Thoughts on Video

Thoughts on Video (572 words - Present)

I’m going to write this reaction to the video Race: The Power of Illusion without trying to be too pessimistic. For the most part in life, I can be quite optimistic, and very enthusiastic about working toward change. However, there are admittedly times when I get very discouraged about our country’s movement toward real change. See, what I kept coming back to throughout the movie was the thought that our present day system of prejudice, racism and intolerance still has many of the same trappings of 50, 100, or even 200 years ago.

As noted in the movie, slavery was not a given in the United States, and had nothing to do with Africans as a foundation. Rather, African slavery didn’t get its foothold until there was a real economic interest in producing crops for export to Europe. But people couldn’t all just be soothed by the thought that subjugating a group of people for our own needs would be all right because we’re making a few bucks. Instead, they needed science to step in and tell us that it was okay, because these men and women had no other plot in life anyway. And this message never really died, it only changed over time. As we moved closer to the Civil War, the message was that African American’s were not only mentally inferior, but that they were morally inferior, and needed whites to keep them from making bad choices. They were akin to a group of teenagers with 5 year-old brains; sexually deviant and unable to make their own lunch. Jump ahead to the present day and we’re still making excuses. Why work to clean up neighborhoods when African Americans simply don’t care? Look at their graduation rates. Look at the levels of violence. Look at the levels of single family homes and drug use. We use so many excuses not to care when we know they are all just that, excuses. Why is it that African Americans, and pretty much every other minority for that matter, have struggled so? Because we have undercut them every step of the way.

One other quick example of how things are intertwined is to parallel the movement of African Americans to that of American Indians. American Indians went from free reign of the land for lets say, thousands of years. Then whites came in and they had free reign of most of the land. From there they went to fighting for the land, to agreeing to inhabit a lot of the land, to agreeing to inhabit a little of the land, to trying to move to new parts of the land, to being stuck on reservations where they had nothing left. That was a quick and dirty version, but bear with me. Now look at African Americans. They were brought to this land and forced to work under slavery for 250 years. Then they went from settling in the South on farms, to having large groups migrate to Northern cities, to being moved into the inner cities, to moving into the suburbs and left behind, to now being moved out of the desirable city neighborhoods today so they can be gentrified. Actually, it’s almost like the reverse of the American Indian saga in a way. White kept following the American Indian wherever they went, stripping them of their land. With African Americans, Whites flee every time African Americans try to move into their territory.

Matt