Relevence (2nd Thursday blog)

When I was reading Ida B. Wells and "The spectator has a picture in his mind to remember for a long time" I really made me think about how the repercussions from these acts are still affecting us today and that we don't really understand it because we don't really learn too much about it in history classes. Some of the things I connected from then and know were the relationships between African Americans and the police and the government, Female Sexuality, and Toxic Masculinity.

Black people and the system it's no secret that there is some bad blood but seeing the pictures and learning the stories of the second lynching made me realize that black people had no reprise in the idea of justice in the law. one section that really stood out to me in the lynching article was the story of Claude Neal who was Hung on the lawn of the courthouse, there was no hope for justice because those who were supposed to protect him were also the same people who were killing him. In Ida B. Wells book she mentions how lynching was a tool used to beat down the recently enfranchised black man, which is a continuous theme up till now.

You then have to account for the hypocrisy of white women's involvement in lynching as said in the Lynching reading, "the emotional venerability and physical fragility for which white women were honors and protected were the same qualities that placed into question their reliability as witnesses to a sexual or criminal assault, especially, … when their suffering took the form of incapacitation." This folks is an unreliable witness. then there was the fact that these women were so delicate, so virtuous, that they needed to be protected from this black beast but witnessing torture and murder doesn't rake their sensibilities. this is yet another continuous theme that seems to be perpetuated that women need this kind of protection that they cannot handle themselves that we need a man to go all caveman.

Lastly you have the prevalence of toxic masculinity, which is touch on in both reading the idea that these white men had something to prove to themselves, their wives, and the African American community that they were "real men", and then it is passed on from father to son this need to prove yourself. This idea of being "a man" poisons the mind and is the cause for a lot of heartaches.

All of these themes are ripples from a past that touches all of our lives if we realize it or not.

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