Race, Class, and Power in the American South Past and Present

Presentation Location

Governors II

Document Type

Event

Start Date

8-4-2022 8:30 AM

End Date

8-4-2022 10:00 AM

Description

  • Alison Bell, Session Chair
  • Meg Langhorne and Alison Bell (Washington and Lee University). “Defective and Degenerate Protoplasm”: Eugenics Research Papers in a University Biology Class, 1927-1938.
    In a 1929 research paper for Biology 202 at Washington and Lee University, two students concluded their field investigation of a low-income family by concurring with eugenicist Charles Davenport on the need, through institutionalization and sterilization, to “dry up the streams that feed the torrent of defective and degenerate protoplasm.” From 1927 until 1938, welfare services provided W&L students names of impoverished families in Lexington and Rockbridge County, Virginia. Biology faculty expected students to visit their assigned families to record generational histories as well as such variables as age, material conditions, educational level, employment, health and illnesses, and supposed proclivities toward promiscuity, alcoholism, illegitimacy, and feeblemindedness. W&L Special Collections contains twenty-five of these papers. Our presentation discusses the papers’ assumptions, methods, analyses, and conclusions and explores ways that eugenics was taught as cutting-edge science in the biology curriculum. The high marks many students garnered suggest they learned the lesson well that, in the words of one paper, “It would be a sin against humanity and nature to let these unfortunates perpetuate their sordidness.”
  • Sydney Pullen (University of Arizona). Soft skills, old and new: Moral training and racial ideologies in vocational education.
    In the post-bellum South, industrial schools for freedpeople focused on the moral value of manual labor. For the missionaries and visionaries of industrial education, it was imperative to demonstrate that freedpeople could put the values of economy, thrift, efficiency, and personal responsibility into practice as laborers. Contemporary career and technical education and workforce development programs emphasize “soft skills”—self-management, work ethic, reliability—as a key component of career readiness. This paper draws on archival and ethnographic data to highlight differences and similarities in the moral values emphasized through vocational education in the past and present in rural South Carolina. The paper concludes with initial thoughts about how moral-vocational training relates to the emergence and persistence of work-related racial ideologies in the rural South.
  • El Johnson (Georgia State University). Southern Tourism Imaginaries and Negotiations of Difficult History in Plantation Site Interpretation.
    During the 20th century, wealthy Northern families purchased more than seventy Antebellum plantation estates in Southeastern Georgia, altering the meaning of the word “plantation” with profound implications for the historical memory of slavery in the South. Plantation scholars have documented how these sites were restored with re-established traditional hierarchies- a legacy that persists today. Portraying slavery through a lens of paternalism and nostalgia, the plantations reified the pre-existing social order which appraised white authority and black servitude as natural. The symbolic capital of the post-slavery plantation is deeply intertwined with alliances of race and class, influencing which narratives prevail and which are forgotten. Utilizing ethnographic interviews (n=15) and observation, this work documents the negotiations between material change within historic preservation and the popularity of plantation tourism in the region. Seeking an equitable and representative public history of plantations, this work highlights historic actors and resilience which have been obscured. Key words: plantations, tourism, historic preservation, public history, museum education.
  • Kalfani N. Ture (Mount St. Mary’s). The Anthropology of Race, Place and Perceptual Racism in a Segregated Community of the Upper South.
    Well before twenty-five-year-old Freddie Carlos Gray Jr.’s arrest on the morning of April 12, 2015, for appearing suspicious to three white male bike patrol officers near the Gilmore Public Housing complex (City of Baltimore, Maryland), most Americans to include African Americans were fully conditioned to perceive racial others, particularly African Americans, in the public way as out of place, dangerous, and criminal. The results of this racist, perceptual schema caused/s African American males to experience increased police encounters in the form of stop, question, and frisk. In what amounts to disproportionate minority contact between police and African American citizens was a reduced sense of public safety for African Americans, and instead, an urban uprising where their tensions were no longer constrain behind Baltimore’s veneer of quaint charm. The research that informs this paper explored African American lived experiences intermittently from 2014 to 2020 as they negotiated a major corridor in the near eastern part of Baltimore – a corridor situated between two carceral spaces (north and south), located between two proximate and segregated residential communities (white and black), and a corridor that briefly runs through a cosmopolitan/Black commercial district. Through a series of walking and windshield tours, semi-structure interviews and the general ethnographic practice of hanging out with community members over five years, this paper attempts to answer “What are the experiences of African American males who attempt to negotiate the public way to achieve their daily contingencies in the upper south where blackness limits their mobility, and opens them up to invasive surveillance and criminalization?” In so doing, this paper attempts to develop an additional insight regarding the understudied feature of urban space, namely liminal space. This paper concludes with proposed measures that might prevent Baltimore’s inevitable fire next time. Key words: gentrification, race & place, historical preservation, African American intra-racial conflict.

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Apr 8th, 8:30 AM Apr 8th, 10:00 AM

Race, Class, and Power in the American South Past and Present

Governors II

  • Alison Bell, Session Chair
  • Meg Langhorne and Alison Bell (Washington and Lee University). “Defective and Degenerate Protoplasm”: Eugenics Research Papers in a University Biology Class, 1927-1938.
    In a 1929 research paper for Biology 202 at Washington and Lee University, two students concluded their field investigation of a low-income family by concurring with eugenicist Charles Davenport on the need, through institutionalization and sterilization, to “dry up the streams that feed the torrent of defective and degenerate protoplasm.” From 1927 until 1938, welfare services provided W&L students names of impoverished families in Lexington and Rockbridge County, Virginia. Biology faculty expected students to visit their assigned families to record generational histories as well as such variables as age, material conditions, educational level, employment, health and illnesses, and supposed proclivities toward promiscuity, alcoholism, illegitimacy, and feeblemindedness. W&L Special Collections contains twenty-five of these papers. Our presentation discusses the papers’ assumptions, methods, analyses, and conclusions and explores ways that eugenics was taught as cutting-edge science in the biology curriculum. The high marks many students garnered suggest they learned the lesson well that, in the words of one paper, “It would be a sin against humanity and nature to let these unfortunates perpetuate their sordidness.”
  • Sydney Pullen (University of Arizona). Soft skills, old and new: Moral training and racial ideologies in vocational education.
    In the post-bellum South, industrial schools for freedpeople focused on the moral value of manual labor. For the missionaries and visionaries of industrial education, it was imperative to demonstrate that freedpeople could put the values of economy, thrift, efficiency, and personal responsibility into practice as laborers. Contemporary career and technical education and workforce development programs emphasize “soft skills”—self-management, work ethic, reliability—as a key component of career readiness. This paper draws on archival and ethnographic data to highlight differences and similarities in the moral values emphasized through vocational education in the past and present in rural South Carolina. The paper concludes with initial thoughts about how moral-vocational training relates to the emergence and persistence of work-related racial ideologies in the rural South.
  • El Johnson (Georgia State University). Southern Tourism Imaginaries and Negotiations of Difficult History in Plantation Site Interpretation.
    During the 20th century, wealthy Northern families purchased more than seventy Antebellum plantation estates in Southeastern Georgia, altering the meaning of the word “plantation” with profound implications for the historical memory of slavery in the South. Plantation scholars have documented how these sites were restored with re-established traditional hierarchies- a legacy that persists today. Portraying slavery through a lens of paternalism and nostalgia, the plantations reified the pre-existing social order which appraised white authority and black servitude as natural. The symbolic capital of the post-slavery plantation is deeply intertwined with alliances of race and class, influencing which narratives prevail and which are forgotten. Utilizing ethnographic interviews (n=15) and observation, this work documents the negotiations between material change within historic preservation and the popularity of plantation tourism in the region. Seeking an equitable and representative public history of plantations, this work highlights historic actors and resilience which have been obscured. Key words: plantations, tourism, historic preservation, public history, museum education.
  • Kalfani N. Ture (Mount St. Mary’s). The Anthropology of Race, Place and Perceptual Racism in a Segregated Community of the Upper South.
    Well before twenty-five-year-old Freddie Carlos Gray Jr.’s arrest on the morning of April 12, 2015, for appearing suspicious to three white male bike patrol officers near the Gilmore Public Housing complex (City of Baltimore, Maryland), most Americans to include African Americans were fully conditioned to perceive racial others, particularly African Americans, in the public way as out of place, dangerous, and criminal. The results of this racist, perceptual schema caused/s African American males to experience increased police encounters in the form of stop, question, and frisk. In what amounts to disproportionate minority contact between police and African American citizens was a reduced sense of public safety for African Americans, and instead, an urban uprising where their tensions were no longer constrain behind Baltimore’s veneer of quaint charm. The research that informs this paper explored African American lived experiences intermittently from 2014 to 2020 as they negotiated a major corridor in the near eastern part of Baltimore – a corridor situated between two carceral spaces (north and south), located between two proximate and segregated residential communities (white and black), and a corridor that briefly runs through a cosmopolitan/Black commercial district. Through a series of walking and windshield tours, semi-structure interviews and the general ethnographic practice of hanging out with community members over five years, this paper attempts to answer “What are the experiences of African American males who attempt to negotiate the public way to achieve their daily contingencies in the upper south where blackness limits their mobility, and opens them up to invasive surveillance and criminalization?” In so doing, this paper attempts to develop an additional insight regarding the understudied feature of urban space, namely liminal space. This paper concludes with proposed measures that might prevent Baltimore’s inevitable fire next time. Key words: gentrification, race & place, historical preservation, African American intra-racial conflict.