Question.1274 - Now that you have read narratives in several genres: fiction and nonfiction (essay), long and short-form, it's time for you to write your own. Your narrative should unpack some aspect of the world and/or systems you've encountered. It should be personal but not personal to the extent you'd be uncomfortable sharing it with an audience. You can incorporate author(s) and work(s) from this class that have most influenced your writing and your response to this exercise (use APA style citations/references). Share something you learned from an author and their work(s). Your narrative should be approximately half a page (500 wds). It should be Times New Roman, 12 point type, double spaced. And share your document with me. Pro-tip: your narrative might be align with the topic of your final project, if this is the case, then feel free to repurpose parts of your narrative in your final paper.
Answer Below:
A Narrative Exercise Lawrence Butts San Jos? State University AFAM 22: The Humanities in African American Culture Professor Carmen Saleh March 26th, 2024 A Narrative Exercise Topic: The Myth of Northern Innocence.? Genre: Personal Essay Influenced by: Seeing White (Scene on Radio) by John Biewen, especially the conversation with Tim Tyson about Northern racism. Lesson Learned: Racism isn't a regional issue, it's deeply embedded in American society. As a Black man growing up in the urban lands, I believed the myth of Northern innocence while building the perceptions about the South as the embodiment of racism, more like a place where segregation and bigotry thrived (this toxic myth tends to encourage the white people in the North to see themselves as people who were free from racism, as though African American from the pre-Civil War North); although we learned that the Civil Rights battles were fought in the South, and felt a sense of ethical superiority while considering the podcast "S2 E5: Little War on the Prairie," wherein Tim Tyson (2017) (a historian) tends to confront this uncomfortable truth pertaining racism not being a Southern problem, rather an American one. As there was no evidence of white people opposing the Civil War since General Pickett, when he came to Kinston, North Carolina, around the early 1860s, he hanged 22 local white boys on the courthouse lawn only because they were loyal to the United States government (Pujara & Cox, 2020).? Another example could be how John Langston suffered in Cincinnati, Ohio, around the early 1840s before the Civil War broke out, wherein the African Americans were subjected to vulnerability as their houses, churches, schools, and businesses were burnt down (Lang, 2019). Those who managed to escape from Cincinnati's devastation had fled to Canaan, New Hampshire, trying to form an abolitionist community, which was also brought down.?With this understanding, drawing in Tim's notion from the podcast that further extended history in terms of implying how the comments had bombarded with comments pertaining to welfare-seeking Black people from Chicago moving to Wisconsin resonated deeply; this mirrors my own personal experience of microaggressions towards Black classmates who received financial aid, the discomfort with Black economic mobility felt uncomfortably similar to the Jim South I thought we'd transcended. The riots in and around New Haven, Philadelphia, and Connecticut were organized by the mayors of the town to burn down the homes of African Americans that included rape and castration during 1834 (Lang, 2019; Lane, 1986). The idea of "polite racism" in the North also struck a chord. Conversations about race were often avoided, replaced by a colorblind ideology that ignored the racial realities people of color faced. This supposed progressiveness felt like a way to avoid culpability and maintain a sanitized self-image. Tyson's observation about the North loving "the race but hating the people" compared to the South hating "the race but loving the people" offered a new perspective ("S2 E5: Little War on the Prairie," 2017). Perhaps it's not about regional differences in racism itself but rather the way it manifests. The North might project a facade of tolerance while harboring underlying prejudice, while the South might be more blunt in its racism. Similarly, during the late 1830s, Philadelphia experienced a surge in white people organizing the destruction of Black schools and churches in order to separate and disperse any gathering place for Black; this also included printing presses to restrict the spread of words against the whites, during the same time the Pennsylvania Hall was destroyed accompanied by white Pennsylvania politicians by rewriting the state's constitution that even excluded the free African American from their fundamental right to vote, while white men voted for the establishment of new Constitution (Lane, 1986).? This new understanding shattered the myth of Northern innocence as it confronted the oftentimes subtle and insidious ways in which racism operated within my community, which is also a need of the hour to move beyond self-righteousness and actively challenge racism from a critical thinking standpoint wherever it existed, whether North or South. This experience tends to be the beginning of my own journey that helped me unpack whiteness and comprehend my place in a society that still battles racial issues; although racial cues in society are hidden in several ways, there is a dire need to constantly reposition one thinking to establish an equitable and inclusive environment for all.? References Lang, J. (2019).? Riot Heritage of the Civil Rights Era?(Doctoral dissertation, Columbia University). Lane, R. (1986).?Roots of violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860-1900. Harvard University Press. Pujara , C. C., & Cox, A. L. (2020, August 27).?How the myth of a liberal north erases a long history of White Violence. Smithsonian.com. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-myth-liberal-north-erases-long-history-white-violence-180975661/ S2 E5: Little War on the Prairie. Scene on Radio. (2017, April 17). https://sceneonradio.org/episode-35-little-war-on-the-prairie-seeing-white-part-5/More Articles From Humanities
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