Something Shiny!

A couple weeks ago, we took up the subject of legalized segregation in the nineteenth-century South. We talked about Jim Crow and how that played out at the time, as well as how the mindset of racism permeated society then and now. We discussed lynching and how it wasn’t just about killing or death, but how it was a public spectacle and how (white) people would come from miles around to watch. I brought in a copy of “White Women, Black Men,” by Martha Hodes, and read part of her epilogue. In it, she talks about how she went about researching nineteenth-century marriages between white women and black men. She recalls a conversation she had with a fellow researcher, a white woman, in which the scholar told Hodes she’d never find anything on the topic. Hodes says, “When I told her that I already had, she admonished me to ‘make sure you say they’re trash’ about the white women involved, thereby helping to prove the legacy of part of my argument.” It’s a powerful and disturbing message that those ideas linger still today. After I’d read that quote aloud in my last class, one of my students, a young white woman raised her hand. For a split second I wondered what she’d say, how she would react to what Hodes had to say, or what about that disturbing idea had moved her to raise her hand. She took a deep breath and began to talk: “Like, when I, like, hear things like that? It, like, I dunno… it makes me, like… sad.” And to emphasize how much racism makes her sad, she… she stuck her lower lip out.

It was one of those, like, profound moments. And stuff.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 9:25 am and is filed under LOL, School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.