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September 2024

09/17/2024

Frederick Douglass Lecture #1 Fall 2024

1A Essay 2: Frederick Douglass Champions African-American History 

The Purpose of Essay 2:

You will examine Frederick Douglass as the Northstar of African-American history to address the claim that teaching African-American history is a form of anti-American, “woke” indoctrination by examining Frederick Douglass’ rigor in presenting the truth of American history. By studying Frederick Douglass’ life, you can interrogate common assumptions about freedom, democracy, and social justice. You can study Frederick Douglass’ witness to slavery as an antidote to the American revisionist myth of the Lost Cause, which perversely celebrates slavery as a blessing by God ruined by “Northern aggression against state rights.” You can also study Frederick Douglass’ life as an exemplar of discipline, literacy-fueled transformation, continual self-improvement, and commitment to helping others overcome what Jordan Peele calls the Sunken Place. In sum, the life of Frederick Douglass is a repudiation of false claims and Strawman arguments that depict African-American history in a derogatory manner to silence African American voices.  

For Essay 2, choose one from the following:

Choice A: Frederick Douglass Lifted Others Out of the Sunken Place

In recent years, there have been critics of teaching slavery, Jim Crow, and racial injustice in the classroom. These critics claim that such teachings have degenerated into biased and extremist political ideology that is intended to indoctrinate students into an anti-American mindset with America painted as the unredeemable devil; that this anti-American mindset encourages helplessness and victimization, and that this mindset has corrupted educational institutions so that rather than teach critical thinking, they foster “Woke” political indoctrination. However, some will counter-argue that such renditions of African-American history are a perversion of real African-American history, which through ignorance or malice twist the essence of African-American history to attack it and silence African-American voices. These defenders of African-American history will posit that while it's true there are political dimensions to the study of African-American history, there are also spiritual, psychological, and spiritual dimensions. To truly understand African-American history, we are well advised to look to Frederick Douglass whose writings were designed to uplift the oppressed from what Jordan Peele calls The Sunken Place. Based on the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, American Slave (available as a PDF online) and Clint Smith’s essay “Monuments to the Unthinkable,” write a 1,200-word essay that addresses the claim that teaching about the life of Frederick Douglass and learning about Germany’s post-World War II moral reform is a way of learning about racial injustice that avoids the aforementioned pitfalls because Douglass’ life and Germany’s moral reform embody the importance of helping others rise above the Sunken Place, bearing witness to the truth, embracing individual self-agency to resist societal injustice, fighting to redeem a society’s past racial sins, and championing the wisdom of the Ancients for our continual self-improvement. Be sure to have a Works Cited page in MLA format with 4 sources. For this assignment, I recommend two excellent books for further reading: Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight and The Pursuit of Happiness by Jeffrey Rosen. I also recommend the 2022 documentary Becoming Frederick Douglass. 

Resources you must use for Choice A:

Sample Outline for Choice A:

Paragraph 1: Summarize the arguments of those who oppose teaching slavery, Jim Crow, and racial injustice in the classroom because they claim these teachings are forms of political indoctrination based on woke ideology, CRT, and DEI resulting in an anti-American screed that encourages victimization and learned helplessness. 

Paragraph 2: Your thesis--address the claim that the real purpose of teaching racial injustice is to bypass politics and encourage Frederick Douglass' moral calling for all: To identify the Sunken Place, a state of despair based on dehumanization, so that we can lift each other to strengthen democracy for all people and to never repeat the sins of the past. 

Paragraphs 3-6: Your supporting paragraphs.

Paragraph 7: Your counterargument-rebuttal.

Paragraph 8: Your conclusion, a powerful restatement of your thesis.

Works Cited page with a minimum of 4 sources

 

 

Choice B: Frederick Douglass and the movie Black Panther Point to a Way Out of the Sunken Place

In recent years, there have been critics of teaching slavery, Jim Crow and racial injustice in the classroom. These critics claim that such teachings have degenerated into biased and extremist political ideology that is intended to indoctrinate students into an anti-American mindset with America painted as the unredeemable devil; that this anti-American mindset encourages helplessness and victimization, and that this mindset has corrupted educational institutions so that rather than teach critical thinking, they foster “Woke” political indoctrination. However, some will counter-argue that such renditions of African-American history are a perversion of real African-American history, which through ignorance or malice twist the essence of African-American history in order to attack it and silence African-American voices. These defenders of African-American history will posit that while it's true there are political dimensions to the study of African-American history, there are also spiritual, psychological, and spiritual dimensions. To truly understand African-American history, we can compare the themes in the 2018 Ryan Coogler movie Black Panther and Frederick Douglass whose writings were designed to uplift the oppressed from what Jordan Peele calls The Sunken Place. In this context, write an essay that compares the way we can learn the essence of African-American history in the movie Black Panther and the writings of Frederick Douglass. This comparison should address the importance of helping others rise above the Sunken Place, bearing witness to the truth, embracing individual self-agency to resist societal injustice, fighting to redeem America, and championing the wisdom of the Ancients for our continual self-improvement so that we can find our “Inner Wakanda.” Be sure to have a Works Cited page in MLA format with 4 sources. For this essay, I recommend the following YouTube videos: “Black Panther: Symbolism Explained” and “Black Panther--Creating an Empathetic Villain.”

Resources you must use for Choice B:

Sample Outline for Choice B:

Paragraph 1: Summarize the arguments of those who oppose teaching slavery, Jim Crow, and racial injustice in the classroom because they claim these teachings are forms of political indoctrination based on woke ideology, CRT, and DEI resulting in an anti-American screed that encourages victimization and learned helplessness. 

Paragraph 2: Your thesis--address the claim that the real purpose of teaching racial injustice is to bypass politics and encourage the movie Black Panther's moral calling for all: To identify the Sunken Place, a state of despair based on dehumanization, so that we can lift each other to strengthen a Utopian Wakanda for all people and to repel the evils from "Outer Wakanda." 

Paragraphs 3-6: Your supporting paragraphs.

Paragraph 7: Your counterargument-rebuttal.

Paragraph 8: Your conclusion, a powerful restatement of your thesis.

Works Cited page with a minimum of 4 sources

Choice C. Glory Vs. The Lost Cause

The Lost Cause is a perversion of African-American history, a fabrication that claims that God blessed slavery and that in the system of slavery, whites and blacks lived in peaceful harmony, but the evil North ruined this harmony through “Northern aggression” and the “violation of state rights.” Write an essay that addresses the claim that the Life of Frederick Douglass and the 1989 movie Glory provides an effective counter-narrative to the heinous mythologies behind The Lost Cause. Be sure to have a Works Cited page in MLA format with 4 sources. 

Resources you must use for Choice C:

Sample Outline for Choice C:

Paragraph 1: Summarize the arguments of those who oppose teaching slavery, Jim Crow, and racial injustice in the classroom because they claim these teachings are forms of political indoctrination based on woke ideology, CRT, and DEI resulting in an anti-American screed that encourages victimization and learned helplessness. 

Paragraph 2: Your thesis--address the claim that the real purpose of teaching racial injustice is to bypass politics and encourage Frederick Douglass' moral calling for all: To identify the Sunken Place, a state of despair based on dehumanization, so that we can lift each other to strengthen democracy for all people, reject historical revisionism such as The Lost Cause, and to never repeat the sins of the past. 

Paragraphs 3-6: Your supporting paragraphs.

Paragraph 7: Your counterargument-rebuttal.

Paragraph 8: Your conclusion, a powerful restatement of your thesis.

Works Cited page with a minimum of 4 sources

Choice D. Misinformation Is the Enemy of the People 

Write an essay that addresses the claim that the misinformation that fuels The Lost Cause as interrogated by the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Clint Smith’s essay “Why Confederate Lies Live On” and the the lies of Alex Jones evident in the HBO Max documentary The Truth Vs. Alex Jones makes a persuasive case that misinformation is the enemy of moral decency and a liberal democracy. Be sure to have a Works Cited page in MLA format with 4 sources. 

Resources you must use for Choice D:

  • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, American Slave PDF.
  • The HBO Max documentary The Truth Vs. Alex Jones (which requires a subscription fee unless I have time to show it to the class)
  • Clint Smith’s essay “Why Confederate Lies Live On”

Sample Outline for Choice D:

Paragraph 1: Summarize the arguments of those who oppose teaching slavery, Jim Crow, and racial injustice in the classroom because they claim these teachings are forms of political indoctrination based on woke ideology, CRT, and DEI resulting in an anti-American screed that encourages victimization and learned helplessness. 

Paragraph 2: Your thesis--address the claim that the real purpose of teaching racial injustice is to bypass politics and encourage Frederick Douglass' moral calling for all: To identify the Sunken Place, a state of despair based on dehumanization, so that we can lift each other to strengthen democracy for all people, resist weaponized misinformation and historical revisionism, and to never repeat the sins of the past. 

Paragraphs 3-6: Your supporting paragraphs.

Paragraph 7: Your counterargument-rebuttal.

Paragraph 8: Your conclusion, a powerful restatement of your thesis.

Works Cited page with a minimum of 4 sources

Choice E. Condescension and Stereotyping

Comparing Jordan Peele’s movie Get Out with Cord Jefferson’s movie American Fiction, write a 1,200-word essay that analyzes the way both films are a critique of white liberal condescension toward African Americans and how this condescension can be a subtle cause of the Sunken Place.  Be sure to have a Works Cited page in MLA format with 4 sources. 

Resources you must use for Choice E:

 

Outline for Choice E:

Paragraph 1: Write an extended definition of white liberal condescension and provide at least one salient example.

Paragraph 2: Your thesis: Explain how both movies present parallel illustrations of white liberal condescension and how this condescension is dehumanizing. 

Paragraphs 3-7: Analyze 5 similar examples of condescension and subtle denigration in the two movies. 

Paragraph 8: Your conclusion, a dramatic restatement of your thesis.  

***

Getting Ideas for Essay Option E from ChatGPT:

Both *Get Out* and *American Fiction* brilliantly expose white liberal condescension toward African Americans, each in its own unique way. Here are seven parallel themes that emerge from the films:

1. **Tokenization of Black Identity**: In *Get Out*, the Armitage family fawns over Chris as though his blackness is a fascinating artifact, with their obsession over his physical traits and cultural background. Similarly, in *American Fiction*, the publishing industry fetishizes Monk’s racial identity, urging him to write stereotypical stories that fit their expectations of Black culture, reducing him to a caricature of "Blackness."

2. **Superficial Support for Black Struggles**: *Get Out* shows the Armitages' fake allyship, as Dean Armitage insists he "would have voted for Obama a third time," using it to assert his "wokeness" without truly engaging in any meaningful way with the real struggles African Americans face. In *American Fiction*, liberal elites gush over surface-level, sensationalized depictions of Black suffering, while ignoring deeper, authentic narratives that would challenge their comfort zones.

3. **Performative Progressivism**: Both films show white liberals who outwardly embrace progressive values but ultimately perpetuate harmful racial dynamics. In *Get Out*, the Armitages host a party where guests, though polite, casually commodify Black people’s bodies and experiences for their benefit. *American Fiction* mirrors this as the publishing world demands Monk write the “right kind” of Black stories, ones that will make white readers feel good about themselves rather than challenge their preconceptions.

4. **Cultural Appropriation**: In *Get Out*, white characters like Jim Hudson covet Black bodies and talents, symbolizing a deeper desire to appropriate Black culture while stripping it of its humanity. *American Fiction* highlights a similar theme as white publishers commodify Black trauma for profit, pushing Monk toward a hyperbolic, exaggerated narrative they deem acceptable for their liberal audiences.

5. **Invisibility of Authentic Black Voices**: In *Get Out*, Chris's discomfort is repeatedly ignored or downplayed by white characters who are too busy projecting their own fantasies onto him. Likewise, in *American Fiction*, Monk’s authentic writing is dismissed as not “Black enough,” demonstrating how white liberal institutions silence or distort genuine Black perspectives to fit their own narratives.

6. **Exploitation of Black Pain**: Both films illustrate how Black pain becomes a spectacle for white liberal consumption. In *Get Out*, the Armitages and their friends exploit Chris’s existence for personal gain, literally hijacking his body for their desires. *American Fiction* critiques the literary world’s obsession with Black trauma, rewarding stories that focus on Black suffering, as long as it fits a palatable formula that keeps white readers entertained and reassured.

7. **Patronizing Control over Black Narratives**: In *Get Out*, the Armitages exert control over Black bodies under the guise of benevolent paternalism, deciding who deserves to be “saved” or uplifted. *American Fiction* reflects this dynamic in the publishing industry, where white editors and publishers dictate what kinds of Black stories get told, maintaining control over the narrative and relegating Black authors to fulfilling stereotypes rather than telling complex, nuanced stories.

Both films starkly reveal how white liberalism, despite its outward proclamations of support, often perpetuates a deeper, more insidious form of condescension and control over African Americans.

Why Do We Study African-American History?

  • We’re in a state of spiritual warfare.
  • The war is spiritual; it’s not theoretical or intellectual theories and intelligence have a lot to do with this war.
  • I don’t teach theories; I teach narratives because narratives are what move us. When I was a kid, Alex Haley's book-turned-into TV series Roots made us talk about African-American history during school recess. As a kid, reading biographies of African-American baseball players who lived in Jim Crow possessed my mind with American history. 
  • Narratives are what move us. 
  • The spiritual war today is about a clash of narratives and what these narratives say about people of color. There are racist trolls who live on various social media platforms. They say that people of color are the blame of all of society's ills--crime, immigration, unemployment, low wages, crumbling education, etc. On the other hand, there are the voices of real history that show people of color in a different light: For examples, we can look to Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks, and Hercules Posey who represent individual excellence, toughness in the face of brutal obstacles, dignity, and the struggle for justice. This clash of narratives defines the spiritual warfare we live in. 
  • You won't find trolls having podcasts or posting on social media about Hercules Posey because he is the antithesis of the trolls' racist propaganda. 
  • When it comes to African-American history, there is a clash of narratives, which has intensified since the advent of social media.
  • There are authentic AA voices that give their history (Jordan Peele, Isabel Wilkerson, David Pilgrim, Donald Glover, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Frederick Douglass) and there are troll voices that spread the misinformation of The Lost Cause ("slavery wasn't so bad"), Replacement Theory (white dominance is withering and must be met with grievance and rage), and Scapegoating (blame people of color for economy, jobs, inflation, immigration, education, and crime).
  • We can say the Lost Cause, Replacement Theory, and Racial Scapegoating narratives exist deep on the social media grids. These narratives are sucking people into their rabbit holes at rapid speed and we are losing people to these false narratives. 
  • Trolls using the Internet perpetuate these false narratives.
  • The false narratives, racist memes, and tropes of today are nothing new to African-Americans. Many of my students have grandparents and great-grandparents who lived in the Jim Crow South. Their lives were immersed in these false narratives day and night. Many of my students’ families packed their bags, left the South, and moved to Los Angeles and other places in what has been called The Great Migration. 
  • Like a recurring cancer, these Jim Crow narratives have returned because of trolls working in various social media platforms.
  • There are troll voices that give false race narratives, which appeal to people with racist appetites. These trolls include SB, TC, AJ, QAnon, 4Chan, and the Proud Boys. 
  • The trolls have normalized racism and false narratives about race. Successful politicians are friendly with these trolls and they are not canceled. Just the opposite is happening. They’re doing well. These politicians have a base hungry for racist narratives and racist dog whistles. 
  • The spiritual warfare tends to be college educated on the side of authentic AA voices and the non-college educated on the troll voices.
  • The spiritual warfare has gotten worse since social media scaled around 2009. 
  • Since 2009, as the business model for YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms makes money by sucking people into the rabbit holes of extremism, people’s brains have been hijacked by extremism and conspiracy doctrines while those same people have rejected legacy media and major institutions such as the CDC. These same people refer to the United States government as "the deep state."
  • People with an appetite for troll narratives and conspiracy theories probably won't like Frederick Douglass' Narrative, Donald Glover's YouTube video "This Is America," or Jordan Peele's movie Get Out, which they will accuse of being an expressions of "Critical Race Theory."
  • America is polarized with college-educated living in their information silos and the non-college educated living in their silos. The latter tend to gravitate toward SB, TC, AJ, QAnon, 4Chan, the Proud Boys, etc. Many of these trolls' followers have been arrested for their role in the January 6 Insurrection at the Capitol. 
  • There are politicians, including state governors, who have outlawed the teaching of African-American history because they claim that such a history is part of a false doctrine called “Critical Race Theory” even when these very politicians push the same troll-driven narratives of The Lost Cause, Replacement Theory, and Racial Scapegoating. The Lost Cause rewrites slavery as "good thing"; Replacement Theory says that white people will no longer be the dominant race; Racial Scapegoating blames people of color for everything--the economy, inflation, education, jobs, immigration, crime, etc. 
  • By studying African-American history in the context of authentic African-American voices on one hand and racist trolls on the other, we are taking part in today's spiritual warfare.

***

Why do we study Jim Crow?

  • To resist the rewriting of history, which is designed to oppress the very people who suffered under Jim Crow.
  • Because rewriting history is morally abhorrent and always has malevolent designs. 
  • Because people are still rewriting history with malevolent intent today.
  • Because the racist ideas that fuel Jim Crow are alive today in an international cult of white nationalists who are dedicated to using social media to spread weaponized misinformation.
  • Because denying representation and silencing voices is morally bankrupt and denies us the truth about ourselves and about people who have been historically oppressed. 
  • Because Jim Crow gave inspiration and instruction to racists throughout the world, for example, Hitler learned segregation techniques from America’s Confederacy creator Jefferson Davis. 
  • Because a moral inventory is essential for society’s moral reform, a process that the Germans have successfully done in the aftermath of World War II. 
  • Historical revisionism kills democracy and inverts morality. For example, the revisionist history of The Lost Cause results in over 200 public schools being named after America's worst racist Jefferson Davis, and millions of Americans praise the criminals involved with the January 6 Insurrection as "American Patriots."
  • Because Jim Crow is built on troll culture and we need to build a society on critical thinking culture.

 

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. 

***

6 causes of the Sunken Place

  1. Physical abuse and violence 
  2. Docile role or persona
  3. Pseudo religious definition as subhuman designed to to serve whites
  4. Erasure of culture and history
  5. Severed from family
  6. Erasure of language

Three Phases of Racism as a Tool of Oppression:

  1. Cynical Use of Religion: Pseudo-Religious Phase: a theory to justify slavery
  2. Propaganda Phase: nonstop weaponized misinformation to reinforce segregation
  3. Revisionist Phase, retell the history; say it wasn't so bad if it existed. Turn it into the Lost Cause. 

Posted at 01:58 PM | | Comments (0)

09/14/2024

Frederick Douglass Notes 9-14-24: 6 Causes of Sunken Place and 3 Phases

Frederick Douglass’ writings show us the 6 causes of the Sunken Place:

 

6 causes of the Sunken Place

 

  1. Physical abuse and violence 
  2. Docile role or persona
  3. Pseudo religious definition as subhuman designed to to serve whites
  4. Erasure of culture and history
  5. Severed from family
  6. Erasure of language

 

Three Phases of Racism as a Tool of Oppression:

  1. Cynical Use of Religion: Pseudo-Religious Phase: a theory to justify slavery
  2. Propaganda Phase: nonstop weaponized misinformation to reinforce segregation
  3. Revisionist Phase, retell the history; say it wasn't so bad if it existed. Turn it into the Lost Cause. 

Posted at 05:53 AM | | Comments (0)

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