Week 8 - Peace and Slavery

The New Testament Background: Selected Documents - 
ed. C.K. Barrett

   This poor book is falling apart. A well used paperback from the 60's...I'm afraid I'm it's last reader. Split in two. A dozen pages unglued from each section. It had a good life, I hope!
   It's a cool selection of passages from Jewish, Roman, and Greek writings - religious, political, historical stuff. Two things really stood out to me.
   1 - Peace and war aren't opposites, at least from the perspective of empires and kingdoms. They're more or less complimentary methods of power and prosperity. The opposite of peace is rebellion or division, which can sometimes lead to war. To "bring peace" means to crush the rebellion or end the opposition. Wars of conquest don't seem to threaten the maintenance of peace.
   2 - The concept of slavery - someone owning someone else - is all over ancient religious writing, Pagan, Jewish, and Christian. It's a central metaphor for the relationship between the divine and human. Is it fair to call it the fundamental "hierarchy" (holy rule) of the ancient world? Did the rapid growth of slavery during the Roman Empire increase the frequency of it's metaphorical use?

Week 7 - Am I addicted to racism?

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America - Ibram X. Kendi

"The Emergence of the Written Record" - Margaret Mitchell

"The Gospel of Mark" -  Joanna Dewey

"The Sayings Source Q" - Luise Schottroff

We Should All Be Feminists - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

    Something isn't working. I don't want to be racist or sexist, but I keep doing racist and sexist things. I keep voting for politicians that create racist and sexist policies. I keep buying racist and sexist products produced in racist and sexist ways. I keep thinking about society, especially poverty and other "social problems," in racist and sexist terms. As Kendi would put it, I keep consuming and producing racist ideas. Surely this must qualify me to be a racist and sexist (which "intersect" with many other of my biases). Uh, what do you call it when you keep doing something even though you don't want (or think you don't want) to do it?
    A personal resolution or determination not to be racist or sexist is a good starting point, but it's not gonna cut it. It's not cutting it for me personally, and it's not cutting it for America. It's necessary but not sufficient, in other words.
   Since the political momentum-high of the 60's civil rights victories, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and what Kendi says was the closest we've ever come to White-Black income equality during the first three years of the 70's, since then racial disparities have peaked, troughed, peaked, troughed, more or less steadily persisting. 
   The summit-achievements of Black business people, artists, scholars, and politicians have been as high as high can be - the Presidency of Barack Obama was the most inspiring political movement of my lifetime - but the overall political-economic power disparity endures, continues, lives on. When times are good for White folks, times are good but not as good for Black folks (see current unemployment figures); when times are bad for White folks, times are worse for Black folks (see Recession figures). Can't the same be said of gender disparity? The achievement list grows but the gap remains.
   The technical term for this is "systemic" inequality, right? Could we also apply the language of addiction and recovery? We all know there are race and class based obstacles, but we deny that these are really racist and classist obstacles. "Blacks and poor people just have a lot more baggage to deal with" (as if White middle class desperate avoidance of that baggage isn't also a coping mechanism). "They just need a little extra help" (re: than White middle class people; as if White middle class people don't have "extra" help). We rationalize and explain it all away. "The old racist guard is dying off; once the young people take over all the racism will go away."
   Most Americans know something about the demographically stratified outcomes of Urban Renewal (funded by both Republicans and Democrats), Suburbanization (roads and infrastructure funded by both), the ballooning Finance Economy (supported by both), the ballooning Labor-Union-less Service Industry (supported by both), the War on Drugs and Mass Incarceration (supported by Pres. Clinton as much as Regan and Bush), Standardized-Testing and No Child Left Behind (mostly Republicans but many Dem's too), Super-Agro-Business and the Packaged Food Industry (supported by both), and Automation/A.I. Development (supported by both). Oh, and of course what many people (Rep and Dem) claimed was the most advanced Health Care system in the world (which didn't cover 1/5 of American adults under 65 - see CDC statistics for 2008). If only we'd had all these single-payer-advocating Democrats 10 years ago, maybe we could have tried something close to what Obama initially proposed.
   The Welfare and Safety-net programs, whatever their original FDR or LBJ intention, seem to have been mostly after-the-fact efforts to help catch-up or "fix" the "broken" non-Whites and poor Whites that never fit into our plans in the first place.
   In my short voting life, I have almost exclusively voted Democratic, and I expect to continue voting Democratic. Democrats since LBJ have done better than Republicans at talking the non-racist talk, but when we look at the results, Democrats haven't much to brag about. Affirmative-action may be the only officially anti-racist Democratic effort of the 80's and 90's, but many White Dem's have quietly sympathized with those who label it "reverse-racism" (Kendi points out frighteningly similar statements about Emancipation, Reconstruction, 15th Amendment, and the Civil Rights Act). Electing President Obama in the 00's and the 10's seemed to be enough for us Dem's to "prove" to ourselves that we're not racist.
   Kendi doesn't describe "anti-racism" as a recovery plan, but I think that might apply. If you are addicted to something, you can't just decide to not be addicted, you have to pursue sobriety. You need a plan, and methods to stay motivated. It's a day by day, step by step struggle. It takes higher power, forces beyond the self, friends, support, accountability, hope.
   Where can I start? The first steps for me might be 1) not to be afraid to admit to being racist or being called racist, 2) partner with others in anti-racist accountability groups, 3) hold hands tightly and ideas lightly, 4) as Kendi says, fix policy, not people, 5) "find a way to get in the way" of mass incarceration (John Lewis).

Week 6.5 notes from Stamped from the Beginning

    Hey yall! I furiously read this amazing book to prepare for a lecture by Dr Kendi last night at the VCU library. Here are some places I marked as I read. This isn't a good summary or representative sample of quotes; just things I wanted to remember.

Stamped from the Beginning - by Ibram Kendi

Prologue

• U.S. Senate floor, April 1860, Jefferson Davis, "This Government was not founded by negroes nor for negroes...[but]...by white men for white men...the inequality of the white and black races [was] stamped from the beginning."
• racist idea: "any concept that regards one racial group as inferior or superior to another racial group in any way"
• segregationist racism: one racial group is superior or inferior by nature (forever and unconditionally)
• assimilationist racism: one racial group is superior or inferior by nurture (temporarily and conditionally)
• anti-racism (more effective term than "non-racism")
• "Each and every identifiable Black group has been subjected to what critical race theorist Kimberle Crenshaw has called "intersectionality" - prejudice stemming from the intersections of racist ideas and other forms of bigotry, such as sexism, classism, ethnocentrism, and homophobia."
• racist theory is born of active oppression and discrimination (i.e., racist policy); usually racial discrimination leads to racist ideas leads to ignorance/hate, not the other way around.

Part 1: Cotton Mather

• Aristotle: "Humanity is divided into two: the masters and the slaves; or, if one prefers it, the Greeks and the Barbarians, those who have the right to command; and those who are born to obey."
• 1377, Ibn Kaldun, "The Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery...because [Negroes] have little that is human and possess attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals...same applies to the Slavs"
• 1453, Gomes Eanes De Zurara, The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, frames enslavement and trade as a Christian missionary venture
• 1516, Bartolome de Las Casas, campaigns against enslavement and abuse of Taino Native Americans and suggests importing enslaved Africans instead. Later, 1561, he regrets advising the king to do this.
• Comedias de Negros - Spanish dramatic genre, stamps Black people as cruel and stupid
• Shakepseare: Aaron from Titus Andronicus and Othello from Othello
• The Masque of Blackness, a play by Ben Jonson in honor of King James and Queen Anne (who performed in the play): twelve African princesses voyage to Britannia to be "made beautiful" by being turned white
• "race" as a word - usage grows in late 15th century and 16th century
• "climate theory" - skin color and racial characteristics are determined by climate
• "curse theory" - Africans are the cursed children of Ham (from story of Noah)
• 1655, Elizabeth Key, Virginia, a biracial enslaved Christian woman, whose white father had intended her manumission, successfully sues for her freedom. Virginia legislators respond, 1622, "all children borne in this country [derive their status from] the condition of the mother."
• Early American racial statements - already "individualizing White negativity and generalizing Black negativity."
• Boyle and Newton - White is the color of light
• 1664, Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory, "make it your chief end in buying and using slaves, to win them to Christ, and save their souls."
• John Locke, the child's unprejudiced understanding is as "white paper," also, "rasa tabula"
• Locke, "slaves, who being captives taken in a just war, are by the right of nature subjected to the absolute dominion and arbitrary power of their masters."
• 1688, Mennonite "Germantown Petition Against Slavery"
• 1676, Bacon and company, "liberty to all Servants and Negroes"
• 1684, Francios Bernier, becomes "first popular classifier of all humans into races"
• Cotton Mather, African souls are "as white and good as those of other nations, but are destroyed for lack of knowledge."
• Witch hunts in Massachusetts, the devil always portrayed as black
• 1696, Mather, A Good Master Well Served, husband over wife, parent over child, master over servant/slave
• Virginia, imposed compulsory slave patrols on non-slaveholding Whites
• Enslaved Africans branded as submissive, ignorant, needing a paternalistic master on the one hand, and violent, devious, needing a policing overseer on the other hand
• 1724, Hugh Jones, William and Mary, "Christianity encourages and orders [African people] to become more humble and better servants."

Part 2: Thomas Jefferson

• 1745, Malachy Postlethwayt, defines the Bristish Empire as "a magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power, on an African foundation"
• 1735, Carl Linnaeus, System Naturae, classifies four varieties of Homo Sapiens with Europeans at the top and Africans at the bottom
• Most leading Enlightenment intellectuals produce both racist ideas and abolitionist ideas
• Polygenesis - different species of humans, with different origins
• Monogenesis - single origin
• "mulatto" from "mulo/mule" branded as "cross-breed" that's "infertile" or has "bad blood"
• Phillis Wheatley, 1767, enslaved African American, talented scholar and writer, "The sable Land of error's darkest night," referring to Africa
• David Hume, 1753, "There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white"
• growing myth of the "extraordinary Negro;" an exception that proves the rule
• Ben Franklin complains to the British crown that it's enslaving Americans and making "American whites black"
• George Washington, when asked to sign an anti-slavery petition, replies, "It would be dangerous to make a frontal attack on a prejudice which is beginning to decrease"
• Thomas Jefferson, "Amalgamation with the other color, produces degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character, can innocently consent"
• 1793, Fugitive Slave Act
• growing myth of "uplift suasion;" if Blacks act according to good white standards, racism will decrease
• Southern representatives and media claim that public discussion of slavery and the presence of free Blacks incite slaves to rebel
• Sarah Baartman is carted and displayed all over Europe as "The Hottentot Venus;" after her death her body is dissected and her bones, genitals, and brains displayed in museum
• Growth of colonization movement (mostly white); England starts colony "for" freed Blacks - Sierra Leone; later Monroe starts American version, Liberia
• TJ, "the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government"
• 1824 American Tract Society, mass producing images of Jesus, always white

Part 3: William Lloyd Garrison

• 1830s, urban penny press turns more and more "to eye-catching bad news, sensationalizing and connecting crime and Blackness and poverty"
• growth of blackface minstrel shows; Thomas "Daddy" Rice perfects the blackface character he calls, Jim Crow
• 1837, U.S. Senate floor, John Calhoun, "the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two [races], is, instead of an evil, a good - a positive good"
• 1839, Dr. Samuel Morton, Crania America, racism based on phrenology
• 1845, Alabama doctor J. Marion Sims experiments on enslaved Black women, becomes "father of modern gynecology"
• 1840s, Richmond, Tredegar begins using enslaved black workers in skilled positions; White workers go on strike; strikers are fired
• 1850, new Fugitive Slave Act
• "Plantation-school novels" respond to Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin
• 1853, Nott and Gliddon, Types of Mankind, polygenesis
• 1857, Dred Scott v Sandford
• 1859, John Brown and interracial battalion capture armory at Harper's Ferry; Brown hailed in abolitionist circles as a martyr like no Black revolutionary had ever been
• 1864, Spencer coins "survival of the fittest," which later develops into "Social Darwinism"
• 1869, Galton, "nature verses nurture," claims that nature is undefeated. In 1883 urges governments toward "eugenics" to prevent "unselected peoples" from reproducing
• 1861, some propose 13th amendment that would "make slavery untouchable and potentially reunite the union"
• Alexander Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, "Cornerstone Speech," "upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth"
• 1861, thousands of enslaved Blacks run north, Union soldiers enforce Fugitive Slave Act during first months of the war; people later considered "contraband;" creation of "contraband camps" for escaped Blacks from the south; one out of four die in terrible conditions
• Lincoln, "my paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery"
• Maryland Unionist constitution sends "thousands of Black children into long-term indentures to their former masters, against their parents' objections"
• Black southerners: do not leave us landless! "do not force us to work for our former masters and call that freedom."
• Fed government sells over 90% of confiscated land to norther Whites
• May 1866, White mobs in Memphis kill 48 Black people, gang-rape Black women and destroy Black-owned property. Authorities blame Black provocation. First in a long line of "race riots" that kill mostly or exclusively Black people.
• Susan B. Anthony, "I would not trust [a Black man] with my rights; degraded, oppressed, himself, he would be more despotic...than ever our Saxon rulers are"
• 1867, Pres Andrew Johnson, "No independent government of any form has every been successful in [Black] hands
• 15th Amendment, no voting discrimination on basis of race; Democrats label it "as a 'nigger superiority bill' meant to establish horrific and barbaric Black supremacy"
• Reconstruction - millions given to railroad companies
• 1873, Colfax, Louisiana, Easter Sunday, 61 Blacks take refuge in courthouse and defend themselves, all killed.
• economic Panic of 1873, many driven into sharecropping
• 1875, Mississippi governor, Adelbert Ames, "a revolution is taking place - by force of arms - and a race are disenfranchised - they are to be returned to a condition of serfdom - an era of second slavery"
• 1876, carnage in Hamburg, South Carolina; Whites shout, "This is the beginning of the redemption of the South!"
• 1876, Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man, "proves" that non-Whites love to kill; initiates "criminology"
• Pres Grant privately tells his cabinet that giving Black men the ballot had been a mistake
• "Bargain of 1877" - Democrats peacefully concede defeat to Rutherford Hayes, while Hayes agrees to withdraw federal troops
• increased lynching in 1880's
• from 1889 to 1929, someone was lynched, on average, every four days

Part 4: W.E.B. Du Bois

• 1883, Supreme Court declares Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional
• Henry Grady, editor of Atlanta Constitution, the "New South," "The friendliness that existed between the master and slave...has survived the war
• 1885, Grady, "The assortment of races is wise and proper, and stands on the platform of equal accommodations for each race but separate"
• 1885, Berlin Conference, European colonizers divide up Africa, claim to bring civilization
• 1890 Congressman William Connell introduces ex-slave pension bill, no traction
• National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association, based in Nashville, TN
• Mississippi adopts anti-poor literacy test with an "understanding clause" which allows registrars to ask applicants to interpret something in the state constitution; the registrar gets to determine if the applicant "interpreted" correctly
• all other southern states follow suit, finding ways to restrict Black voters
• 1892, Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases, "only about a third of lynching victims had 'ever been charged with rape, to say nothing of those who were innocent of the charge'"
• 1892, Anna Julia Cooper, "[the Black woman] is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or unacknowledged factor in both"
• 1895, Booker T. Washington, "Atlanta Compromise," "He asked southern Whites to stop trying to push Blacks out of the house of America, and to allow them to reside comfortably in the basement - to help them rise up, knowing that when they rose, the whole house would rise"
• 1896, Plessy v Ferguson, upholds separate but equal
• Justice Brown, "If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them on the same plane"
• Justice Harlan, lone dissenter, "Our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens"
• Frederick Hoffman, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, claims Blacks headed toward "gradual extinction"
• Racist laws target Blacks, leading to higher policing, arrests, and imprisonment in Black community, leading to labeling Blacks as criminal, leads to more arrests of Blacks, a vicious cycle of racist law leads to racist enforcement leads to more arrests leads to vindication of the law leads to more enforcement
• 1899, Rudyard Kipling, "Take up the White man's burden"
• 1901, George White, the last Black representative voted out of congress, "This Mr. Chairman, is perhaps the negroes' temporary farewell to the American Congress, but let me say, Phoenix-like he will rise up someday and come again"
• 1907, William Dunning, Reconstruction: Political and Economic, "All the forces that made for civilization were dominated by a mass of barbarous freedmen"
• 1918, Ulrich Phillips, American Negro Slavery, claims slavery was unprofitable, planters were paternalistic, and enslaved people were for the most part "robust, amiable, obedient and content"
• Thomas Dixon, Jr, author of "Reconstruction Trilogy" novels, romanticizes "oppression" of White planters during Reconstruction, "the awful suffering of the white man during the dreadful Reconstruction period...to demonstrate to the world that the white man must and shall be supreme"
• 1901, Pres Theodore Roosevelt invites Booker T. Washington to White House for dinner; South Carolina senator Ben "Pitchfork" Tillman responds, "The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again"
• 1906, Pres. Roosevelt, "The greatest existing cause of lynching is the perpetration, especially by black men, of the hideous crime of rape"
• 1908, Jack Johnson wins heavyweight title; media cries for a "Great White Hope"
• 1912, Edgar Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes
• "With every Black first, the blame shifted to those who failed to break away"
• 1915, D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation, Hollywood's first feature-length production, based on Dixon's novel The Clansmen: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan
• Pres Woodrow Wilson, after seeing Birth of a Nation, "It is like writing history with lighting...and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true"
• the Great Migration begins in earnest during WWI, over time "transforming Black America from a primarily southern population to a nation and urban one, and segregationist ideas became nationalized and urbanized in the process"
• 1916, Madison Grant, New York lawyer, The Passing of the Great Race, a detailed racial hierarchy, which Hitler later calls, "my Bible"
• 1919, the "Red Summer," the "deadliest series of White invasion of Black neighborhoods since Reconstruction"
• 1929, Claude Bowers, The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln, "Historians have shrunk from the unhappy tasks of showing us the torture chambers," i.e. southern Whites victims of Black Republicans
• Du Bois, the "wages of whiteness," wealth and opportunity accrued by whites over time due to discrimination against non-whites
• "Slave markets" - term for street corners in northern cities during the Depression where White employers could pick up cheapest possible labor
• 1932-1972, Tuskegee, Alabama, U.S. Public Health Service "Study of Syphilis in the Untreated Negro Male," promises free treatment to Black sharecroppers for "bad blood"; no informed consent; project secretly withholds treatment in order to study effects of syphili
• Home Owners Loan Corporation and Federal Housing Administration, parts of the New Deal, draw "color-coded" maps, institutionalizing housing discrimination
• 1938, Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo, responding to a proposed anti-lynching bill, "If you succeed in the passage of this bill...raping, mobbing, lynching, race riots, and crime will be increased a thousandfold, and upon you garments...will be the blood of the raped..."
• 1939, Gone with the Wind, based on Margaret Mitchell's Pulitzer prize winning 1936 novel, surpasses The Birth of a Nation as the biggest box office hit to date
• Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma, "a great majority of white people in America would be prepared to give the Negro a substantially better deal if they knew the facts"
• 1946, Senator Bilbo of Mississippi, "I call on every red-blooded white man to use any means to keep the niggers away from the polls"
• racial reform a part of the "Truman Doctrine;" Pres Truman wants to brand America as "leader of the free world"
• 1947 Gallup poll, only 6% of White Americans think civil rights for Black Americans should be "secured immediately"
• Dixiecrats run as third party in opposition to Truman's civil rights agenda
• 1944, G.I. Bill helps veterans buy property, start a business, or go to college; Black veterans discriminated against
• 1953, Pres. Eisenhower, referring to Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, tells Chief Justice Warren he understands why southerners try to ensure "their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big black buck"
• 1954 Brown v Board decision, Justice Warren, "segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children"
• Massive Resistance, White Citizens Councils, re-energized KKK
• 1955 murder of Emmett Till
• 1957, E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie, "Slavery was a cruel and barbaric system that annihilated the negro as a person"
• 1961, Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, becomes the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the civil rights movement
• 1958, George Wallace, after losing to Klan endorsed candidate for governor, "Well boys, no other son-of-a-bitch will ever outnigger me again"
• 1963, Wallace, "It is very appropriate that from this cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us time and again down through history..."

Part 5: Angela Davis

• 1964, US Senate, 57 day filibuster against Civil Rights Act
• many opposing the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, after their passage, claim that they have ended discrimination and leveled the playing field
• many believe in race-based achievement gap
• 1960, Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative, claims welfare turns a "self-reliant spiritual being into a dependent animal creature without his knowing it" (at what point was Goldwater ever self-reliant?)
• 1965, Malcom X killed, New York Times headline, "The Apostle of Hate is Dead"
• "minority" and "ghetto" as a name for Negro or Black
• "...just as sexists could only envision male or female supremacy, northern and southern racists could only envision White or Black supremacy"
• 1967, National Welfare Right Association sits-in at chambers of Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Russel Long calls them "Black Brood Mares, Inc."
• MLK "economic bill of rights"
• many Black and White accept "the racist idea of the emasculated Black man, an idea popularized by the ever-popular Moynihan Report of 1965"
• Kerner Commision, in response to race riots across country, "What white Americans have never fully understood - but what the Negro can never forget - is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and what society condones it"
• 1968 Gallup poll, 81% of Americans believe in Nixon's slogan, "Law and order has broken down in the country"
• 1969, Gov Ronald Regan fires Angela Davis from UCLA for being a "communist;" later that year Cal. court rules the anti-Communist regulation unconstitutional
• 1971, Griggs v Duke Power Co.
• 1973, Black poverty lowest level
• 1972, fewer than 350,000 people in prison
• 1976, Rocky, the Great White Hope
• 1966, Regan campaign, "send the welfare bums back to work"
• 1974, Regents v Bakke, strikes down UC Davis med school rule that sets-aside 16 out of 100 slots for "disadvantaged" non-White applicants
• 1971-1980, Klan triples membership
• 1980, Philadelphia, Mississippi, Regan running for Pres, "restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them"
• 1982, Regan introduces "War on Drugs," focuses on policing and arrests, higher sentences and deterent/punitive tactics; this strategy is continued in earnest by Bush and Clinton; arrests and prison population skyrocket
• Regan claims, "put drug abuse on the run through stronger law enforcement"
• 1987, McCleskey v Kemp, the "racially disproportionate impact" of death penalty does not justify overturning death sentence of McClesky
• 1994, Pres Clinton, "three strikes and you're out," works with Congress to pass Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act; billions of dollars to enforcement and prisons; majority of arrests continue to be non-violent drug offenses; mass incarceration
• 1996, California voters ban affirmative action
• Newt Gingrich, "Racism will not disappear by focusing on race"
• "Color-blind"
• Oakland Unified School District recognizes Ebonics as a language derived from West-African languages and English; many people, Black and White, freak out about this (I actually remember this)
• 2011, Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention, "Race is not a biological category that is politically charged...It is a political category that has been disguised as a biological one"
• 2003, No Child Left Behind, demands standardized testing and encourages de-funding of schools that don't meet standards
• 2005, Hurricane Katrina, took 3 days for rescue troops to arrive, longer than it took to deploy troops "to quell the 1992 Rodney King rebellion"
• "From 'civilizers' to standardized-testers, assimilationists have rarely confessed to racism"
• Sen Joe Biden, "He [Obama] is the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy"
• folk-theories of Black cultural inferiority, "legacy of defeat," "post-traumatic slave syndrome," "Hood Disease," "lack of personal responsibility"
• Birtherism, Pres Obama under "searing nativity microscope"

Epilogue

• "The Great Recession reduced the median annual Black household income by 11 percent, compared to 5 percent for Whites."
• "Defending racist policy by belittling Black folk: that had been the vocation of producers of racist ideas for nearly six centuries"
• "a myth continuously produced and reproduced by racists and antiracists alike: that racism materially benefits the majority of White people, that White people would not gain in the reconstruction of an antiracist America...It is not coincidental that slavery kept the vast majority of southern Whites poor. It is not coincidental that more White Americans thrived during the antiracist movements from the 1930s to the 1970s than ever before or since...."
• "Individual Blacks are not race representatives. They are not responsible for those Americans who hold racist ideas."
• "Racist ideas have always been the public relations arm of the company of racial discriminators and their products: racial disparities."

Week 6 - Seeds

The Triumph of Seeds - Thor Hanson
From the Maccabees to the Mishnah - Shaye Cohen
The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus - Raymond Brown

   Is there a metaphor more important to Jesus than seeds? Than the plant growth process: seed to plant to fruit? Sow and reap? It's such "fertile ground," wonk wonk. Judge a tree by its fruit...Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles?...If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mountain...The harvest is plenty but the laborers are few...Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains a single grain...I am the true vine...tiny mustard seed into mustard shrub...weeds in the wheat...a sower went out to sow...laborers in the vineyard...farmer storing up grain...

   The Triumph of Seeds is a wonderful, fun-loving book with a slightly misleading title. Seeds evolved from spores and are now much more common, and human life and culture depend on seeds. Does this mean seeds have triumphed? 
   "Triumph" implies victory, but as Hanson explains, there is no finish line for an evolutionary race, no summit point where a spectator could stop and declare triumph to a species or strategy.
   "My mistake lay in assuming that seeds had perfected the 'best' methods for storing energy. I wanted to think that natural selection had eliminated the various possibilities until only one or at most several strategies remained, each adapted to a particular environment. The reality is far more complicated and far more interesting, like evolution itself - an endless and elegant articulation of the possible."
   This is a great read! Clear explanations, dramatic anecdotes, mind-blowing stats.

• Seeds are baby plants, in a box, with a lunch. Sometimes they've already eaten their lunch when they open their box; sometimes they've eaten a little bit; sometimes they've yet to eat any.
• Seeds come packed with desiccated cells ready to expand, like a bag of balloons in your pocket. Just add water! Cell division comes later.
• All primates eat fruit. And, evidence of cooking grains goes back hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps before homo sapiens. To what extent, or in what ways, have humans and seed-plants co-evolved?
• The spore grows a gametophyte, which produces both eggs and sperm. The sperm swim off in muddy water toward other gametophytes. A some point plants adapted to produce separate male and female spores, then later adapted to hold onto the female spore and only release the male, like pollen. There's the proto-seed, a fertilized egg right there on the mother plant.
• Gymnosperm - "naked seed"
• Angiosperm - "seed in a vessel" 
• An "inactive" seed just needs water and soil. A dormant seed resists germination until other specific conditions are right - temperature, soil composition, angle of sunlight, fire, time, whatever. Dormancy is crazy! At one point Hanson says something like (I'm having trouble finding it), sometimes the only way to know if a seed is alive or dead is to plant it and wait.
• Hard seed shells and super strong rodent teeth definitely co-evolved.
• Capsaisin, what makes hot peppers hot, developed as an anti-fungal defense.
• Caffeine in plants seems sometimes to ward off pests, sometimes to inhibit the growth of other plants nearby, sometimes to attract and re-attract honey bees. Bees addicted to coffee? Yes!
• "Fruit influences our behavior because it evolved to do so..."
•  I didn't know cotton is basically seed hair - the fibers grow out from the seed. A single seed can have 20,000 fibers, and an average boll contains 32 seeds. If you "lined up [the strands in a boll] end to end, they would stretch more than twenty miles."

    If Jesus was a seed, what was his soil? Shaye Cohen's From Maccabees to the Mishnah can help with that! Another great non-fiction writer! Dad lent this to me to replace Between the Testaments, which he said is good, just old (with old information).
   Just a few notes:

• Hellenization wasn't simply the hellenising of non-Greek cultures; it was the co-evolution of many cultures. Lots of exchange.
• Why didn't sects develop in pre-exilic Israel? Maybe they did? Before the exile, the basic organizational boundary of Israelite religion was tribal. Israel, at least as an ideal, was a big ethnic and political unit. Second Temple Judaism still emphasized family and clan, but "Israel" was less obviously defined.
• "Judaism" became, to some extent, a supra-national and even supra-ethnic religion. For example, many people "converted" to Judaism during the Second Temple period.
• The synagogue developed in different places in different times to fill local needs. Communal prayer and piety, local organization, study of the scriptures. Pharisees and teachers of the law were important members but not usually controlling forces.
• Jews had to figure out how to follow the law even when they weren't in proximity to the Temple. This spurred the development of non-cultic personal piety and the oral law.
• Judaism and other hellenistic cultures believed that they were in a "post-classical age." The standards had been set. It was time to study and interpret. During and especially after the canonization of the scriptures, study of God's Word grew in importance. Scriptural study wasn't seen as being in competition with the Temple cult, but after Herod's Temple was destroyed, the written word basically replaced the Temple as the center of the religion. 
• Most Jews had a push-pull, "love-hate," relationship with the politically powerful priesthood, and by association, the Temple. The Greeks, Maccabees, and Romans all "gave" power to, and demanded power from, the high priest.

   Raymond Brown wrote this short book with a long title, The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus, in the early 70's, on the verge of what he thought would be a period of "painful assimilation of the implications of biblical criticism for Catholic doctrine, theology, and practice." Is he still alive? What does he think about the past 40 years? In our library here we have his impressive commentaries on the Birth and the Death of the Messiah, so - regardless of what the church has done with biblical criticism - I guess this little book was the beginning of something big for him personally.
   A few questions:

• Are there any good arguments that Paul and the writers of the other epistles knew stories about the virgin birth? Brown mentions a couple possibilities but not arguments.
• Brown mentions the wealth of parallels to the story: God miraculously impregnates mortal woman to birth special son. But he claims that the Christian story is unique in eliminating the sexual nature of the conception. Is that true? And is it fair to call the biblical language non-sexual? "The holy Spirit will come upon you and the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God."
• To Paul and the early Christians, could there have been such a thing as a non-bodily resurrection? Wasn't that a contradiction in terms? I guess what I'm asking is, if Jesus appeared to his disciples while they were normally awake (i.e., not dreaming or in prayer), how else could they have explained it other than "resurrection?" Could they have called it a "vision?"
• Also, did any Jews think the Messiah would resurrect first and then everyone else later? Wasn't judgment day the crucial focus of resurrection? The Messiah first-fruits-of-the-resurrection formula sounds like a disciple coming to terms with 1) I just saw Jesus but 2) the world isn't ending.

 

Week 5.5 - suseJ

   "There is simply so much material in the Gospels that a model - an analogous figure from the period, or...a type of socio-political-religious role...[from Jesus' day] - really helps...In fact, it is probably not possible to write the history of anything without some sort of model in mind...So long as the historian is honest about what the model is and then shows how he or she sifts the data, this is not a bad way to work, since anyone can come along later and dispute the model." -Jesus the Baptist, R. Vinson
   
   Reading this reminded me of something Chesterton says in his book about St. Francis: (I'm paraphrasing) yes, you can view Francis as a second Jesus, but you can also view Jesus as a second Francis. Initially I was confused and scandalized by such a statement (which pleased Chesterton, I'm sure), but, he intends it as spur to understanding. We need models, and we especially love precursors. What if we spelled Jesus backwards, and consciously did what we so often unconsciously do? Work anachronistically.
   A historian reading the Gospels, looking for the original "pre-Christian" words and deeds of Jesus, has to work so hard to peel back layers of Christian confession and context. I'm super grateful to all those making the effort; the results are enlightening and inspiring. But is there a way to leverage the models already present in the Gospels and Christian history? Can 2000 years of Jesus-hypotheses and experimental discipleship help the historian in any way? not as a replacement of the textual methods already developed, but as a treasure trove of psychological and sociological models?

Week 5 - Civil Rights Apocalypse

March - Vol 2 and 3 - John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, Nate Powell

Jesus the Baptist - Richard Vinson (my dad!)

   What is the apocalypse? A vision of the transition between the current world and the future one; out with the old, in with the new; in the end is our beginning; no one puts new wine into old wineskins. Is that an accurate definition?
   What is apocalyptic faith? Belief that the vision is true, accompanied by a lifestyle that prepares for, hastens, or participates in the end/beginning.
   A sample outline of apocalyptic faith:

• Step 1 - Suffering. A group of people, or the entire world, is suffering the effects of sin, oppression, corruption, demonic powers, an evil god or gods, the inevitable degeneration in the succesion of ages since the first Golden Age, or something like that.
• Step 2 - Vision. A prophet or many prophets have a vision of the end of this "evil and adulterous" generation and the beginning of a new world - a good and just world. The transition may be dramatic, violent, with lots of natural disaters - earthquakes, moon turns to blood, solar eclipse, stars fall from the sky. The transition may involve a final battle with lots of trumpets, and/or a final judgment where God clears everything up and sorts everything out. The transition may take a long time, or it may be swift and sudden. Perhaps the new world is really a return to the original Golden Age. Perhaps the new world continues in time, or perhaps it is eternal, with no death or change.
• Step 3 - Preaching. The prophets share this vision with their community.
• Step 4  - Preparation and Participation. The community gets ready for the end of the world! Prayer, mutual support, continued preaching to anyone who will listen, and actions that might hasten the end or help it along.

What am I leaving out? Does this look right?

   Reading March, that short selection Malcom X's speeches (week 2), and some of the debates about whether "historical Jesus" was apocalyptic or not got me thinking about this. So many of the famous civil rights sayings seem to fit this apocalyptic pattern. I dunno if it's accurate to call the following quotes "apocalyptic," but maybe they are on the spectrum.
   "The lie won't live forever." "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." "We shall overcome someday."
   Prophets and people had a vision of a just world, and a trust that God was working toward that end, and the combination of that vision and trust produced amazing strength, resilience, and perseverance.

   Have you read March? Go check it out from the library! Give it to your uncle for his birthday. It's awesome. A graphic novel in three volumes, March is the story of John Lewis's first 25 years. Actually the book opens with President Obama's Innauguration day, 2009, and Lewis starts to tell some growing-up stories to a mother and her two sons, constituents from his district in Georgia visiting his office early before the ceremony. The rest is history, jam-packed history. 
   Growing up on the farm in Pike County, Alabama (down the road from where my grandmother grew up); preaching to the chickens; obsessed with school; his stifled hope to integrate Troy State; seminary in Nashville; church at First Baptist (Capitol Hill) with Rev. Kelly Miller Smith (whose son is pastor there now); sit-ins, arrests, and beatings while working with the Nashville Student Movement; joining and later chairing the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Freedom Rides with CORE; personally escorted by Bull Connor back to the Tennessee line in the middle of the night; arrested in Mississippi and jailed at Parchman Farm for a month; more beatings; more arrests; friends murdered; the march on Washington; the "big six;" a trip to Africa; Mississippi freedom summer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (that story blew my mind); Birmingham; Selma; so much more; all this by the time he was 25 years old.

   John Lewis is from Alabama, and he's written some books. Guess what, my dad is from Alabama and he's written some books too! How's that for a transition!
   Jesus the Baptist is unpublished but I think it would be a great introduction to a "historical Jesus" class or section. Dad sent it to me to help me get oriented. He gives a short and sweet review of the historical Jesus literature and methods, sets out his own historical and textual criteria for researching Jesus, and then dives right in to John the Baptist and Jesus. Some of his most fascinating points:

• Immersion in water is spelled out in Leviticus as part of the ritual cleansing process. In second temple Judaism, for some Jews at least, immersion developed as moral cleansing as well as ritual. And in the Qumran community, which rejected the Temple leadership and the efficacy of it's sacrifices, immersion was essential to atonement and righteousness. So, John the Baptist wasn't coming from way way out in left field with the "baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins." But with immersion you dunk yourself, or wash yourself. John apparently dunked other people. That was wierd.
• How come John is called the Baptist, and Paul and Acts reference baptism with complete comfort, but Jesus barely mentions baptism? (a reference in John to Jesus and his disciples baptising - although it notes that his disciples were actually doing the baptising; and Jesus asking his ambitious disciples, are you willing to be baptised with the baptism I'm about to get dunked into?) Dad makes some good arguments that Jesus and his disciples continued John's repentance-baptism formula.
• Jesus seems to authorize and command his disciples to do everything he is doing (healing, exorcising, preaching). That is very wierd for a religious leader of his day or any day.
• Jesus' move from the wilderness to Galilee is loosely connected to John's arrest by Herod Antipas. If John's arrest had anything to do with Jesus' motivation, then Jesus was trying to stick it to the man, so to speak. Antipas' ruling seat was in Galilee. You might see the Galilean move as a precursor to "set[ting] his face to go to Jerusalem."
• Take up your cross. Dad did an extensive survey of literature from the Greco-Roman-Jewish world, pre-Jesus, to see if there was any metaphorical usage of "cross" or "crucifixion." Of the hundreds of entries, he found only one figurative usage - as a curse in one of Plautus' plays. All the other uses were literal. In fact, some authors avoided the word, calling it the "extreme penalty" or the "servile death." Crucifixion was an inefficient and labor intensive way to execute someone; everyone realized it was intentionally gratuitous. It was reserved mainly for rebels -- rebelious slaves or rebelious subjects. By law, roman citizens could not be crucified. So when Jesus told his disciples "if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross" (and the saying passes dad's historical-textual criteria [it doesn't pass in the Jesus Seminar]), he probably meant, "you need to be ready to die at the hands of the Romans." And dad's extension of that is, "you need to be ready to die, because we're gonna protest in the Temple at Passover (and everyone knew the Romans beefed up security then) and we will get killed for insurrection."