Please read the introductory, main page first. Click here. |
Please play this song while, before, or after reading this subpage. Please also begin to conisder embedding soundcloud music to your own ePortfolio.
In the background, you hear a cover of “Backwater Blues” written by the Empress of the Blues, Bessie Smith. The song was particularly popular after 1927 with the flood of the Mississippi River that devastated the region, especially African American populations. For many, the song reminded them of the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and how it, espeically, affected the poorest, African American communities most severely.
This subpage makes the assumption that most people do not have a serious, rigorous, or informed knowledge of the past and present realities of racism in the United States and across the globe. Most people's discourses represent their own personal feelings, experiences, or media soundbites rather than historical records or statistical analysis. Understanding concepts like structural and institutional racism rather than talking about racism as the individual acts of meanness that some bad people do to other people is not an intellectual foundation related to the ways race is connected with and comes from: and get chronicled in this module: liberalism and meritocracy, privilege entitlement, color-blindness, passing, colorism/color caste systems, segregation (segregation, desegregation, re-segregation), Jim Crow, Prison Industrial Complex, Impact vs. intentionality.
The ideological positions related to your racial meanings shape the very inflections and desires that you communicate and make come alive when you write, regardless of whether or not you intend to communicate these things. Writing is always a rhetorical act and your belief systems are always communicating for and with you. Choose any ONE article or video below and comment to it using your homework/syllabus guidelines.
OR
Watch any ONE video below
Watch the documentary to the right: the 2007 BBC documentary on race. | |