Medium Post due 9/9

Before reading this week’s material, I had a general idea of who WEB Dubois is and his work from High School. Though I have not seen the film, I had heard of The Birth of a Nation in the context of racism, film studies, and the fact that it was the first movie ever shown in the White House by Woodrow Wilson. The only material that was entirely new to me was “Look, a Negro!” How the New World African Became an Object of History. Pinn’s text was also the most engaging for me to read, simply because there was so much there. From the story of Genesis 9:20 (a story that I have never heard in my twelve years of public school or six years of religious schooling) to Pinn’s synthesis of Fannon’s idea that Black people have become “fixed” in historical space- there was so much to unpack, and so much that I had never come close to grasping. In the context of this class, the story from Genesis and the subsequent theological justification for slavery is so telling. Showing both the extent people would use religion and pseudoscience to justify bigotry and European’s the deep rooted fears of “others”. Pinn continuously touches on this almost cyclical dehumanization of Black people. Most poignantly, he notes: as slavery became synonymous with Blackness, the sense that Black people were subhuman was further enforced. Just the sheer amount of knowledge (both facts and theories) that I was able to pick up from this week’s materials stresses the gaps in my education as well as the merits of first-hand perspective. Meaning, one reason that I never learned about color symbolism or Louis Agassi in school was that leaning about such things did not fit the perspective of the people in Texas writing our textbooks.