Social Transformation Activity One: 500 Years Later Documentary Reflection

Due Sunday, 9/11 at 11:59 pm 

Please Note: The assignment can be up to 2 days late (Tuesday, 9/13 at 11:59 pm); however, points will be deducted. Please review the late policy guidelines for this assignment. I will not take this assignment by email after the late policy deadline. The submission for it will close. So, give yourself time. I want you to be successful in the course.

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This assignment is worth a 100-points

Each question is worth 20 points

Beloveds, I look forward to reading your work.

Expectations:

• All answers should give examples from the documentary.
• Make sure you use MLA/APA in-text citations for direct quotes.
• Put all quotes in bold letters.  Need to have a minimum of 4 quotes. Quotes should be drawn from the documentary primarily. Any quotes used from our material this week should make strong connections to the documentary in your reflection. Your quotes should not take up the majority of your answers; instead, your analysis, commentary, and reflection should shine through your answers. All quotes should also be integrated into what you are conveying. In other words, it must be very clear that you have reviewed the documentary.
• Each answer should be at least 150 words. It can be more if you would like, but not less. Answers underneath the word count will not receive points.
• Each answer should be organized, clear, and with little or no grammatical errors. In this fashion, make sure you review your work before you submit it.

I look forward to reading your reflection on the 500 Years Later Documentary.

Our documentary chronicles the holocaust of people of African ascent. The documentary has been described as the following:

“Crime, poor education, poverty, self-hatred, incarceration, and broken homes plague people of African descent globally. Why? From the onset of the African holocaust of enslavement and colonialism, Africans are still struggling for basic freedom. Filmed in five countries, 500 Years Later is a critically acclaimed, multi-award-winning journey infused with the spirit and music of liberation. It chronicles the struggle of a people who have fought, and continue to fight, for the most essential human right—self-determination.”

Here are the 5 questions you are expected to answer to complete the assignment:

Please include questions with the answers. I suggest you copy them.

1. In what ways are people of African ascent impacted by colonialism, enslavement, and white supremacy according to the documentary? What ways did you find most interesting and why in the documentary?

2. What are some of the ways people of African ascent resist? What ways did you find most interesting and why in the documentary?

3. In the documentary, what are some of the ways conveyed that the educational system and religion are used to oppress people of African ascent? Please note: this doesn’t mean all education and religion is bad, but it is important that we note the ways it has/is used in oppressive ways if we are to understand the impact on people of African ascent. In fact, we will see in future readings how people of African ascent use education and religion to challenge oppression.

4. What are some of the ways suggested in the documentary that people of African ascent can be healed and restored? What is one of the ways suggested that you find most interesting and why?

5. Reflecting on the documentary and our readings so far, what are three items in the documentary that resonated with you and why? What is the most valuable lesson you learned in watching this documentary?

6. BLACK NATIONAL BELIEFS

   Article Link: Black Nationalist Beliefs – American Renaissance (amren.com)Links to an external site.

   American Renaissance: Black Nationalist Beliefs

   Black Nationalism, also known as black separatism, is a complex set of beliefs emphasizing the need for the cultural, political, and economic separation of African Americans from white society. Comparatively few African Americans have embraced thoroughgoing separatist philosophies. In his classic study Negro Thought in America , 1880-1915, August Meier noted that the general black attitude has been one of “essential ambivalence.” On the other hand, nationalist assumptions inform the daily actions and choices of many African Americans.

   Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, Black Nationalists have agreed upon two defining principles: black pride and racial separatism. Black Nationalism calls for black pride and seeks a unity that is racially based rather than one grounded in a specific African culture or ethnicity. Thus the basic outlook of Black Nationalism is premised upon Pan-Africanism. Historian Sterling Stuckey argued that this Pan-African perspective emerged as an unintended byproduct of the institution of slavery. Slaveholders deliberately mixed together slaves of diverse linguistic and tribal backgrounds in order to minimize their ability to communicate and make common cause. In response, African slaves were forced “to bridge ethnic differences and to form themselves into a single people to meet the challenge of a common foe. . ..”

   Those espousing nationalist or separatist philosophies have envisioned nationalism in quite different ways. For some, Black Nationalism demanded a territorial base; for others, it required only separate institutions within American society. Some have perceived nationalism in strictly secular terms; others, as an extension of their religious beliefs. Black Nationalists also differ in the degree to which they identify with Africa and African culture.

   {snip}

   Black pride has also involved an insistence on distinctly black standards of beauty (see Hair and Beauty Culture). Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), deplored black acceptance of white standards of beauty, for example, in preferring straight hair or a lighter skin color. During the 1920s he refused to place advertisements for hair straighteners or purported skin whiteners in Negro World, the UNIA newspaper. In the 1960s black nationalists embraced the political slogan Black Power, but they also proclaimed that “black is beautiful.”

   {snip}

   The most consistent proponents of Black Nationalism were those who advocated emigration or colonization. Delany , Garnet, Turner, and Alexander Crummell all endorsed colonization and insisted that African Americans’ greatest hope lay in the establishment of all-black settlements or colonies, most often planned for Africa . Emigration or colonization entailed blacks leaving the United States to establish an African American settlement abroad, often in the hope of creating an independent black state.

   In 1815, for example, Paul Cuffe led a group of 38 African Americans to found a settlement in Sierra Leone , which the British government planned to use for the repatriation of slaves freed in its colonies. Free African Society founders Richard Allen and Absalom Jones endorsed Cuffe’s plan. Garvey’s UNIA was the most powerful back-to-Africa movement of the 20th century. But emigrationists differed among themselves over an appropriate destination and, in the case of emigration to Africa, in their attitudes toward the African people with whom they intended to settle.

   {snip}

   Black Nationalists seek racial separation but differ on the degree and nature of that separation. Some have sought a specific territory that could be reserved for and controlled by blacks. Others have advocated separate black social, religious, economic, or political institutions within the existing white society. Territorial nationalists have differed on an appropriate location. Those calling for a return to Africa have most commonly suggested the territories of such present-day West African nations as Liberia , Sierra Leone , and Nigeria .

   Others proposed creating a separate black nation in the Americas , often viewing Haiti as a likely possibility. Still others believed that a part of the United States should be set aside as a separate black state. In the late 1920s white radicals of the Communist Party of the United States of America( CPUSA) viewed African Americans as an internal colony of American imperialism and demanded recognition for a Negro Nation that would be located within the Black Belt counties of Mississippi , Alabama , and Georgia .

   Many African Americans implicitly acted on nationalist principles. In the 1870s, for example, black ” Exodusters ” fled the South to found all-black settlements in Kansas . African Americans established other all black towns-, including Eatonville , Florida , the childhood home of Zora Neale Hurston . Hurston and such prominent African Americans as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois also expressed attitudes that at times resembled or drew upon Black Nationalism. Hurston’s writing, notably Their Eyes Were Watching God (1938), portrayed a black world in which whites rarely intruded and mattered little.

   {snip}

   W. E. B. Du Bois—one of America ‘s foremost black intellectuals and a leading figure in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People( NAACP)—had strong ties to Africa . In 1919 he organized the first Pan-African Congress (see Pan-African Congress of 1919). During the 1920s he traveled to Africa . Yet for most of his life, Du Bois rejected Black Nationalism. In the 1920s he opposed Marcus Garvey and the UNIA. During the 1930s, as Du Bois grew more radical, he turned to socialism and internationalism rather than to Black Nationalism. But during the harsh anticommunism of the Cold War era, Du Bois lost his faith in American society. In 1961 he abandoned the United States and settled in Ghana , where he died two years later, shortly after taking Ghanaian citizenship.

   From the 1930s through the 1950s, Black Nationalists maintained a low profile. In 1935 Garvey failed to resurrect the UNIA, despite the hardships that many blacks endured during the Great Depression. Apart from Elijah Muhammad, the Nation of Islam’s relatively obscure leader, there was no Black Nationalist who could supplant Garvey. Although Hurston , Robeson , and Du Bois were significant figures, they were not principled separatists.

   The 1960s, by contrast, were a high point for Black Nationalist thought. In some respects, it became a radical extension of the Civil Rights Movement. Many blacks grew impatient with the slow pace of change and broke with the movement’s principles of passive nonviolence. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) contributed an important expression of Black Nationalism through its slogan Black Power. SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael ( Kwame Ture ) and political scientist Charles Hamilton wrote Black Power (1967) to elaborate that slogan into a philosophy and political program.

   In 1966 Bobby Seale and Huey Newton founded the Black Panther Party, which advocated militant self-defense and Black Nationalism. The Black Panther Party, like SNCC Black Power advocates, embraced a Black Nationalism that was primarily secular and political. By contrast, Nation of Islam leaders Elijah Muhammad and the charismatic Malcolm X grounded their goals of racial separation in religious precepts. Black Muslims sought to establish separate economic enterprises, finding a religious justification for a racially separate business life.

   As of the late 1990s African American attitudes and beliefs continued to reveal the significance of Black Nationalism, although less as a political philosophy than as a cultural attitude. It is difficult to weigh this cultural impact, but its manifestations can be seen throughout African American society. For example, a growing number of black parents give their children African names. Since the 1970s African-style clothing has been a recurring feature in black fashion. Likewise, the celebration of Kwanzaa emphasizes African Americans’ distinctly African heritage.

7. David Walker: Black Nationalist Beliefs

   Walker’s 1829 Appeal: Referenced Information from https://sittingbull1845.blogspot.com/2015/05/black-social-history-african-american_2.htmlLinks to an external site.

    

   In September 1829, Walker published his appeal to black people entitled Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular and Very Expressly to Those of the United States of America. The purpose of the document was to encourage readers to take an active role in fighting their oppression, regardless of the risk, and to press white Americans to realize the moral and religious failure of slavery.[5][N 2]

   Core issues
   Racism
   Walker challenged the racism of the early 19th century. He specifically targeted groups like the American Colonization Society, which sought to deport all free and freed blacks from the United States to a colony in Africa (this was how Liberia was established.),[5][17] He wrote against published assertions of black inferiority by the late President Thomas Jefferson, who died three years before Walker’s pamphlet was published.[17] As he explained, “I say, that unless we refute Mr. Jefferson’s arguments respecting us, we will only establish them.”[18]
   He rejected the white assumption in the United States that dark skin was a sign of inferiority and lesser humanity. He challenged critics to show him “a page of history, either sacred or profane, on which a verse can be found, which maintains that the Egyptians heaped the insupportable insult upon the children of Israel, by telling them that they were not of the human family,” referring to the period when they were enslaved in Egypt.[19]

   Equal rights
   By the 1820s and 30s, individuals and groups had emerged with degrees of commitment to equal rights for black men and women, but no national anti-slavery movement existed at the time Walker’s Appeal was published.[20] As historian Herbert Aptheker wrote,
   “[t]o be an Abolitionist was not for the faint-hearted. The slaveholders represented for the first half of the nineteenth century the most closely knit and most important single economic unit in the nation, their millions of bondsmen and millions of acres of land comprising an investment of billions of dollars. This economic might had its counterpart in political power, given its possessors dominance within the nation and predominance within the South.”[21]
   He was referring to the provision in the Constitution that counted three-fifths of the slave population toward the total of any state, for purposes of apportionment of Congressional seats and the electoral college. This gave the white voters in the South power in electoral office much greater than their numbers represented; neither slaves nor free blacks could vote. It resulted in Southern politicians having enormous power and to the election of Southerners as president.

   Effects of slavery
   The Appeal described the pernicious effects of both slavery and the subservience of and discrimination against free blacks. Those outside of slavery were said to need special regulation “because they could not be relied on to regulate themselves and because they might overstep the boundaries society had placed around them.”[22]

   Call to action

   Resist oppression
   Walker’s Appeal argued that blacks had to assume responsibility for themselves [key component of Black Nationalism] if they wanted to overcome oppression.[5][23] According to historian Peter Hinks, Walker believed that the “key to the uplift of the race was a zealous commitment to the tenets of individual moral improvement: education, temperance, protestant religious practice, regular work habits, and self-regulation.”[23]

   In his Appeal Walker implored the black community to take action against slavery and discrimination. “What gives unity to Walker’spolemic,” historian Paul Goodman has argued, “is the argument for racial equality and the active part to be taken by black people in achieving it.”[24] Literary scholar Chris Apap has echoed these sentiments. The Appeal, Apap has asserted, rejected the notion that the black community should do nothing more than pray for its liberation. Apap has drawn particular attention to a passage of the Appeal in which Walker encourages blacks to “[n]ever make an attempt to gain freedom or natural right, from under our cruel oppressors and murderers, until you see your ways clear; when that hour arrives and you move, be not afraid or dismayed.”[25] Apap has interpreted Walker’s words as a play on the Biblical injunction to “be not afraid or dismayed.” As he points out, “‘be not afraid or dismayed’ is a direct quote from 2 Chronicles 20.15, where the Israelites are told to ‘be not afraid or dismayed’ because God would fight the battle for them and save them from their enemies without their having to lift a finger.”[26] In the Bible, all the Israelites are expected to do is pray, but Walker asserts that the black community must “move.”[25] Apap insists that in prompting his readers to “move,” Walker rejected the notion that the blacks should “sit idly by and wait for God to fight their battles — they must (and implicit in Walker’s language is the assumption that they will) take action and move to claim what is rightfully and morally theirs.”[26]

   “America,” Walker argued, “is more our country, than it is the whites — we have enriched it with our blood and tears.”[27]

Resistance, Reform, and Renewal Intro-Walker’s Appeal (PowerPoint for Sankofa Three-Revised)