{"id":49608,"date":"2016-10-25T20:06:38","date_gmt":"2016-10-25T20:06:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=49608"},"modified":"2016-10-25T20:12:18","modified_gmt":"2016-10-25T20:12:18","slug":"how-america-bought-and-sold-racism-and-why-it-still-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=49608","title":{"rendered":"How America Bought and Sold Racism, and Why It Still\u00a0Matters"},"content":{"rendered":"

How America Bought and Sold Racism, and Why It Still\u00a0Matters<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Collectors Weekly<\/a>
\n2015-11-10<\/p>\n

Lisa Hix<\/strong><\/a>, Associated Editor<\/p>\n

Today, very few white Americans openly celebrate the horrors of black enslavement\u2014most refuse to recognize the brutal nature of the institution or actively seek to distance themselves from it.\u00a0\u201cThe modern American sees slavery as a regrettable period when blacks worked without wages,\u201d writes Dr. David Pilgrim<\/a>, the Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion and a sociology professor at Ferris State University and the author of Understanding Jim Crow: Using Racist Memorabilia to Teach Tolerance and Promote Social Justice<\/em><\/a>, who has spent his life studying the artifacts that have perpetuated racist stereotypes.<\/p>\n

The urge to forget this\u00a0stain on our nation\u2019s history is everywhere. In Texas<\/a>, McGraw-Hill\u00a0recently distributed a high-school geography textbook that refers to American slaves as immigrant workers. At Southern plantation museums that romanticize the idea of genteel antebellum culture, the bleak and violent reality of enslaved plantation life is whitewashed and glossed over. Discussions about how slavery led to modern-day racism are often met with white defensiveness. How many times have black people heard this line? \u201cSlavery happened a long time ago. You need to get over it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The truth is when President Lincoln<\/a> signed the Emancipation Proclamation<\/a> in January 1863, the economic subjugation of African Americans, and the terrorism used to maintain it, did not come to a grinding halt. The Jim Crow<\/a> racial caste system that emerged 12 years\u00a0after the Civil War<\/a> ended in 1865 was\u00a0just as violent and oppressive as slavery\u2014and it lasted nearly a century. Up through Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s assassination<\/a> in 1968,\u00a0black people across the country, in Northern states as well as Southern ones, were routinely humiliated, menaced, tortured and beaten to death, and blocked from participating in business and public life. Thanks to smartphone and social-media technology, we\u2019re seeing how such\u00a0violence\u00a0continues in 2015, 50 years after the height of the Civil Rights Movement<\/a>…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nPuerto Rican actress Rita Moreno<\/a> played the \u201ctragic mulatto<\/a>\u201d in the 1960 film \u201cThis Rebel Breed<\/a>.\u201d(From Understanding Jim Crow<\/em><\/a>)<\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

…Another caricature was inflicted upon mixed-race women: the \u201ctragic mulatto<\/a>,\u201d which is based on the \u201cone-drop rule<\/a>\u201d that says any African American blood in your lineage makes you a black person. In this story, the mixed-race woman grows up living as a privileged white person. When her white father dies, her black heritage is revealed, and she\u2019s enslaved and subjected to violence by white men. Rejected by both racial groups, she\u2019s often suicidal and alcoholic, and she in particular loathes her black side.<\/p>\n

Reality, of course, tells a different story. In Understanding Jim Crow<\/em>, Pilgrim says it\u2019s true that in the days of slavery, mixed-race slaves (usually the illegitimate sons and daughters of their owners), sometimes sold for higher prices, and masters saw these women as particularly sexually desirable, claiming their beauty drove them to rape. Enslaved mixed-race women were also frequently sold into prostitution, and freeborn mixed-race women sometimes became the mistresses of white men under the \u201cpla\u00e7age<\/a> system.\u201d Some people with \u201cNegro blood\u201d worked to \u201cpass<\/a>\u201d as whites, which helped them get better education, pay, and homes. But throughout history, mixed-race people\u2014who had the slur \u201cmongrels\u201d hurled at them by whites\u2014have been well accepted in the black community: Take for example, W.E.B. Du Bois<\/a>, Booker T. Washington<\/a>, Mary Church Terrell<\/a>, Thurgood Marshall<\/a>, Malcolm X<\/a>, Louis Farrakhan<\/a>, Langston Hughes<\/a>, and Billie Holiday<\/a>…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How America Bought and Sold Racism, and Why It Still\u00a0Matters Collectors Weekly 2015-11-10 Lisa Hix, Associated Editor Today, very few white Americans openly celebrate the horrors of black enslavement\u2014most refuse to recognize the brutal nature of the institution or actively seek to distance themselves from it.\u00a0\u201cThe modern American sees slavery as a regrettable period when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8413,459,1196,8,6462,6940,20],"tags":[25297,25299,25298],"class_list":["post-49608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-communications","category-history","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-slavery","category-usa","tag-collectors-weekly","tag-david-pilgrim","tag-lisa-hix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49608"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49608\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49610,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49608\/revisions\/49610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}