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African American Heritage

Mmm?

  • Yes, blacks have their own heritage.

    Votes: 12 80.0%

  • Yes, blacks can create something else.

    Votes: 1 6.7%

  • No, blacks lack heritage.

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • No, black identity politics depend on government.

    Votes: 2 13.3%
  • Total voters
    15
Hatuey said:
Pretty much any North Eastern state can be claimed for its Irish American history. NY and Jersey both have a **** ton of Irish.
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Tucker Case said:
Chicago's Irish as hell too. San Fran has a pretty large Irish community, too (due in part to the railroads).
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Serendipity... Definitely NSFW!

 
Smeagol said:
I'm sorry. Got a little knee jerk reactive. I've discussed the general black culture issue elsewhere and in a broader context most of the time I hear people expressing the view that there shouldn't be any acknowledgement of America's black culture and especially history with a mindset that doing so is racist. Of course, it's rediculous IMHO but I do find a lot of decent people with that position who I think just need to see the double standard. Oddly people with that view think that by ignoring and encouraging others to ignore ethnicity (when it comes to blacks), with the best of intentions, they're fighting racism.
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No worries. It's, unfortunately, one of those topics that seem to make everyone hot headed. The problem is that such is hardly conductive to finding solutions to many of the race issues in america
 
haymarket said:
Your inability to do so is noted.
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to adequately reexplain my argument while you feign ignorance of the obvious? thank you for noting that, but it's more based on a lack of interest. I figure anyone reading this thread can make up their own mind, as opposed to rehashing the thing 30-40 times, as you make nonsensical objections.
 
Dr. Chuckles said:
to adequately reexplain my argument while you feign ignorance of the obvious? thank you for noting that, but it's more based on a lack of interest. I figure anyone reading this thread can make up their own mind, as opposed to rehashing the thing 30-40 times, as you make nonsensical objections.
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Again, your stated inability to provide a cogent and clear explanation of whatever point you thought you had is duly noted.
 
haymarket said:
Again, your stated inability to provide a cogent and clear explanation of whatever point you thought you had is duly noted.
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you ignoring a clear and cogent explanation is not the same as one not existing. But feel free to continue noting in a due manner. As I said, I'm more than happy to leave it in the hands of the reader
 
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Dr. Chuckles said:
you ignoring a clear and cogent explanation is not the same as one not existing. But feel free to continue noting in a due manner. As I said, I'm more than happy to leave it in the hands of the reader
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You seem to be laboring under the delusion that you are some sort of criminal prosecutor and you are performing your act in front of a jury.
 
haymarket said:
You seem to be laboring under the delusion that you are some sort of criminal prosecutor and you are performing your act in front of a jury.
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no, I am laboring under the idea that I am on a public forum, and that the members of this forum tend to read what is posted here. Now I can continue posting in this thread and rehashing the same argument with you, endlessly, or I can simply acknowledge that I feel I adequately defended my position and leave it to the reader to decide who was right

there doesn't seem much point to the former...
 
jamesrage said:
Of course not.Black history is relegated to a month instead of integrated with the rest of American history. This reenforces the idea that black history is only important to black Americans or that blacks made no contributions to the country other than to black people instead of contributions to the country as a whole.



Personally I care more about their contributions to this country than the negative stuff that they may have done in their person lives.History classes don't need commentary on how someone was a evil slave owner, a communist, a womanizer or some other negative thing.





Its racist that utter than crap regardless if they are liberal or conservative.



So if the US would have went to war with the south anyways even if the south banned slavery then this would mean that the civil war was not mostly about slavery. Did I misunderstand what you wrote?
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Black history isn't relegated to a month. School textbooks and American history curriculums do a good job of integrating the histories, now, but in the past they had not. Black history month is simply an additional public history emphasis on a specific race that in the past, had been marginalized in both society and in the public consciousness.

Second:

Personally I care more about their contributions to this country than the negative stuff that they may have done in their person lives.History classes don't need commentary on how someone was a evil slave owner, a communist, a womanizer or some other negative thing.
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In history you take the good with the bad. You don't equate history with "contributions" and commentary with "negative things."
 
jamesrage said:
Of course not.Black history is relegated to a month instead of integrated with the rest of American history.
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That's absolute nonsense.

Personally I care more about their contributions to this country than the negative stuff that they may have done in their person lives.History classes don't need commentary on how someone was a evil slave owner, a communist, a womanizer or some other negative thing.
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Ah so then you're in favor of white washing history? Good to know.

Its racist that utter than crap regardless if they are liberal or conservative.

So if the US would have went to war with the south anyways even if the south banned slavery then this would mean that the civil war was not mostly about slavery. Did I misunderstand what you wrote?
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What? No. Straw man arguments aren't your friend. The US went to war over slavery but not to abolish it. It went to war because the South declared US territory as its own in an attempt to maintain slavery. If the South had never declared secession, we wouldn't have gone to war, it would have simply been phased out as abolitionists had planned. So the "immediate" reason for war was secession and slavery was the absolute catalyst.
 
Fiddytree said:
Black history isn't relegated to a month. School textbooks and American history curriculums do a good job of integrating the histories, now, but in the past they had not. Black history month is simply an additional public history emphasis on a specific race that in the past, had been marginalized in both society and in the public consciousness. "
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Thats good to know.Is that at all schools or select schools?


In history you take the good with the bad. You don't equate history with "contributions" and commentary with "negative things.
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There is no reason to go George Washington was the first president, but he was a evil white slave owning sexist racist,Thomas Jefferson was a great founding forefather but he was a white evil slave owning racist who was a womanizer who engage in extramarital affairs with his slave women or Martin Luther King jr was a great civil rights activist who stopped segregation but according to some liberals and racist he was a communist and a womanizer.If its not relevant to their contribution to this country then it really shouldn't have any place in history courses.
 
Daktoria said:
If MLK Day, Black History Month, Kwanzaa, and other political "holidays" didn't exist, would African Americans have anything to celebrate?
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We're all hung like donkeys. Beat that.
 
jamesrage said:
Thats good to know.Is that at all schools or select schools?
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My own perspective is generally at the high school level, so I'll use more of that, if you don't mind.

Well, we can take a look at a few things. First: the textbooks. There are not that many school textbooks regarding American history, so it is easy enough to spot general trends in the assumptions in historiography. Indeed, school textbooks since the 1990s had placed a great deal more interest in interweaving African American history in the overall narrative. As each textbook is basically devised by a combination of the school board, educators, professors of sociology and various sections of American or World History, you can see the general trend of how historians as well as educators view the narrative of the history. From the 1960s onward, a great shift had occurred with how historians viewed minorities such as African Americans, as well as Native Americans, and underrepresented gender histories, and so forth. We had already seen a shift away from the "Great Man" histories in favor of general political histories, but there also became a large emphasis on social history, which it had been successfully argued, had largely been ignored in the past. The goal was don't strictly look at what the top areas of society do, look at the everyday people-the masses. Since the 1990s there has been a serious attempt to either include or in some sense revise the US narrative for the public schools in order to make sense of how significant minorities fit into the movements of our political, social, and economic history. More on this a bit later.

Now, when it comes to state standards through state DPI websites, you can see some generalities. It won't be all that specific, and they can be immensely broad in scope. For instance, the standard might be something like, "Students Understand Important Historical Events," and then below that you have individual subsections. An individual substandard could then say something like, "Analyze the struggle for equal opportunity." Next to that are probably going to be some examples that an instructor probably should or want to make special mention of. As to what is actually said in each district, that's a great deal harder for me and researchers to delve into.

Then you can look at the national standards game. In the 1990s, if you recall, there was a big controversy surrounding the optional history standards that were funded through the NEH under Lynne Cheney's direction. I'll skip some of the back and forth regarding how the standards were devised and to what extent various parties agreed or disagreed with the project. Suffice to say, it moved in a much more cultural pluralist to multiculturalist understanding of American history. Some of the teaching examples (eg. something like, "The teacher might want to ________") were controversial in that they did represent a more left-wing viewing of history, power, and social justice. In the 1994 standards, it included the examples. In the 1996 standards, they were removed, due to controversy and criticism from both the public and scholars. Now, we are supposed to have a great many states signed on to the Common Core standards, which mine is, but we do not have social studies standards finished, nor is there much of anything to look at. If somehow they are able to solidify national history standards in the classroom, that are actually meaningful with regard to history (as they have promised), you might be able to look at the 1996 national history standards (which were on the whole approved by most former critics, save Cheney) for some direction. My intuition (and I could be wrong) is that it's only been 20 years since the last big fight ended up on Rush Limbaugh's opening act, so I am expecting rather weak standards with regard to specifics. You'll probably get some bland "students must understand the founding generation" blather that merely waters down what states already have. To me, there's a reason why mathematics, science, and english literature have established Common Core Standards, and history does not.

There is no reason to go George Washington was the first president, but he was a evil white slave owning sexist racist,Thomas Jefferson was a great founding forefather but he was a white evil slave owning racist who was a womanizer who engage in extramarital affairs with his slave women or Martin Luther King jr was a great civil rights activist who stopped segregation but according to some liberals and racist he was a communist and a womanizer.If its not relevant to their contribution to this country then it really shouldn't have any place in history courses.
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I see that you use the word "evil" to attach to a name, but generally speaking, many teachers save that word for someone like an Adolf Hitler or perhaps Stalin. Surely they would likely label the system of slavery as evil, but that specific word becomes problematic when it comes to actual people. Will I doubt that some teachers will want to espouse some watered-down version of the Marxist interpretation of American history (see Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the United States Constitution )? No, I will not.

The problem with that is you're making it difficult to understand the nature of American slavery by doing that.

For one thing, you would have students wonder how widespread slavery was. Was it something that a certain number of people participated in, and if so, who? Further, during the Civil War, the Union found out that those in mountainous regions or those who were poorer did not identify so much with the plantation owners, and even resented them. That's a pretty good segment of the population for Lincoln to appeal to, no? The nature of power in the slavery system can come up. Indeed, Jefferson's affair with Hemmings brings all sorts of questions that spring all around the place. For one thing, indeed, male slave owners did use the female slaves for sex by virtue of the power relationship. Could that have happened with Jefferson's affair? Possibly. Or, perhaps then we get into another question: was it genuine love, even though still taking place within an imbalance of power?

Next, you make it difficult to bridge generations by avoiding that question. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, but considered slavery a sin. Why, pray tell, did they keep their slaves, how could they contribute to the system while at the same time deriding it? Then we ask, if Thomas Jefferson found it an evil, do we see that in any of his documents? Well, actually you do. The original draft of the Declaration of Independence it's right there, but it was removed. Well, why? Because it was a subject that one ought not to get into when the primary objective is to unify against Britain. Then afterwards, we want to keep this loose group of states tied together. But this issue of free and slave states comes up, threatening to ever-divide the country.

Then, you have to ask yourself, how important is the institution of slavery to understand American history? As it started when the colonies came, and to an enormous extent was key to the separation of the nation by the mid-19th century, and had lingering scars for decades in the south afterward, it's clearly important. We can see its significance through who participated in it, to what extent they did, and what complications arose. We can't simply ignore it because it raises many uncomfortable questions.

As far as Martin Luther King Jr. goes, he wasn't a communist. He was developing tendencies in Democratic Socialism toward the end of his life, and the womanizing portion may get mentioned, but likely won't be focused on. As Martin Luther King Jr. was a social and political figure, the nature of his politics include a general orientation as well as a group that not only identifies with him but is also the group he "fights for." This happened to be the poorer citizens of both races, and indeed, specifically all African Americans. This informed his developing political views, whether or not we agree with them (and I certainly am no Democratic Socialist or sympathizer to them).

All of these things are indeed relevant to our history. American history, or any history course in the public schools or in higher education, is not celebratory, and nor should it. It can and ought to have some flavor of unification or pride, but most of the focus ought to be on the subject matters. For one thing, if you focus on the good but not the bad, you lose reality. For another thing, if we want to equip the future generation to in some way learn from the past, it would be helpful to know that men and women failed, did evil or bad things, but perhaps it was possible to change things for the better. Otherwise, what would they have to compare their lives to: weak perceptions of the past? Do you know how frustrating it is to me to hear day in and day out, how great everyone in the past was, but we are so incapable of doing anything equal to or better than our forefathers? Heck, you can even get the opposite. It is frequent enough that people broadly declare our present times as far better than any in the past and that our forefathers were weaker and more despicable men and women than we.

Don't we deserve to teach the young better than that?
 
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The existence of poll threads like this -- with a transparently racist premise -- demonstrates a general policy failure within DP to counter racism.

To be clear: all four of the poll options are based upon one or more racist premises:

Daktoria said:
(option): Yes, blacks have their own heritage.
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This option implies either that "blacks" having their own heritage (singular?) is a matter of opinion (it is not), and possibly also that if that do, they have one common heritage under the umbrella of "African American" (which is false, as "black" is not synonymous with African American.

Daktoria said:
(option): Yes, blacks can create something else.
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Once again, by framing this as an opinion poll option, this falsely implies that the capacity for "black" people(s) to participate in building their own identities and communities is a matter of opinion (it isn't).

Daktoria said:
(option): No, blacks lack heritage.
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This implies that there's some kind of inherent or obvious standard for what counts as heritage (there isn't), and furthermore that "blacks" don't have it (subtly implying that "blacks" are culturally inferior/less-than due to this imagined difference -- a "lack").


Daktoria said:
(option): No, black identity politics depend on government.
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This implies that "black" identity could not stand on its own were it not for government intervention or support.

Note that all four of these poll options require what is essentially a bigoted premise: the general notion that heritage, identity politics, and the formation of social and political communities work differently (and implicitly in an inferior way) for "blacks" than for the rest of humanity.

Thus, the poll question, as framed, is a variation of "When did you stop beating your wife?" ANY of the options given, if chosen, requires giving at least the appearance of endorsing one or more racist premises built into the question.
 
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