Fish Out of Water
I’ve taught writing at El Camino College in Southern California for nearly thirty years. One of the welcome surprises of my job is that the overwhelming majority of you are kind and affable. This surprises me because you must feel like fish out of water for several reasons. For one, my writing courses are not electives; they’re requirements, so you have to be here the way someone with a speeding ticket is forced to attend traffic school. Secondly, most of you are on some kind of financial aid and work full- or part-time jobs, so you are not exactly showing up to class with a surplus of sleep and free time. A small number of you are international students who often don’t work but have serious challenges with the English language. As a result, you come to class with an understandable amount of anxiety.
Another factor that makes you feel out of place is that you have spent most of your lives on smartphones. A life of texting, looking at video clips, and reading only writing fragments, never book-length works, makes your brains maladapted to dissecting a nonfiction book, a novel, and a 5,000-word argumentative essay.
To add to the strain on your brains, you are being asked to learn a brand new language to help you conceptualize argumentation and informed opinions such as ethos, logos, pathos, counterargument, rebuttal, irony, bias, active voice, passive voice, correlation, causation, inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning, and ad hominem. The way a beginning piano student has to learn chords, scales, and arpeggios, you have to learn the basic pillars of logic and argumentation.
English majors in my composition classes were rare in previous decades. Now with the popularity of STEM majors in our hypercompetitive job market and underpaid teaching careers about as appealing as steak gristle, I don’t get English majors anymore.
I would be remiss not to mention the cost of education. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, a college education when I attended in 1980 has skyrocketed 173% today. I didn’t live in an age when college debt and living with my parents well into my thirties was a serious possibility.
And yet in spite of all these hurdles you face, you are for the most part kind, intellectually curious, and eager to learn. In spite of all the doomsday prophets who say America is turning into the movie Idiocracy, you have always been a living rebuttal of that claim.
Not only are you eager to learn, but you are also as tough as nails. Many of you drive great distances to get to class, work long hours, take care of children, live on a modest income, and claw your way up the economic ladder. Your courage and fortitude humble me.
But being humble before you is not enough. I feel compelled to persuade you, with the zeal of a hungry vacuum cleaner salesman, why learning the tools to develop informed opinions and credible arguments requires an overall metamorphosis of your personality, a moral core, and a strongly-defined identity that is essential to success and happiness. So indeed, that is precisely what I will do.
The Challenges of Defending a Writing Class
Trying to persuade you that my required writing class is as vital as the oxygen you breathe and likely one of the best things that ever happened to you is not an easy task. There are several challenges I face when presenting such an argument. The first challenge is that of sanctimonious cliches. When people defend writing classes and the humanities in general, they too often rely on lazy cliches:
The humanities enrich your soul, make you cultured, make you literate, give you critical thinking skills, and help you find a life purpose.
Even if all these cliches are true, they are so overused, pompous, saccharine, self-indulgent, and vague as to be useless.
The second challenge is the absence of objective measurement. In the sciences, you can objectively show your proficiency in calculus, computer coding, chemistry, biology, and physics. In contrast, in a writing class, we don’t have objective measures for things like “enrichment of the soul,” “meaning,” “purpose,” “literacy,” “linguistic acquisition,” “self-expression,” and “authorial presence.”
We can all agree that well-articulated self-expression, literacy, and life purpose are essential and desirable; however, there is disagreement over whether or not college is the place to develop these qualities. There is a sentiment that says, “Find meaning and self-expression in your own free time but don’t waste your time and money in college developing those qualities. College is for real subject matter, and we all know the only real subject matter that counts is STEM.”
This sentiment speaks to the third challenge about my writing class and that is the charge that my writing class is irrelevant. Whereas STEM courses can be tested objectively and result in financially-rewarding careers, humanities courses such as my writing classes are considered at best luxuries for the privileged class and deadends for careers. Many will say, “If you want to improve your writing and grammar, study a few YouTube videos, but meanwhile, take real college courses that will be worth your time and money.”
This sentiment speaks to my fourth challenge: The subtle or flagrant contempt for writing and humanities courses. When students tell people they’re majoring in a humanities subject, they are often looked upon as second-class college students and fakers. “Real students major in STEM. The pretend students major in everything else, and the proof is in the kind of jobs they land after they graduate.”
This adulation of STEM majors combined with a disdain for humanities majors speaks to my fifth challenge: The notion that studying writing and humanities is not cost-effective. “Why waste your time working on the intangibles of writing when you can focus your energy on the STEM courses that will bring you real money?”
The Frederick Douglass Mindset
So my writing class appears to have much against it. Champions of the humanities may feebly defend my class with lazy cliches, a lack of objective ways to measure literacy, an inability to prove my course’s relevance, powerlessness in the face of mass disdain for humanities courses in general, and what looks like a failed cost-benefit analysis. But this perception of my writing class as a Loser Course is rooted in ignorance and a superficial grasp of what my writing course truly is.
To grasp the essence of my writing class and the very way I teach it, we must look to perhaps the greatest American in American history--Frederick Douglass. By studying the arduous literacy, writing, and oratory journey Douglass embarked upon, we can see that Douglass embodies the kind of person who undergoes a dramatic metamorphosis from his exceptional literacy and intellectual prowess. Even if we don’t come close to attaining the literary genius of Frederick Douglass, we can look to him as the correct path to developing an appropriate orientation and philosophy that life’s conflicts demand. To study the kind of intellect Frederick Douglass became is to understand the benefits of a humanities course such as my writing class.
Born a slave and forbidden to read and write, Frederick Douglass was a genius who saw that the white man was withholding literacy from him as a weapon to deny him his humanity. He would have none of it. As a child, he taught himself to read and write by studying scraps of discarded newspapers and magazines from trash bins. He was so committed to developing literacy, he preferred to starve, giving his food to poor white children in exchange for reading and writing lessons. Even as a child, he was a living lesson of the principle that it is wiser to enjoy long-term gain over short-term gratification.
Over time, Douglass became the country’s greatest orator, traveled the world, and became an international hero for championing human rights. As a writer, orator, and abolitionist, Douglass lived from the beginning to the end of the 19th century, a span that made him a witness to slavery, Reconstruction, Redemption, and Jim Crow. The forces that would enslave, emasculate, and dehumanize him were from a cesspool of bad ideas. Douglass realized that he had to counteract these malignant forces with the only power he had--language and his power of persuasion. For Frederick Douglass, learning to read and write and to give his communication the highest levels of oratory and rhetoric was not a luxury or an indulgence; it was a matter of life and death, not just for him but for all the oppressed people he represented.
Part of his resistance to the dark forces of dehumanization was the cultivation of his persona. This cultivation was largely achieved through his use of language. Language is the mother of invention. We read in David W. Blight’s magisterial biography Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom that as a child hanging out with the master’s son on the plantation, Douglass used his wits and insights to grasp that he could use words to transform himself. In the words of Blight: “In afternoon competitive repartee, the future Douglass may have first experimented with the magic of words and unwittingly wielded the tools by which he would invent his life.”
Most people sleepwalk through life, but Douglass had no such luxury. He learned at a young age that invention and reinvention were essential to survival and that the bricks of invention were words, language, rhetoric, and argumentation. Word by word, Douglass began to use language to create his persona.
His cultivated persona was not limited to his linguistic acquisition. He was also photogenic, handsome, and by many accounts the most photographed man of his time. It is also true that Douglass had no illusions about the power of image and he refused to let white people “touch up” his photographs, for fear that they would distort his features to make his visage conform to ugly Jim Crow stereotypes. What’s most true of all is that Douglass knew the power of media long before the age of social media, and he used his language, his strong identity, and his image to create what in today’s parlance is called “a brand.” While the term is too often crassly used, the word brand is an accurate way to describe the maturity we go through by embarking upon an intellectual journey and refining our notion of self the way a machinist uses molten metal to refine steel.
How important is language when it comes to forming and defining the self? Douglass’ biographer David Blight observed that slaves owned nothing: tools, clothes, beds, not even their own children, but they did own one thing: language. The slaves could create rhythms of speech, certain tonalities in their speaking and singing, and idiosyncratic expressions that belonged to them. Their use of language, poetry, and song became who they were at their very essence. They had nothing else to define them. Frederick Douglass grasped the importance of language as a child and embarked upon an obsessive quest to develop his own and to use it as a sword against the forces of injustice.
If you admire Frederick Douglass and you think his attributes are worth emulating, then you will be motivated to learn reading and writing to be like him: To have a strong personality, to have strong writing and oratory skills, have a strong moral core that hungers for justice, and a desire to make a lasting impact on this world.
The Philistine Mindset
But let us not have any delusions. Not everyone wants to be like Frederick Douglass. Some people just want to get by and live a provisional, self-insulated existence. They want to make enough money and live a life of fine eating and fine entertainment, what the ancient Romans called a life of bread and circuses. If we want to distract ourselves with tasty morsels and scintillating entertainment, then all we need is enough money to quench those appetites. In that case, we will define our existence by the quality of our consumerism. To devote our lives to consumerism is to eventually become Philistines.
It is very likely that the Philistine Mindset is in direct opposition to the Frederick Douglass mindset. It is also very likely that the pressures of society to conform to lifestyles that appeal to others so that we are popular and attractive to others will create a gravitational pull to the Philistine Mindset and repel us from the Frederick Douglass Mindset.
In a writing class like mine, it is not my place to tell you which mindset to embrace. I can only give you the lay of the land, so to speak, define the landscape, and argue that the Frederick Douglass Way is the True Way, but ultimately let you decide which path to take.
Having said that, I would be less than honest if I didn’t make the case that if you reject the Frederick Douglass mindset, it is most likely that you will choose the alternative--the Philistine’s Mindset. And here I must make a warning: Even if you find materialistic success, if you adopt the Philistine’s Mindset, as most people do, you’ll find that such an orientation will result in misery, self-complacent mediocrity, low self-regard, self-induced bondage, and moral entropy.
What is so dangerous about the Philistine Mindset? Such a mindset rests on mindless consumerism, which leads to addictive behavior. We eventually become attenuated to the pleasures of consumerism until we become numb. Psychologists call this the “anhedonic response” or the “anhedonic treadmill.”
A life of consumerism is a life built on short-term gratification. Feeding on confectionary pleasures, we will always be malnourished and hungry, waiting for the next shiny object.
A life of meaning and struggle, the kind of life embodied by perhaps the greatest American, Frederick Douglass, is a life that looks at the long game, is more mature, more philosophical, and more rooted in language, philosophy, and history. It is the more desirable life, but I can’t force you to believe that. The choice is for you to make.
Essay #2 (Essay worth 200 points): Jim Crow 1.0 and Jim Crow 2.0
Due as an upload on April 13.
The Assignment:
In a 1,200-1,500-word essay that adheres to current MLA format, provides a minimum of 4 sources for your Works Cited page, and presents either a block-paragraph or point-by-point paragraph comparison design, develop a thesis that connects Dr. David Pilgrim’s video presentation of the Dr. David Pilgrim’s video “The New Jim Crow Museum” as an explanation of “Jim Crow 1.0” to Childish Gambino’s video “This Is America” and the Netflix documentary 13th as a gut-wrenching picture of “Jim Crow 2.0” today.
Your essay should explore the following: What are the parallels between Jim Crow 1.0 and Jim Crow 2.0? What new mutations do we see in Jim Crow 2.0? How has Jim Crow evolved to be in its current state that is in many ways less flagrant yet more insidious than Jim Crow 1.0?
Essay 2 Option:
Defend, refute, or complicate the argument that racial demagogues have weaponized language like "Critical Race Theory" and "Woke" to make a misguided effort to ban the teaching of American slavery and Jim Crow in both high schools and colleges.
Sample Outline for Essay 2 Option:
In paragraph 1, your First Building Block, summarize an account of the movement to ban the teaching of slavery and Jim Crow under the banner of “Critical Race Theory” and the “Woke extremists” pushing a “radical agenda.” Consider the concerns on both sides of the argument.
In paragraph 2, your thesis, defend, refute, or complicate the argument that racial demagogues have weaponized language like "Critical Race Theory" and "Woke" to make a misguided effort to ban the teaching of American slavery and Jim Crow in both high schools and colleges.
Paragraphs 3-6: Present your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraphs 7 and 8: your Second Building Block: Address your opponents by showing one or two of their strongest objections and then provide your rebuttal of those objections.
Paragraph 9: Your conclusion: Provide a powerful restatement of your thesis.
Your last page: MLA Works Cited with a minimum of 4 sources.
The Purpose:
In terms of content, I want you to understand the meaning of Jim Crow as a pernicious, bald-faced racist ideology that persisted in many parts of the country after the Civil War in which recalcitrant or unrepentant racists resented the downfall of the slave plantation economy and wished to resurrect oppression of African-Americans in any way they could. Additionally, I want you to see how Jim Crow morphed after the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s into a more sneaky beast, revealing itself through media stereotypes, mass incarceration, and normalized violence against African-Americans, as we see in Childish Gambino’s “This Is America" and the Netflix documentary 13th. By seeing how Jim Crow exists today, we can fight against its normalization and resist it becoming part of the mind-numbing “ambiance” of American society.
In terms of writing skills, I want you to see how a comparison designLinks to an external site., either block method or point-by-point, gives more depth, power, and detail to an important term such as Jim Crow.
For example, author Michelle Alexander in her magisterial nonfiction work The New Jim Crow, a book that focuses mainly on mass incarceration, she devotes a lot of time in her book to the evolution of “The Old Jim Crow” with “The New Jim Crow.”
Moreover, a comparison expository design is an effective way to roadmap and organize your essay. We use comparisons all the time to help us weigh the value of similar things or to understand how something evolves such as the early stages of Facebook, Twitter, or Netflix with their current state in order to understand what kind of trade-offs these changes make.
The Method for Option 1
Your First Paragraph
In your introductory paragraph define Jim Crow as you see this term presented in David Pilgrim’s video “The New Jim Crow Museum.” Give a one-sentence definition of Jim Crow and expound on your definition by giving distinguishing characteristics an example from the video.
Remember that when you provide an extended definition, you provide three things:
One: single-sentence definition of the term you’re defining
Two: the class that the term belongs to
Three: the term’s distinguishing characteristics.
Use Extended Definition for Jim Crow in Paragraph 1
By doing this, you are writing an extended definition to help the reader understand Jim Crow. You’d be surprised how many people have no idea or at best a vague idea of what Jim Crow is.
Some of you may be asking, what class does Jim Crow belong to?
While there is no single right answer, here some suggestions:
- Racism
- Oppression
- Systemic Inequality
- Systemic Racism
- Segregation
Building Block Assignment #1 for Jim Crow Essay
Due Date: March 23 for 25 points
Writing Your Introduction Paragraph as an Extended Definition of Jim Crow
To build your Essay 1 with your introductory paragraph.
Objectives:
- Write an introductory paragraph with a single-sentence definition followed by an extended definition to show a clear understanding of Jim Crow.
- Two. Use appropriate signal phrases and in-text citations.
- Three. Use this paragraph as a building block for your Jim Crow essay (this essay is a summative assessment).
Assignment Description
Writing Your Introduction Paragraph as an Extended Definition of Jim Crow
In your introductory paragraph define Jim Crow as you see this term presented in David Pilgrim’s video “The New Jim Crow Museum.” Give a one-sentence definition of Jim Crow and expound on your definition by giving distinguishing characteristics an example from the video. Your distinguishing characteristics will be gathered by quoting, paraphrasing, or summarizing Dr. David Pilgrim’s major points as he curates the museum.
The Purpose of this Assignment
All of my assignments are “building blocks” toward your finished essay what in online education circles is referred to as your Summative Assessment. By fulfilling the requirements of this assignment, you will have the first paragraph completed toward your essay.
Building Block Assignment #2 for Jim Crow Essay
Due Date: April 6 for 25 points.
Objectives:
- Write a thesis paragraph that outlines your body paragraphs in a clear design of block or point-by-point comparison. Of if you're doing the second essay option, write an argumentative thesis.
- Learn how to frame a comparison thesis in the context of a meaningful argument.
- Use this paragraph as a building block for your Jim Crow essay (this essay is a summative assessment).
- Learn that using comparison expository design is an effective way to roadmap and organize your essay and expand our understanding of an important term such as Jim Crow. We use comparisons all the time to help us weigh the value of similar things or to understand how something evolves such as the early stages of Facebook, Twitter, or Netflix with their current state in order to understand what kind of trade-offs these changes make.
Assignment Description
Writing Your Comparison Thesis for your Jim Crow essay.
Write a comparison thesis that shows the similarities and possible differences between Jim Crow 1.0 as seen in the Jim Crow Museum and Jim Crow 2.0 as seen in Childish Gambino's “This Is America" and the Netflix documentary 13th.
You will explain the distinguishing characteristics of Jim Crow that are presented in the video.
Here are some template sentence examples of transitioning from the first paragraph to the second paragraph:
While Jim Crow 1.0 consisted of _________, ___________, and __________, we see in “This Is America” that Jim Crow 2.0 has morphed into a new oppression characterized by __________, _____________, and _________________.
With similar characteristics of Jim Crow 1.0 illustrated in “This Is America,” Childish Gambino also shows Jim Crow’s new manifestations, which include _______________, _________________, and _________________.
While Jim Crow 1.0 emphasized __________, __________, __________, Jim Crow 2.0 became a different beast in that it focused on _______________, _______________, and _________________.
While there were some key differences between Jim Crow 1.0 and Jim Crow 2.0, especially in that 2.0 emphasized __________ and __________, they have key similarities, which include ________________, ___________________, __________________, and ________________________.
What’s important is that you provide a clear transition between the first and second paragraphs. The Purdue Writing Lab has a good explanation of these paragraph transitions, which you can find on this link.
The Purpose of this Assignment
All of my assignments are “building blocks” toward your finished essay, what in online education circles is referred to as your Summative Assessment. By fulfilling the requirements of this assignment, you will have a third paragraph completed toward your essay.
Sources for this assignment:
The New Jim Crow Museum
This Is America
The Netflix documentary 13th
Instructions:
Step One. Begin Paragraph 3 with a comparison thesis.
Because we will gain a greater understanding by comparing the original version with its current manifestation, we will want to create a thesis template that allows us to see the similarities and differences between Jim Crow 1.0 and Jim Crow 2.0.
Step Two. Decide if you want to emphasize similarities or differences.
Based on your analysis of the two videos, you will decide if you want to emphasize the similarities or differences.
Use Whereas or While for emphasizing contrast.
Example:
Whereas the Apple Macbook Pro emphasizes ease of use, a tightly secure connection between its hardware and software, and enhanced security from malware, the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Extreme emphasizes faster processors for power users, more freedom to customize components, and more compatibility with accessories and add-ons.
Use Both to emphasize similarities.
Example
Both the Apple Macbook Pro and the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Extreme offer 4K high-resolution screens, solid state drives, latest generation i9 processors, and Bluetooth 5 connectivity.
As we discussed earlier, when you provide an extended definition, you provide three things: a single-sentence definition of the term you’re defining, the class that the term belongs to, and the term’s distinguishing characteristics.
Start with While to show both contrast and comparison.
Example:
While there were some key differences between the MacBook Pro and Thinkpad X1 Extreme, including __________ and __________, they have key similarities, which include ________________, ___________________, __________________, and ________________________.
List of Requirements for This Assignment
- You write a comparison paragraph that shows a clear understanding of Jim Crow 1.0 and Jim Crow 2.0 based on Dr. David Pilgrim’s museum, Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” video, and the Netflix documentary 13th.
- Your comparison and/or contrast must give the reader a deeper understanding of Jim Crow.
- You must frame the comparison as an argument about the importance and relevance of Jim Crow as part of America’s history and identity.
- Your comparison thesis must help you outline your body paragraphs in either a point-by-point or block-paragraph design.
***
Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil By Susan Neiman
I’ve been teaching a unit about Jim Crow in my college writing class for the last 10 years. The recent hysteria about CRT has forced me to look closely at why I teach a unit about American racism.
It seems one can teach American racism in four ways:
- American exceptionalism, in which racism is minimized as a mere hiccup in America’s grand narrative
- The Lost Cause is the most grotesque perversion of history in which resentful losers of the Civil War cast slavery and Jim Crow as a virtue in which everyone knows their place.
- Radical Fatalism in which the original sin of racism is so egregious that America is an irredeemable hellscape.
- Struggle for Redemption in which we acknowledge our sins of racism and our accomplishments and struggle to find atonement within our country’s contradictions. Working off the past or the struggle to overcome the past is a long word in German: Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung.
What is the word?
Vergangenheitsbewältigung: Struggle to overcome the past
Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung
I choose the latter category as the only moral and instructive way I can teach a course about American racism.
See the New Yorker essay by Lizzie Widdicombe: “What Can We Learn from the Germans About Confronting Our History?
Widdicombe writes:
Neiman, an American who directs the Einstein Forum, a public think tank outside of Berlin, has recently published a book, “Learning from the Germans,” that makes the case for an American version of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, a word that she translates as “working off the past,” which refers to the decades-long process through which Germany has come to terms with Nazism and the Holocaust. Today, the country isn’t free from racism and anti-Semitism, as the recent attack on a synagogue in Halle showed, but its culture and politics remain deeply informed by its history. All of the arts, including TV and film, regularly refer to and treat Nazi history. And the country pauses to perform what Neiman calls “public rites of repentance” around events such as the liberation of Auschwitz, Kristallnacht, and the end of the war. Then there’s the iconography: the Holocaust Memorial sits at the center of a reunified Berlin. There are also the famous “stumbling stones”—small brass plaques placed throughout the city to mark where Jews and other victims of the Nazis last lived, before they were deported. By comparison, she writes, “Imagine a monument to the Middle Passage or the genocide of Native Americans at the center of the Washington Mall. Suppose you could walk down a New York street and step on a reminder that this building was constructed with slave labor.”
The lesson for Americans—particularly those involved in racial-justice work—is that “Nobody wants to look at the dark sides of their history,” she said. “It’s like finding out that your parents did something really horrible. There’s always going to be resistance. It’s normal, and it’s something we should expect.” So what made the Germans change? Neiman writes about a number of historical factors, but the most important, in her opinion, was “civil engagement” by the German public, beginning in the nineteen-sixties. A new generation came of age. “They realized that their parents and teachers had been Nazis, or at least complicit in Nazi atrocities, and were outraged,” she said. A small and often controversial vanguard insisted on digging up history that older generations had refused to discuss. People called them Nestbeschmützer, or “nest-foulers.” But the process they set in motion—a process of uncovering the past and talking about it—eventually reverberated throughout German society.
Her final lesson was about balance. She brought up a charge recently made by conservative critics of the Times’ 1619 Project, which commemorates slavery: that focussing on the worst parts of a nation’s history is depressing and, worse, delegitimizing. “They complained about it in Germany as much as Newt Gingrich and company are complaining about it now—‘It’s going to tear the social fabric, and we won’t have a national identity anymore! People won’t have anything to celebrate!’ ” There’s some truth there, she said. When planning monuments, “I think it’s really important that it not just be sites of horror, that we also remember heroes.” Is this to make us feel better about ourselves? “Yes,” she said. “I make this analogy which may seem a bit hokey: having a grownup relationship to your history is like having a grownup relationship to your parents. As a kid, you believe everything they tell you. As an adolescent, you may be inclined to reject everything. But having a grownup view involves sifting through with some distance, and saying, ‘O.K., I’m glad that my mother had those values, and that’s what I’m going to pass on to my kids. Not the other stuff.’ ” She mentioned a few of her own heroes: Sojourner Truth and Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Brown and Harriet Tubman, Woody Guthrie and Paul Robeson. She said, “It’s like being orphaned if you can’t say, ‘No, there are people, and not a few of them, in my nation’s history whom I really admire.’ ”
***
After World War II and the defeat of Hitler and the Nazis, German went through a soul-search process, acknowledged their collaboration with evil forces, and made a concerted effort to work away their sins.
Working off the past or the struggle to overcome the past is a long word in German: Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung.
We cannot overcome the past unless we acknowledge it. Denial of the past causes the past evils to perpetuate.
To acknowledge evil from our own tribe goes against human instinct. Evil is “out there performed by The Others, but it’s not us.” Such an impulse makes acknowledgment of evil within the tribe very difficult.
Today in the South, many southerners won’t acknowledge that the South committed sedition and insurrection to defend the evil practice of slavery. There is a different narrative: “The South fought Nothern aggression and defended state rights.”
In post-World War II Germany, there was initial resistance to the acknowledgment of past sins. We read in The Guardian from Alex Clark:
Neiman does not stint on impressing on her readers the details of number one, drawing on a vast body of interviews – half, she estimates, didn’t even make it into the book – to explore how long history’s tail is. It is too easy, she argues, to believe that as soon as the second world war ended, Germany set about the process of atoning for its crimes. It simply isn’t so: after all, 10% of the country’s population had been members of the Nazi party, “and the most shocking, but also important thing, is they were not the uneducated masses. The majority had academic degrees. We like to think that education provides immunity to racist and fascist ideology. And it doesn’t.”
What, then, heralded the start of Germans en masse beginning to face the past? Although some of it can be explained generationally, she replies, as people died off, “that won’t do the trick, as we’ve seen in the United States. And as we’ve seen in Britain where, you know, time has gone by, and people like falling back on national myths of greatness.” In part, she believes the Auschwitz trials marked a moment of change in which the burgeoning of mass travel connected ordinary Germans with other worldviews and there was an emergence of books by Holocaust survivors. She also notes the importance of 1968, “a moment for confronting parents and teachers … and there was a sense of a sudden real wave of disgust and rebellion: what have you done?”
Neiman is also at pains to point out that this work was done more quickly and more effectively in East Germany – much of which went unnoticed because of the relentless focus on West German attempts at rehabilitation. “Whenever you say anything good about East Germany,” she says, “immediately somebody jumps up and says, ‘My God, you’re a Stalinist … ’ I’m not defending everything about it, of course. But I laboured on the chapter that talks about the east. I fact-checked it; I had somebody else fact-check it. I knew that I was going to get a lot of flak for that. But in the beginning, East Germany did a better job. They just did. On every level: in terms of bringing old Nazis to trial, in terms of teaching the period in schools, in terms of building monuments, and restoring concentration camps and making them educational.” Meanwhile, the west was so busy fighting a new conflict – “old Nazis were the best people to fight the cold war” – that efforts at serious denazification went by the board.
As one might expect from a philosopher – especially one who has side-stepped the academy to work across disciplines – Neiman is fascinating and potent on how the Holocaust has functioned on multiple planes, and primarily as an example of pure evil that, by consequence, allows other societies to divert attention from their own misdeeds. “Nothing else even comes close to it. And if you haven’t done that, well, then you’re doing fairly well … you know, it’s as if we would like to have a large black hole that says, this is where you put evil and we don’t have to look at it.”
She has, she says, been shocked by the lack of knowledge in Britain about the Nazi period, which naturally leads us into a conversation about the fondness of rightwing politicians for invoking the glories of the war, “this nostalgia for the empire that you see all over the place with Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg and I suppose Boris Johnson too ... As if the empire really was a wonderful thing, as if it brought nothing but civilisation to the rest of the world.”
***
In the New York Times review of Neiman’s book by Deborah E. Lipstadt, we read:
For two decades after World War II, Germany — East and West – practiced “moral myopia.” Communist East Germany claimed that since it was a postwar antifascist state and all the former Nazis were in West Germany (they were not), it bore no responsibility for genocide. West Germans, in Neiman’s words, “from dogcatcher to diplomat,” falsely insisted that only the Third Reich’s leadership knew of the mass murder. “Our men were gallant fighters, not criminals,” one German told her. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer appointed former Nazis to some of the government’s highest jobs, thus telegraphing the message that, on a personal level, all was forgiven. Even the reparation process, Neiman says, was “meanspirited and arduous.” Auschwitz survivors received a smaller pension than former SS guards and their widows. Simply put, Germans, East and West, refused to articulate the words: I was guilty.
What changed? In the late 1960s West German children and grandchildren of Nazis began to struggle with their families’ crimes. Having watched the televised Eichmann and Auschwitz trials, and inspired by student protests sweeping Europe, young Germans demanded an honest account of past wrongs. That confrontation with history, while hardly complete and now under attack from right-wing forces, remains far more extensive and honest, Neiman says, than anything that occurred in the United States regarding slavery and discrimination.
Born and raised in the South, Neiman moved from Berlin to Mississippi to research this fascinating book. She actively sought people and institutions engaged in “remembering.” She found eerie similarities between the response of the first generations of postwar Germans to their evil past and the response of many Americans, particularly Southerners, to theirs. Many of her Southern informants echoed Germany’s post-World War II mantra. Nobody was in the slave business. Southerners just bought what Northern ship captains sold them. Slavery was unconnected to the Civil War. The conflict was all about taxes.
Neiman notes that while Germany’s past no longer immunizes it against resurgent nationalism and anti-Semitism, there is in the heart of Berlin a memorial to the six million Jews murdered by Germans. “A nation that erects a monument of shame for the evils of its history in its most prominent space is a nation that is not afraid to confront its own failures.” While a museum dedicated to the African-American experience has opened in the heart of Washington, recent expressions of racism not just from the highest office in this land but also from many politicians, pundits and ordinary people suggest that America’s confrontation with its legacy of slavery and racial hatred is far from complete.
Many Americans, in the South and the North, insist that Confederate monuments are historical artifacts that simply honor the region’s history and its loyal defenders. They ignore the fact that most were built 50 years after the war, when the children of the Confederacy were creating the myth of a noble lost cause. Others were erected during the 1960s in protest of the civil rights movement.
Jim Crow 1.0 and 2.0 First Lesson
Teaching Jim Crow Is the Counter Response to the American Myth of Disneyland Innocence
When I grew up and went to public schools in the 1960s and 1970s, I received what you might call the American Mytho of Disneyland Innocence.
In this Innocence Narrative, slavery was given a tiny paragraph in the history textbook and treated like a hiccup in the narrative. Once the hiccup ended, America was back on track with Disneyland innocence. Equality, freedom, and justice defined the American scene for all Americans.
This same Innocence narrative informed the history of the pilgrims and the American settlers.
Christopher Colombus was portrayed as a hero who “discovered” America and was worthy of our admiration. The atrocities he committed against indigenous peoples, including severing the limbs of children, were never addressed because these atrocities would violate the myth of American innocence.
Likewise, the pilgrims and settlers were portrayed as benign travelers who shared cultural good with the native Americans and celebrated a Kumbaya moment.
As a ten-year-old child in the fifth grade, I assumed the Myth of Innocence to be true.
Then something happened that pulled the curtains apart and revealed the real America, an America that did not resemble the Disneyland innocence inculcated into me since my days in kindergarten.
As a fifth-grader, I was obsessed with baseball, and I read every baseball biography I could get my hands on. I’d either find baseball player biographies at the library or buy them from Scholastic Books, a mail-order program offered at my public schools.
A lot of the biographies I read were about African American baseball players, many who played Minor and Major League baseball in the Jim Crow South during the 1950s. Here is what I learned:
- Henry Aaron’s wife and other black players’ wives could not sit in the bleachers with the white baseball players’ wives. She had to sit isolated in a section for people of color.
- Black players could not eat in restaurants with the white players.
- Often, white players would buy food from the restaurant, scurry out of a back door and chow their grub in a back alley inside a car.
- Black players could not ride the trains with the white players.
- Black players could not sleep in the same hotels as white players.
- Black players had to be five times better than white players to get a full-time position.
- Great black players were resented by white players and white fans because their greatness violated the Myth of White Supremacy.
As I read about these Jim Crow humiliations, it occurred to me that what my public school was teaching me about America as a place of Disneyland Innocence was a lie.
As I read about these Jim Crow humiliations, it occurred to me that white supremacy was used against other people of color, including Asians.
I started thinking of my favorite TV show at the time, Kung Fu, starring David Carradine who played Caine, a Shaolin monk who travels through America’s Wild West in search of his half-brother, and along the way, he was subjected to racist taunts and violence. After reading about the black baseball players being humiliated by Jim Crow, I looked at Cain’s struggles from a broader perspective.
White supremacy was a systemic disease brought on by deliberate doctrine. Only later would I learn that this odious doctrine was largely created by the founder of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, who as I write this, is venerated as a hero by having over 200 public schools in the South named after him.
I was only ten years old. I was no expert on human relations, no psychologist, no professor, but I knew what I was reading about was my heroes being abused, and this abuse was a refutation of the lie of American Innocence. Several thoughts swirled in my mind:
- What the African American players were facing was abuse: mental and physical abuse and this abuse did not square with the America my school was teaching me about.
- Their abuse was sanctioned and supported by the southern state governments in policies that were made by legal decree, a contradiction of a country that was supposed to be fair, just, and equal.
- The white people committing the abuses were exceedingly pleased with themselves and committed their acts of degradation with absolutely no shame or moral compunction. This told me their behavior had been normalized by some code that needed to be revealed, a code that I would later learn was the code of Jim Crow.
- My schools withheld this information from me and were complicit in propagating the lie of American innocence and therefore my schools could not be trusted.
- Either the public school system committed the lie of Innocence through incompetence or deliberate deceit, but it did not matter: Their lie made them worthy of contempt.
- As a ten-year-old boy, I learned I was going to have to read on my own if I were going to learn the truth about various subjects, not the least of which was America’s original sin of slavery and Jim Crow.
- I often wondered that if I did not love baseball so much and love Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, Lou Brock, Larry Doby, Curt Flood, and others, I may have never had such a personal experience with Jim Crow, and I may have grown up brainwashed by the Disneyland of Innocence.
To this day, I teach Jim Crow because I don’t trust institutions that sweep the truth under the carpet.
To this day, I teach a unit on Jim Crow in my English 1A class.
Overview
Outline for Essay 2, a Contrast-Comparison of Jim Crow 1.0 and Jim Crow 2.0
Paragraph 1: Write an extended definition of Jim Crow 1.0 (Building Block #1)
Paragraph 2: Write an extended definition of Jim Crow 2.0
Paragraph 3: Write a thesis that presents a contrast and comparison of Jim Crow 1.0 and Jim Crow 2.0.
Paragraphs 4-6: Show similarities between 1.0 and 2.0
Paragraphs 7-9: Show key differences between 1.0 and 2.0
Conclusion: a dramatic restatement of your thesis
Works Cited with 4 sources
Essay #2 (Essay worth 200 points): Jim Crow 1.0 and Jim Crow 2.0
Due as an upload on April 6.
The Assignment:
In a 1,200-1,500-word essay that adheres to current MLA format, provides a minimum of 4 sources for your Works Cited page, and presents either a block-paragraph or point-by-point paragraph comparison design, develop a thesis that connects Dr. David Pilgrim’s video presentation of the Dr. David Pilgrim’s video “The New Jim Crow Museum” as an explanation of “Jim Crow 1.0” to Childish Gambino’s video “This Is America” as a gut-wrenching picture of “Jim Crow 2.0” today.
Your essay should explore the following: What are the parallels between Jim Crow 1.0 and Jim Crow 2.0? What new mutations do we see in Jim Crow 2.0? How has Jim Crow evolved to be in its current state that is in many ways less flagrant yet more insidious than Jim Crow 1.0?
The Purpose:
In terms of content, I want you to understand the meaning of Jim Crow as a pernicious, bald-faced racist ideology that persisted in many parts of the country after the Civil War in which recalcitrant or unrepentant racists resented the downfall of the slave plantation economy and wished to resurrect oppression of African-Americans in any way they could. Additionally, I want you to see how Jim Crow morphed after the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s into a more sneaky beast, revealing itself through media stereotypes, mass incarceration, and normalized violence against African-Americans, as we see in Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.” By seeing how Jim Crow exists today, we can fight against its normalization and resist it becoming part of the mind-numbing “ambiance” of American society.
In terms of writing skills, I want you to see how a comparison design, either block method or point-by-point, gives more depth, power, and detail to an important term such as Jim Crow.
For example, author Michelle Alexander in her magisterial nonfiction work The New Jim Crow, a book that focuses mainly on mass incarceration, she devotes a lot of time in her book to the evolution of “The Old Jim Crow” with “The New Jim Crow.”
Moreover, a comparison expository design is an effective way to roadmap and organize your essay. We use comparisons all the time to help us weigh the value of similar things or to understand how something evolves such as the early stages of Facebook, Twitter, or Netflix with their current state in order to understand what kind of trade-offs these changes make.
The Method
Your First Paragraph
In your introductory paragraph define Jim Crow as you see this term presented in David Pilgrim’s video “The New Jim Crow Museum.” Give a one-sentence definition of Jim Crow and expound on your definition by giving distinguishing characteristics an example from the video.
Remember that when you provide an extended definition, you provide three things:
One: single-sentence definition of the term you’re defining
Two: the class that the term belongs to
Three: the term’s distinguishing characteristics.
Example of an Extended Definition
Term: Metacognition
Single-sentence definition: Metacognition is a form of self-analysis in which individuals identify undesirable thought and behavior habits, map alternative courses to their self-destructive habits, and put in safeguards to prevent repeating old mistakes of thinking.
The Class: Form of self-analysis
Distinguishing Characteristics: individuals with metacognition do the following:
One, identify undesirable thought and behavior habits
Two, map alternative courses to their self-destructive habits
Three, put in safeguards to prevent repeating old mistakes of thinking.
Use Extended Definition for Jim Crow in Paragraph 1
By doing this, you are writing an extended definition to help the reader understand Jim Crow. You’d be surprised how many people have no idea or at best a vague idea of what Jim Crow is.
Some of you may be asking, what class does Jim Crow belong to?
While there is no single right answer, here some suggestions:
- Racism
- Oppression
- Systemic Inequality
- Systemic Racism
- Segregation
Helping your reader have a clear grasp of a central term in your essay makes your writing more clear and effective. The Purdue Writing Lab has an effective description of extended definitions with the link here.
So to recap, in Paragraph 1 you would summarize the YouTube video presentation of David Pilgrim’s “The New Jim Crow Museum” by giving the reader an extended definition of Jim Crow.
You might focus on the history of Jim Crow as a misinformation campaign to saturate minds with racist ideas that dehumanized black Americans in the service of promoting the false religion of white superiority. You might want to call this original Jim Crow the first incarnation: “Jim Crow 1.0” because in the second paragraph you’re going to contrast Jim Crow 1.0 with today’s Jim Crow, what might be called “Jim Crow 2.0.”
Importance of Signal Phrases in Your Introductory Paragraph
It is important that you show your ability to summarize, paraphrase, and quote Dr. Pilgrim’s points by using signal phrases, which are short phrases you use to introduce quoted, paraphrased, or summarized content. Here are 6 important components to consider when writing signal phrases:
Review Complete 6 Components of Signal Phrases
- Vary your transitions so you're not only using "say" and "write."
- Transition from your own writing to quoted or paraphrased material.
- Vary your location of the signal phrase, beginning, middle, or end.
- Provide credentials of the person being cited in your signal phrase.
- Provide correct in-text citations for MLA format, as provided by Purdue Owl.
- Return to what you just cited and analyze its significance to your argument.
For a fuller explanation of signal phrases, I would refer to my Breakthrough Writer blog post, “Mastering the 6 Components of Signal Phrases.”
In Paragraph 2 you want to transition to Childish Gambino's “This Is America” video by summarizing the distinguishing characteristics of Jim Crow that are presented in the video.
In paragraph 3, you want to create a comparison thesis that shows the similarities of Jim Crow 1.0 in the Jim Crow Museum and Jim Crow 2.0 in the Childish Gambino video.
Here are some template sentence examples of transitioning from the first paragraph to the second paragraph:
While Jim Crow 1.0 consisted of _________, ___________, and __________, we see in “This Is America” that Jim Crow 2.0 has morphed into a new oppression characterized by __________, _____________, and _________________.
With similar characteristics of Jim Crow 1.0 illustrated in “This Is America,” Childish Gambino also shows Jim Crow’s new manifestations, which include _______________, _________________, and _________________.
What’s important is that you provide a clear transition between the first and second paragraphs. The Purdue Writing Lab has a good explanation of these paragraph transitions, which you can find on this link.
Make Paragraph 3 Your Thesis Paragraph
You might find it easier to make Paragraph 3 your lone thesis paragraph in which you develop a thesis that will highlight the parallels between Jim Crow 1.0 and Jim Crow 2.0.
Sample Comparison Thesis Templates
While Jim Crow 1.0 emphasized __________, __________, __________, Jim Crow 2.0 became a different beast in that it focused on _______________, _______________, and _________________.
While there were some key differences between Jim Crow 1.0 and Jim Crow 2.0, especially in that 2.0 emphasized __________ and __________, they have key similarities, which include ________________, ___________________, __________________, and ________________________.
Deciding on a Structure After Your Thesis Paragraph:
Before you go on, decide on a comparison structure, either block method in which you spend the first half of your body paragraphs explaining Jim Crow 1.0. Then in the second half you explain the characteristics of Jim Crow 2.0. On the other hand, you may want to use a point-by-point in which you show the parallels between Jim Crow 1.0 and 2.0 point by point. There is an excellent site explaining the correct use of block and point-by-point method by Michelle Bickwell of the MJC Writing Lab.
Once you decide on what kind of comparison to write, you might want to focus on these parallels between the Jim Crow Museum and “This Is America”:
We see normalized violence against the African-American community as seen in both videos.
We see White America consuming black culture for entertainment (depending on all variations of minstrel stereotypes) while turning their back on social injustice as seen in both videos.
We see White America using guns as a form of intimidation and oppression against the African-American community as seen in both videos.
We see White America exploiting African-Americans as a form of entertainment in the form of violence as seen in both videos .
We see black America wearing a dual mask to survive in America: a happy entertainment face on one hand and the horror of violence and being gaslighted every day on the other.
If you want, you can have a contrast paragraph: Childish Gambino addresses the use of American consumerism a technology ("This is a celly" and the worship of bling) as a distraction for all Americans, regardless of skin color, from racism, violence, and white-ethnic fascism, which is spreading throughout America and the world.
Your conclusion should be a powerful restatement of your thesis designed to achieve pathos or emotional impact. For a further discussion on using pathos for more effective writing, consult Purdue OWL University article “Aristotle’s Rhetorical Situation.”
After your conclusion, you will have a separate page for Works Cited using current MLA format as explained in this these videos:
Purdue OWL video for Word
Purdue OWL video for Google Docs
Title for Your Essay
Make sure your essay has a strong title. Avoid a generic title like “Jim Crow” or “Essay 3.” Try to have a catchy title that is relevant to your focus.
Here is a somewhat dry academic title: “The Meaning of Jim Crow Throughout American History.”
Here is a more impressive title: “Let Us Not Sweep Jim Crow Under the Rug.”
Time Needed for the Assignment
Of course, everyone is different, but estimating the time based on the assigned videos, supplementary material, note taking, first draft of a 1,500 word essay of about 8-10 paragraphs, making a Works Cited page, and then rewriting your draft for correct grammar, spelling, and format, I would say that over the course of 4 weeks you could very well spend 16 hours, or 4 hours a week, to get this essay to a polished state that is ready to upload.
Your main sources are the following:
Suggested Supplementary Material
For the “This Is America” video, you may consult the following:
Insider’s content:
Hidden Meanings Behind Childish Gambino’s ‘This Is America’ Explained
Inside Edition’s content:
The Hidden Meanings Behind Childish Gambino’s ‘This Is America’ Video” (with Dr. Lori Brooks
PBS Newshour's content:
The stark, chaotic power of Donald Glover’s ‘This Is America
Make Stuff’s content:
This Is America: Childish Gambino’s Genius Absurdity
BucketHeadNation’s content:
Dad Reacts to Childish Gambino--This Is America
Regarding the Jim Crow Museum, I recommend the following:
David Pilgrim’s Ted Talk video:
My Racial Journey: Using Hateful Items as Teaching Tools
David Pilgrim's autobiographical online essay, “The Garbage Man: Why I Collect Racist Objects.”
Suggested Design and Format Resources:
For comparison essay structure, I recommend the following:
Free English video:
Point-by-Point vs Block-Style Essay
For MLA format, I recommend the following:
Jason Morgan’s video:
Formatting a paper in MLA style
How Points Are Earned on This Assignment
Essay 3 has a maximum 200 points. You earn points through the following:
- Meaningful thesis statement that generates compelling body paragraphs of a thesis or claim and a strong exposition driven by a distinct writing voice (authorial presence). This thesis produces meaningful content and a powerful writing voice that passes the “So what?” question, meaning that the writing matters, is significant, and elevates the reader to a higher understanding about an urgent topic. 80 points maximum.
- Clear organizational design, also called an expository mode, that has a logical sequence and follows a clear comparison design. 40 points.
- The use of signal phrases and correct MLA in-text citations whenever you cite paraphrased, summarized, or quoted material. 30 points.
- The essay has sound sentence mechanics, sentence variety, correct spelling, and correct grammar usage suitable for college-level writing. The most common errors students make are comma splices and sentence fragments. 30 points.
- The essay conforms to updated MLA format for pagination, spacing, and Works Cited page. 20 points.
Essay Checklist to Maximize Your Success
- Do you have a meaningful thesis statement that generates compelling body paragraphs of an argumentative thesis or claim and a strong exposition driven by a distinct writing voice (authorial presence).
- Does your essay have a clear organization design that logically drives your exposition?
- Does your essay correctly use signal phrases and correct in-text citations?
- If your essay is a counterargument, do you have an adequate counterargument-rebuttal section to show you have addressed opposing views?
- Does your essay have a Works Cited page with a minimum of 4 sources for the first three essays and minimum of 5 sources for your fourth essay? Do these citations satisfy the requirements of authorship credit so that you are staying clear of plagiarism?
- Are your sources credible, that is to say do they come from authors who have peer credibility as opposed to authors with a sneaky, biased, or strident agenda?
- If your authors are biased, did you disclose that bias in your essay?
- Is your essay free of frequent grammar and sentence mechanic errors, especially comma splices and sentence fragments?
- Does your essay conform to the current MLA format?
- Does your essay have a distinctive title that alerts your readers to your tone and main focus?
- Does your essay have college-level paragraph transitions to make your essay flow and enhance its clarity?
- Do you have a conclusion paragraph that contributes to the expressiveness and/or persuasiveness of your essay?
Submission Method
Your essay should be turned in as an upload to Canvas.
What Is Jim Crow 1.0?
Jim Crow was born of white southern resentment to losing the Civil War, losing slavery, and being told by the northerners that their way of life was evil.
Full of resentment, white southerners scapegoated black people by crushing them with a series of cruel and often ridiculous laws that were enforced by violence. These oppressive laws in the words of Isabel Wilkerson constituted a “feudal caste system” with the privileged and servant classes.
Jim Crow was a sneaky way white southerners brought back slavery “off the books” by making black people subject to violence and exploitation with no protection from the law. In other words, slavery was illegal but Jim Crow brought it back under another name.
In other words, the Civil War did not end slavery; it merely shifted slavery into another form called Jim Crow. This shift is chronicled in Douglas A. Blackman’s book Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.
Perhaps the best book ever written about Jim Crow from the point of view of African Americans is Isabel Wilkerson’s award-winning The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration in which six million African Americans fled the south to escape Jim Crow.
Wilkerson interviewed over 1,000 black Americans who lived in the terror of Jim Crow and fled for their lives to the Northern and Western states between 1915 and 1970.
Over six decades, six million African Americans fled the Jim Crow south not knowing what was in store for them. By the end of the Great Migration, almost half of all the black Americans in the south were gone. They had no job, no place to live, no assurance of the means to survive, but they went anyway.
That should tell us just how bad Jim Crow was. “I don’t know what’s in store for me, but I’m getting the hell out.” Jim Crow was a 24/7 Torture Chamber.
All they knew was one thing: Whatever they faced, it couldn’t be worse than living in the Jim Crow states.
Characteristics of Jim Crow
One. Jim Crow didn’t allow black people to flourish.
In 1953, a black doctor Robert Joseph Pershing Foster got out of Monroe, Louisiana, and headed for California. Why? Because even though he was qualified in the highest medical procedures, the whites wouldn’t let him practice surgery.
In the Jim Crow south, whites didn’t like to grant any rights to blacks that suggested that blacks were equal to them. Allowing a black man to practice surgery was just too much for the whites to bear. The mere suggestion that blacks were talented and intelligent was a scandal to white southerners and a threat to their carefully curated racist paradigm, so Dr. Foster got in his car and headed for California.
Two. Jim Crow was a living hell.
Jim Crow was so hellish that it created The Great Migration, the greatest migration ever recorded in America, a migration that far exceeded the California Gold Rush of the 1850s, and yet the Great Migration, Isabel Wilkonson points out, is underreported. Not much is known about a migration that completely changed America, sending black people to urban cities in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and other major cities.
Three. Jim Crow was a danger to black lives.
Isabel Wilkinson makes an astute observation: A lot of black people that we know about would not have existed except that their parents got out of the deadly Jim Crow south. She points out that James Baldwin, Michelle Obama, Miles Davis, Toni Morrison, Spike Lee, and Denzel Washington were “all products of the Great Migration” and might not exist but for the fact that their parents fled for their lives.
Four. Jim Crow celebrated the myth of The Lost Cause.
The Lost Cause is a re-imagining of slavery as “a good thing” in which slave owners and slaves were happy in a bucolic paradise where whites and blacks “knew their place” and were blessed by God. Such heinous chicanery was embraced by the United Daughters of the Confederacy who published propaganda books to brainwash children in the Jim Crow public schools.
The myth of the Lost Cause is so strong that to this day the great military heroes of the North who brought an end to slavery--Ulysses Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, George Henry Thoms, David Farragut are to this day hated and reviled in the south.
Five. Jim Crow is a stain on American History that America has tried to sweep under the carpet.
Wilkinson understood that you couldn’t really understand the hell of Jim Crow unless you saw how black people reacted to it: Fleeing for their lives in a mass migration. She was astonished that before her book virtually nothing was written about the mass escape from Jim Crow. It’s as if historians are too ashamed of this chapter or not interested in it. Wilkinson has remedied that by writing a 550-page masterpiece about the subject.
Six. Jim Crow’s tentacles reached into the smallest areas of black lives to create daily humiliations. Here are some:
- Black children had to learn in separate schoolhouses, always rundown with no resources.
- Black people had to sit in filthy waiting rooms at doctors’ offices while whites enjoyed clean waiting rooms.
- When black people walked opposite direction a white person on the sidewalk, the black people had to step off the sidewalk and walk on the curb.
- Black people had to give all the good parking spaces to white people. Whites parked close to stores. Blacks parked far away.
- No matter how slowly a white driver was going in a car, a black driver was never allowed to pass the white person’s car.
- When a white person was at fault for a car accident involving a black driver, the fault always was assigned to the black driver. “You’re black so it’s your fault.”
- Blacks and whites couldn’t play chess or checkers together because such a game suggested they were equal.
Seven. Jim Crow violated the Consitution.
As Wilkinson writes: “The South began acting in outright defiance of the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868, which granted the right to due process and equal protection to anyone born in the United States and it ignored the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870, which guaranteed all men the right to vote” (38).
The North tried to grant rights to blacks in the south, but by the mid-1870s, Wilkinson observes, the North bailed on the south and stopped their oversight.
Eight. Hostility towards blacks in the South was so acute that white politicians who fomented racism against blacks enjoyed popularity, which they leveraged for self-gain.
When political leaders spoke of black people deserving violence, the white masses saw this as “open season” to commit any violence they wanted against blacks with impunity.
Nine. Lynchings of black people became an epidemic that was normalized and glorified by white southerners.
In one of the most painful chapters to read in Wilkinson’s book, we read that a black man who was merely accused of looking at a white woman would be lynched. Petty crimes were always worthy of a lynching.
These lynchings, which included beatings, hangings, and being burned alive, were watched by “festive crowds” who brought their children and let their toddlers sit on their shoulders to enjoy the spectacle.
I’m reading this, and I’m thinking I’d be part of the Great Migration myself. I would be urgent to leave the south.
How frequent were these lynchings?
Wilkinson writes: “Across the South, someone was hanged or burned alive every four days from 1889 to 1929, according to the 1933 book The Tragedy of Lynching.”
According to Dr. David Pilgrim, there were 4,730 lynchings that we know about but no doubt many more.
Objectives of this lesson:
- Integrate credible sources in your writing.
- Avoid plagiarism.
- Make smooth transitions from your own writing to quoted, paraphrased, summarized, and quoted content.
- Use the same templates that professional writers use to make your essays more impressive and college-level.
- Apply what your signal phrase knowledge to your first building-block assignment, the first paragraph of your First Essay assignment.
Learning Outcomes of Mastering the 6 Components of Signal Phrases
- Vary your signal phrases so you're not only using "say" and "write."
- Transition from your own writing to quoted or paraphrased material.
- Vary your location of the signal phrase, beginning, middle, or end.
- Provide credentials of the person being cited in your signal phrase.
- Return to what you just cited and analyze its significance to your argument.
- Provide correct in-text citations for MLA format, as provided by Purdue Owl. Cite everything that you summarize, paraphrase, or quote.
The Importance of Citing Your Sources in the Text of Your Essay
When we write essays for college instructors, we find that we are usually using text from credible sources to support our arguments, opinions, and analyses. But this is easier said than done. Students tell me integrating signal phrases and in-text citations is one of the most challenging requirements of a writing class.
How are signal phrases like making a lane change?
Signal phrases are transitions that let you know you are about to “switch lanes” by turning from your own writing to another lane of someone else’s writing by summarizing, paraphrasing, or directly quoting their content.
Having a list of signal phrases handy is helpful. The Claude J. Clark Learning Center has a PDF of common signal phrases. I encourage you to familiarize yourself with these.
Common Signal Phrases (underlined):
Author Barry Schwartz makes the claim that . . .
Author Barry Schwartz observes the following:
Futurist and best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari contends that . . .
As best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari opines:
Using the above and other signal phrases helps you avoid plagiarism, the stealing of others' content.
We use signal phrases to make a smooth transition
We use signal phrases to signal to the reader that we are going to cite research material in the form of direct quotes, paraphrase or summary.
You can also call a signal phrase a lead-in because it leads in the quotation or paraphrase.
Grammarian Diana Hacker writes that signal phrases make smooth transitions from your own writing voice to the quoted material without making the reader feel a "jolt."
Signal Phrases Provide Context
Signal phrases not only establish authority and credibility. They provide context or explain why you're using the sourced material.
Here you are using a signal phrase to let the reader know you are setting up a counterargument paragraph:
As a counterpoint to Yuval Noah Harari's contention that Foragers lived superior lives to Farmers, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "Elsewhere, I wondered the extent to which Harari was projecting an idealistic (even Rousseauian) vision of a noble savage on pre-state peoples. . . ."
Here you are using a signal phrase to show that the author agrees with your point:
Concurring with my assertion that Harari is misguided in his Noble Savage mythology, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "Elsewhere, I wondered the extent to which Harari was projecting an idealistic (even Rousseauian) vision of a noble savage on pre-state peoples. . .."
Here you are using signal phrase to show you are giving additional support for your argument:
Further supporting my contention that not all calories are equal, we find in science writer Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories that there are statistics that show . . ."
Mastering Signal Phrases Part 2
In Mastering Signal Phrases Part 2, we will cover a variety of signal phrases as templates to give you powerful sentence structures that will make your essays more sophisticated and professional and give more detailed instruction on following your signal phrases with in-text citations.
Use signal phrases to explain your purpose for using them
You will use signal phrases for supporting your argument mostly, but you may also want to show an opponent’s view. Notice how the templates below have signal phrases that show support or refutation of the author.
Examples of Signal Phrase Templates
- As a counterpoint to X,
- As a counterargument to my claim that X,
- Giving support to my rebuttal that Writer A makes an erroneous contention, Writer B observes that . . .
- Concurring with my assertion that X,
- Further supporting my contention that X,
- Writer X chronicles in her book. . . . As she observes:
Use the above templates and don't worry: you're not committing plagiarism.
Use Signal Phrases to Show Author’s Credentials
We often include credentials with the signal phrase to give more credibility for our sourced material.
Examples
The acclaimed best-selling writer, history professor, and futurist Yuval Noah Harari excoriates the Agricultural Revolution as "the greatest crime against humanity."
Lamenting that his students don't enjoy his music playlist in the writing lab, college English instructor Jeff McMahon observes in his blog Obsession Matters: "Two-thirds of my students in writing lab don't hear my chill playlist over classroom speakers because they are hermetically sealed in their private earbud universe content to be masters of their own musical domain."
You don't have to put the signal phrase at the beginning. You can put it at the end:
"The Agricultural Revolution is the greatest crime against humanity," claims celebrated author and futurist Yuval Noah Harari.
You can also put the signal phrase in the middle of a sentence:
Racism, sexism, worker exploitation, and pestilence afflicted the human race during the Agricultural Revolution, claims celebrated futurist Yuval Noah Harari, who goes on to make the bold claim that "the Agricultural Revolution was the greatest crime perpetrated against humanity."
"Covid-19 fears make me recall Don Delillo's novel White Noise," writes Jeff McMahon in his blog Obsession Matters, " especially the Airborne Toxic Event chapter in which pestilence affords us a rehearsal for our own mortality."
Varying placement and types of signal phrases helps you avoid monotony, makes you a more impressive writer, and gives you more ethos.
Partial List of Signal Phrases
acknowledges adds admits affirms agrees answers argues asserts claims comments concedes confirms contends counters counterattacks declares defines denies disputes echoes endorses estimates finds grants illustrates implies insists mentions notes observes predicts proposes reasons recognizes recommends refutes rejects reports responds reveals speculates states suggests surmises warns writes
Examples of signal phrases:
We are fools if we think we were put on Planet Earth to be happy. That is the fantasy of a four-year-old child. Ironically, this infantile pursuit of happiness makes us unhappy. In the words of John Mellencamp: “I don’t think we’re put on this earth to live happy lives. I think we’re put here to challenge ourselves physically, emotionally, intellectually.”
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. As we read in Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits' essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Variation of the above:
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. According to Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits in his essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Importance of Explaining Transitions
After you present the signal phrase and quoted, summarized, or paraphrased material, what do you write?
You explain what you just cited.
To do so, you need a toolbox of transitions:
- Writer X is essentially saying that
- In other words, X is arguing that
- By using these statistics, X is making the point that
- X is trying to make the point that
- X makes the cogent observation that
- X is essentially rebutting the philosophical movement that embraces the position that
- X's main point is that
- The essence of X's claim is that
Here is a good college link for in-text citations.
Here is a good Purdue Owl link for in-text citations.
Review 6 Components of Mastering Signal Phrases
- Vary your transitions so you're not only using "say" and "write."
- Transition from your own writing to quoted or paraphrased material.
- Vary your location of the signal phrase, beginning, middle, or end.
- Provide credentials of the person being cited in your signal phrase.
- Provide correct in-text citations for MLA format, as provided by Purdue Owl.
- Return to what you just cited and analyze its significance to your argument.
Partial List of Signal Phrases
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