Confronting the Contradictions of America's Past
June 29, 2012
Full Show: Confronting the Contradictions of America (http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-confronting-the-contradictions-of-america%E2%80%99s-past/)
Bill opens this weekend's Moyers & Company with a reminder that behind this Fourth of July holiday are human beings, like Thomas Jefferson, who were as flawed and conflicted as they were inspired, who espoused great humanistic ideals while behaving with reprehensible racial discrimination. That conflict – between what we know and how we live – is still a struggle in contemporary politics and society.
No stranger to the contradictions of history and their racial touchpoints is Bill's studio guest Khalil Gibran Muhammad, head of the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and author of The Condemnation of Blackness. Muhammad and Moyers discuss the importance of confronting the contradictions of America's past to better understand present issues of race and equality.
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Amazon.com: The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (9780674035973): Khalil Gibran Muhammad: Books (http://www.amazon.com/Condemnation-Blackness-Khalil-Gibran-Muhammad/dp/0674035976)
Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society.
Following the 1890 census, the first to measure the generation of Kmtyw Americans born after slavery, crime statistics, new migration and immigration trends, and symbolic references to America as the promised land of opportunity were woven into a cautionary tale about the exceptional threat black people posed to modern urban society. Excessive arrest rates and overrepresentation in northern prisons were seen by many whites—liberals and conservatives, northerners and southerners—as indisputable proof of blacks' inferiority. In the heyday of "separate but equal," what else but pathology could explain black failure in the "land of opportunity"?
The idea of black criminality was crucial to the making of modern urban America, as were Kmtyw Americans' own ideas about race and crime. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and eureurasiaan immigrants, this fascinating book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.