The Tuskegee Experiment

Secrecy in anthropology

  NO. 1

 Anthropology is the scientific study of human beings, and social anthropology is the study of behavior in certain societies. Studying patterns of behavior means studying how humans think, react, and evolve in society, but that also means understanding human secrecy through ethnographic research. But what is secrecy? In the ethnographic record, initiatory secrets often stand for the quiddity of culture, and the revelation of concealed realities is an organizing trope in much ethnographic writing.

NO. 2

   ‘’Intellectual historiography shows that the concept of secrecy has carried overwhelmingly negative, antisocial, and primitive connotations in learned Western discourses since the Enlightenment and that early anthropological research often supported such an implicitly social evolutionist stance. Secrecy and risk are closely connected. Secrecy engenders risk insofar as concealment entails the possibility of unwelcome revelation; non-circulation also creates a risk of its own, such as the breakdown of social relations or cultural reproduction. However, risk can also, gender secrecy as a strategy to manage perilous social relations. In practice, the casual relationship between secrecy and risk can be difficult to disentangle because the subjective experience of risk and the urgency of secrecy are constitutive--in both ritual secrecy and strategic secrets of state.’’

NO. 3

Secrecy excludes outsiders, but the power it attracts lies in the possibility it may be disclosed and revealed to those same outsiders. ‘’This contradictory centrifugal and centripetal forces push and pull on secrets. Possessing secrets can make people intensely aware of the fragility of knowledge and the precariousness of their custodial position. Revelatory and initiatory practices within secretive practice activities are often carefully calibrated to induce a sense of risk. It is paradoxical also because it ‘must be performed in a public fashion in order to be understood to exist.’ The revelation of concealment is a way of socially mobilizing the secret as a form of sociocultural capital without dispersing restricted knowledge.’’ Basically, secrecy is a personal form of belonging, of being included in the intimate affairs of family, friends, or just knowing about something that you didn’t previously. 

Gender and Religion

    NO.1

In order to understand the system of race, class and gender in America, we have to look at England’s role in their systems of class. ‘During this time period, the emergence of a consumer-oriented corporate order undermined the coherence of the Victorian gender system; rising gender consciousness among black women turned the ideology of ‘women’s sphere’ into a disrupted terrain of racial and struggle class; while women’s devotional practices became a site of gender contestation within American Catholic culture. Each of these developments has given impetus to new studies. Historians of conservative evangelicalism have complicated the heretofore easy equation of ‘Protestantism’ with ‘women’s sphere’ by delineating the different understandings of women’s role within early twentieth-century Protestantism; Progress across racial lines has been initiated by several important literary and historical studies that reveal how the separate spheres ideology served the interests of the white middle class by camouflaging racial and economic differences.’’

 NO. 2

Since the early 1980’s, advances in the study of gender in American history have come primarily through an unmasking of the assumptions of earlier studies; Others have laid bare the earlier scholarship’s assumption’s to universal gender definitions that do not take into account differences in women’s roles based on race, class, or region. Additionally, several historians have begun to explore the influence of gender relations on the lives of men. As a result, we are beginning to get a picture of gender in the American history that goes beyond the ‘women’s sphere’ experience of white, middle-class, northeastern women.

  For the past twenty years of this apparent lifetime, Protestant mainline has given way to a religious studies interest in the social and cultural history of outsiders. Concurrently, an older Protestant consensus narrative has come to be seen as one of several stories that, together seek to account for the American religious past. Further inquiries have questioned the usefulness of both liberal and evangelical labels in accounting for the deep racial, economic and theological divisions of late nineteenth century among the more than 150 Protestant denominations, not to speak of the rapidly growing population of Catholics with their own substantial differences of nationality, theology and social class. As historians have started to study seriously the deep diversities in American culture, gender has emerged as an important analytic category for re-imagining America’s religious past.

NO. 3

    As recently as 1985, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese complained that historians of religion and gender have too often simply added ‘religion to an almost finished picture rather than exploring ways in which religion might refine and even radically revise the picture.’ Within the past decade, however recent developments both within and without the field of American religious history have begun to coalesce and suggest the contours of promising new departures, and most of this new work focuses on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This could seriously be a whole video essay series cause many folks raised in the Global North (Western-oriented countries and communities) will frame all history as a matter of black/white events when, in actuality, history is informed by our indigenous, immigrant, and diaspora pasts and their present day afterlives.

I'll keep my thoughts about executive director Pinkett's spiritual bypassing on private for now, BUT I will say this: Egypt is a part of Africa and Africa belongs in our garden of history cause there are enough miracles, memories, and magic across our African histories and their cultures that we don't have to produce miseducated docuseries that try to pass as Pan-African history pieces or afrofuturist reimagings (when in actuality they are just reinventing bougie versions of well-worn imperial histories).

Egypt is a part of Africa and Africa belongs in our garden of history.

Mean World Syndrome

NO. 1

Mean World Syndrome is a theory the sociologist George Gerbner, creator of the Cultural Indicator’s Project, where three quarters of Americans believe in high level of crime, even though statistics show it is low. In the media, there is too much sex and violence, more so than the average person will ever see a day in their lives, and it has become repetitive, too routine, as the storytelling of violence seem ‘normal’. Since 1995, the demand for guns to ‘protect themselves’ has been at an all time high, and so is the fear, fear that everyone in the world is a suspect. But most importantly, is the image of the bad guys coming to get them. 2/3 of Americans get their information from the media, mostly the news, which creates negative stereotypes of minorities, who are seen as violent and aggressive.

NO. 2 Take for instance, Latina’s, who make up 15% in population in America, are portrayed by the media as aggressors, seen as ‘rapists and gangbangers’ or ‘murderers’. They are also the subject of illegal immigration, which all together creates dehumanizing effects. Then, there’s the vilification of Arabs and Muslims, as bloodthirsty terrorists, that are linked to violence and terror, and the subject of torture/ing of these people is ‘okay as long as it’s a good guy doing it’’. 39% of Americans actually believes that American-born Muslims are not loyal to the country’s ideals, and so not loyal to them. And finally, African-Americans are twice as likely to be seen as perpetrators. In the media, it is harmful showing black people as great middle/class, successful people, then as violent and aggressive in the next slide, as if to say some people choose that type of lifestyle, that they are simply a product of their environment. White people are five times more than likely to be criminalized by whites than black people, yet it’s not white people being shown almost everyday on the news for braking crimes.

The result of all this is the active fear in everyday Americans that makes us less likely to be compassionate, and more hardened to anyone and everyone. It also increases a high demand for national security, and believing that we have to lock these ‘criminals in cages where they belong.’

Cultivation Theory is the examination of the long term effects of television. Media cultivates a set of values, meanings, expectations, understanding, etc. which is the culture now in the modern century. Mass media replacement of community-based storytellers, it advances corporate interests (increasing profits and sales) since Americans spend a lot of time with the media. The effects are becoming more systemic and all encompassing. We need to start asking questions, like who is being represented in the media, who is the victim, and who is in the cast, and what are their fates. Who is generally casted as the good guy, and who is casted as the bad guy. We can look to the Media Database (IMDb) to see who is making the cultural object, and what is the main subject. Mean World Syndrome relates to this theory, through intersections of race, gender, ethnicity, criminal justice and the international border. We need to understand who is creating these TV shows/films, since America has such a global reach, it attracts the largest audience. Sociologists are not condemning media, but the constant repetition of ‘happy violence’—where in the film, show, or media, the good guy faces has a challenge, fights and action and explosions reoccurs, he stops the evil doer, saves the damsel, and the day is saved! It’s boring, cliché and the same story over and over again— and the various franchises and storylines springing from these corporations because it slows down progress and keeps negative stereotypes alive, some of them extremely damaging.

The tale of Lilith

There are a lot of accounts about the ‘demon-ness Lilith’, and her origin story leads a lot to be desired. Apparently, she was the first wife of Adam in Sumerian folklore, and because she did not want to be under Adam’s control any longer, and became, depending on which account you read, a vampire, a demon-ess, or a harlot, or all three, for not wanting to be apart of ‘God’s plan.’ The Sumerian accounts, taken from the 3rd millennium, were the first accounts of what happened to her before the biblical Hebrews surmised of her.

She is described as a ‘beautiful maiden’ but was believed to be a harlot, who once took a lover, offered no satisfaction to him, nor would she ever let him go. According to the Sumerian epic, dating from around 2000 B.C, ‘Gilgamesh and the Huluppu Tree’ and was ‘‘believed to appear to have human eyes. She is slender, well-shaped, beautiful, and nude, with wings, and owl feet. She stands erect on two reclining lions which are turned away from each other and are flanked by owls. On her head, she wears a cap embellished by several pairs of horns. In her hand, she holds a ring-and-rod combination. Evidently, this is no longer a lowly she-demon, but a goddess who tames wild beasts, and as shown by the owls on the reliefs, rules by night.’’

Apparently, the earliest mention of the ‘she-demon, whose name is similar to that of Lilith is found in the Sumerian king list which dates from around 2400 B.C. ‘‘It states, that the father of the great Gilgamesh was a Lilu-demon. The Lilu was one of four demons belonging to an incubi-succubae class. The other three were Lilitu (Lilith), a she-demon; Ardat Lili, or her handmaiden, who visited men in the night and bore them ghostly children. There is also the tale of the Irdu Lili, who was her male counterpart and would visit women and beget children by them. Originally these were storm demons, but because of a mistaken etymology, they came to be regarded as night demons. On one brief reference to Lilith in the Bible, Isaiah 34:14, in describing Yahweh’s (God) day of vengeance, says: The wild cat shall meet with the jackals, And the satyr shall cry to to his fellow, Yea, Lilith shall repose there, And find her a place of rest.’’

(😂😂😂😂)

Yes, Thor. You enjoy that relaxing bath…

The Assassination of MLK!

  NO. 1

 Martin Luther King. Jr, the famous civil rights leader, and the clergyman was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968; he was rushed to St. Joseph’s Hospital where he ‘’died’’.  James Earl Ray, a fugitive who had escaped Missouri State Penitentiary was arrested in London at Heathrow Airport, extradited back to the United States, and charged with the crime, where he pleaded guilty on March 10, 1969, and sentenced to 99 years in Tennessee State Penitentiary. He made several attempts to withdraw his guilty plea and be tried by a jury but was unsuccessful. He died in prison in 1998. 

 The King family do not believe he was murdered at the hands of this common criminal, but that the F.B.I and C.I.A had their hands involved, especially the head of the F.B.I, director J. Edgar Hoover, the Mafia, and Memphis police, as alleged by Lloyd Jowers, the owner of Jim Grill, a restaurant near the Lorraine Motel where the civil rights leader was shot. They believed that Ray was a scapegoat. In 1999, the family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Jowers for $10 million. During closing arguments, their attorney asked the jury to award damages of $100, to make the point that ‘it was not about the money.’ During the trial, both sides presented evidence alleging a government conspiracy. The government agencies accused could not defend themselves or respond because they were not named as defendants. 

Based on the evidence, the jury concluded Jowers and others were ‘’part of a conspiracy to kill King’’ and awarded the family of $100. The allegations and the findings of the Memphis jury were later rejected by the U.S Department of Justice in 2000 due to lack of evidence. ‘’The brutal death of the civil rights leader elicited a political reaction manifest in social disturbances across the nation. Numerous riots and lesser civil disturbances occurred as a direct aftermath of the killing. Several explanations for the disturbances appear obvious. The best--known civil rights leader in the nation had been murdered. For many, King had become a symbol of progressive change in policies concerning race relations and poverty. The killing also occurred within the context of increased interracial tension. More widespread rioting, looting, and burning--although less personal violence--took place in the prior summer than at any other time since the Civil War. Finally, diverse modes of political participation among African-Americans had emerged on a fairly massive scale. [I] argue that the assassination was a stimulus that led individuals to an emotional disengagement from the realm of political behavior. What I term political disengagement occurs when normally positive and latent diffuse sentiments toward the political system and its elements become negative.’’

and just in case you thought she was lying...

Marvel is nailing it with their movies! Gotta talk about the upcoming movie #GuardiansoftheGalaxy it is on fire! And I haven't even seen it yet!