSMIC EVIL.
This tendency among people of African ancestry is a devastating
handicap.
Definition of criminal offenses ---note how Slavery by Another Name deals with the
fact that in the antebellum South criminality was often not a matter of
substantive criminal law as codified in penal codes; it was a matter of
reconstituting whiteness at the expense of black lives.
Special note to
one of the young participants in "Generations of Struggle"
----The fear of revenge was actually the fear of black political power, fear
that if African Americans had the political power to manage the sacred rule of
law, there would be a loss of hegemony, the myth of white supremacy, and
certainly the privileges of the "white" skin (which is really
bleached pink and tan in color). During
Reconstruction, black politicians were advocates for public education,
universal literacy, health services, and enterprises unfettered by segregation
North and South. Please remember that the film Slavery by Another Name only accounts for conditions up to 1945, as
if WWII resolved something. It did
not. Ask very old black males who served in World War II.
Special note from
one of the young participants to the group ---even in the very best charter
schools in New Orleans students are not fully exposed to the specifics of
American and African American histories.
What positive changes have occurred in our nation since
1945? Revisions of law to maximize the
small gains of a very long struggle in American for human and civil
rights. It is unfortunate that in the
Age of Trump there is a dedicated effort to erase the importance of such
struggles at the level of tweets. budgets, and profit-motivated policy (maximum
greed).
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. June
2, 2017
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