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[taeroberts]

Materialism contends that the physical world impacts and sets constraints on human behavior. The materialists believe that human behavior is part of nature and therefore, it can be understood by using the methods of natural science

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/culturalanthropology/chapter/cultural-materialism/

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“Beyond the continued assault on scientific racism, however, there was ‘no institutional effort by the AAA to end racial discrimination against the people who were the primary subject of anthropology’...Active participation in the civil rights movement or other forms of political struggle was left up to individuals” (Anderson 126)

(https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6834580/mediaviewer/rm4163653888)

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Confederate Monument Law Upheld By Alabama Supreme Court

The Alabama Supreme Court said the lower court erred earlier this year when it ruled the city of Birmingham had constitutional rights to free speech. The city must now pay a $25,000 fine.

“Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a statement that the Supreme Court ruling was "the correct conclusion," adding: "The Supreme Court's ruling is a victory for the Alabama law which seeks to protect historical monuments. The City of Birmingham acted unlawfully when it erected barriers to obstruct the view of the 114-year-old Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Linn Park” (Booker)

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How False Beliefs in Physical Racial Difference Still Live in Medicine Today

Biological fallacies were used to justify slavery. Why can’t doctors let them go?

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Context

While doing the readings for this week, one thing that I felt would help my understanding was researching a bit more about the Civil Rights Movement’s timeline to see how it overlaps with the timeline of the readings specifically in regards to the Black Power movement and Pan-African movements which attempted to link Black lineage in America to Africa at the same time that Herskovits was writing about this same continuum.

Below are a few events which were mentioned in the readings and/or seemed relevant. All events are from this Black History Month Timeline (https://www.fs.fed.us/people/aasg/calendar/timeline.html). 

1619 August 20. Twenty Africans arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, aboard a Dutch ship. They were the first blacks to be forcibly settled as involuntary laborers in the North American British Colonies.

1808 January 1. The federal law prohibiting the importation of African slaves went into effect. It was largely circumvented.

1863 January 1. The Emancipation Proclamation freed all slaves in states in rebellion against the United States.

1918 February 19-21. The First Pan-African Congress met in Paris, France, under the guidance of W. E. B. Du Bois.

1920 August 1-2. The national convention of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Society met in New York City. Garvey would be charged with mail fraud in 1923. He was convicted in 1925 and deported in 1927 after serving time in prison.

1930 Herskovits’ “The Negro in the New World: The Statement of a Problem”

1954 May 17. In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the Supreme Court completed overturning legal school segregation at all levels.

1966 July 1-9. CORE endorsed the concept "Black Power." SNCC also adopted it. SCLC did not and the NAACP emphatically did not.

1991 Scott’s “That Event, This Memory: Notes on the Anthropology of African Diasporas in the New World”

2003 Price & Price’s The Root of Roots or, How Afro-American Anthropology Got Its Start

[taeroberts]

“The biologist, working with the short-lived lower forms of life, can breed them in great numbers and through many generations, and thus observe the process of heredity. He can cross various types at will, and in numbers permitting statistical analysis of his results. Not so the student of human biology. His laboratory is the world over, and he can only best approximate laboratory conditions” (Melville Herskovits, The Negro in the New World, 146-147)

Photo:

Allen, E.B. “RACE: Are We So Different? Exhibit Will Launch Dialogue Examining an Issue Critical to Flint's Future.” The HUB Flint, 2 Aug. 2018, www.thehubflint.com/race-exhibit-will-launch-dialogue-examining-an-issue-critical-to-flints-future/.