Sociology

This assignment has 4 parts
part 1 : 3 pages
N WHOSE HONOR: FILM CRITIQUE

Professional and collegiate sports organizations have adorned Native Americans by utilizing Native American names for their mascots. In the eyes of many this is a way of “honoring” Native American people, or it is?

On one side are those who say, “What’s the big deal? Stop being so overly sensitive. The whole thing is just good fun.” On the other side are those who argue that these names and images are degrading and perhaps humiliating to Native Americans. Native American activists have received a good deal of publicity for their demands that sports teams like the Cleveland Indians, Washington Redskins, among others, change their names. Having read: 1) “A Fight Over Identity: Native American Sports Mascots,” 2) “Politics in the Toy Box: Sports Reporters, Native American Mascots, and the Roadblocks Preventing Change,” 3) “It’s a White Man’s Game: Racism, Native American Mascots, and the NCAA,” and having viewed the film “In Whose Honor?,” do you support the demand to change names? Explain your position using the three articles, film AND THE LESSON PLAN. If you exclude any of the three articles, you will lose a letter grade for each that is excluded.

part 2: 3 pages

AMERICAN HISTORY X: FILMCRITIQUE

American History X is a racially charged film that explores the many and varied forms of hate. It is a film that brings to light the ugly realities of white supremacy. It is a film depicting the neo-Nazi movement of Venice Beach in Los Angeles and is marked by deeply engrained stereotypes, prejudices, bigotry, violence and racism.

First, this assignment asks that you discuss and apply McDevitt and Levin’s categories of hate crime offenders: thrill-seeking, defensive, mission, and retaliatory. In the film there are a number of horrible racist crimes fueled by extreme ideologies, as well as a series of racist remarks. Using any of the characters (Derek, Danny, Dennis, Doris, or Davina Vinyard, or any of the other characters from the film – Seth, Stacey, Dr. Sweeney, Murray, Cameron, Lamont, etc) provide and discuss at least 5 examples as they relate to McDevitt and Levin. This will likely require you to describe various incidents and to quote a series of remarks. Second, while Derek Vinyard was imprisoned he endured a transformation. What do you believe fueled his transformation? Third, have you seen the film before and what emotions did the film evoke in you?

part 3: 2 pages

Across the United States, racism, racist violence, physical attacks, beatings, violent bullying, threats, discrimination, prejudice, hate speech, hate crimes, the use of derogatory language and racist rhetoric by politicians, media outlets, and citizens alike, against Chinese Americans, and other people of Asian descent have spread with the COVID-19 pandemic. These events have even launched a #WashTheHate Campaign.

In light of these events, I have decided to offer one last Extra Credit Opportunity. This Extra Credit asks you to explore and discuss any three events related to the treatment of people of Asian decent amid the COVID-19 pandemic using what you have learned or taken away from this course. Please be specific in discussing course materials when discussing the three events you have selected.

part 4 2 pages

It is based on this New York Times Opinion piece.

In recent years, the death of George Floyd and the deaths of other African-Americans at the hands of law enforcement, amid calls for racial equality, have led to requests for Confederate monuments to be removed.

Please read the Opinion piece. Using the abundance of material presented to you in this course, explain your reaction to this opinion piece and what your position is regarding the growing traction and measures taken to remove confederate monuments, memorials, or statues.

You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument

The black people I come from were owned and raped by the white people I come from. Who dares to tell me to celebrate them?

By Caroline Randall Williams

June 26, 2020

NASHVILLE — I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.

If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.

Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, , solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it. But there are still those — like President Trump and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new perspective.

I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.

According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.

It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.

What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?

You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.

And here I’m called to say that there is much about the South that is precious to me. I do my best teaching and writing here. There is, however, a peculiar model of Southern pride that must now, at long last, be reckoned with.

This is not an ignorant pride but a defiant one. It is a pride that says, “Our history is rich, our causes are justified, our ancestors lie beyond reproach.” It is a pining for greatness, if you will, a wish again for a certain kind of American memory. A monument-worthy memory.

But here’s the thing: Our ancestors don’t deserve your unconditional pride. Yes, I am proud of every one of my black ancestors who survived slavery. They earned that pride, by any decent person’s reckoning. But I am not proud of the white ancestors whom I know, by virtue of my very existence, to be bad actors.

Among the apologists for the Southern cause and for its monuments, there are those who dismiss the hardships of the past. They imagine a world of benevolent masters, and speak with misty eyes of gentility and honor and the land. They deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or question the degree of frequency with which it occurred.

To those people it is my privilege to say, I am proof. I am proof that whatever else the South might have been, or might believe itself to be, it was and is a space whose prosperity and sense of romance and nostalgia were built upon the grievous exploitation of black life.

The dream version of the Old South never existed. Any manufactured monument to that time in that place tells half a truth at best. The ideas and ideals it purports to honor are not real. To those who have embraced these delusions: Now is the time to re-examine your position.

Either you have been blind to a truth that my body’s story forces you to see, or you really do mean to honor the oppressors at the expense of the oppressed, and you must at last acknowledge your emotional investment in a legacy of hate.

Either way, I say the monuments of stone and metal, the monuments of cloth and wood, all the man-made monuments, must come down. I defy any sentimental Southerner to defend our ancestors to me. I am quite literally made of the reasons to strip them of their laurels.

part is due in Nov 27th part 2 12/3 part 3&4 12/7

My main concern is please it has to be original work thank you