Confronting the Contradictions of America’s Past-gctid52724

[Ajamu]

Confronting the Contradictions of America's Past

  June 29, 2012

Full Show: Confronting the Contradictions of America

   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

                  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.