- Whether intentionally or not, I think using cinema to learn about history is a dangerous approach to being aware about the past. As we can tell with this film, even since the beginnings of cinema it has been used to paint a different picture of history in order to persuade and deceive the audience towards certain ideologies.
- Booker T. Washington and his ideas are discarded quite quickly by the academics contributing to this documentary. He appeared to be playing the long game and trying to build a strong foundation of education and wealth within the black community before moving on to construct the upper levels of the structure (i.e. – more political involvement and power). This seems to be discarded out of a belief that he thought blacks should submit to this lack of political power permanently. While I agree that ideally all of these equal rights should have come at the moment of emancipation (actually even earlier at the moment of American independence), the world has never been ideal and maybe he was attempting to be more realistic than idealistic.
- I’ve heard similar arguments about the limits of the first amendment before in regards to incorporating hate speech in some manner. For instance, that any Nazi or neo-Nazi white supremacist jargon should be unequivocally categorized as hate speech and not fall under the protection of the first amendment. I think 99.9% of the world can agree that such speech is horrendous and indefensible but I also don’t see a way in which to make more exceptions to the first amendment which doesn’t lay precedent for other not so desirable exceptions being added in the future. I know this is a bit of a slippery slope argument and therefore a fallacy in rhetoric, however, slippery slopes do occur on occasion in reality and to ignore them in every instance as a fallacy is just naive to me.
- 1) The Boston Guardian and the NAACP
- 2) Both were arenas where a voice could be given to the opposing argument against white supremacy and Jim Crow laws from the perspective of blacks. An arena that could reach a wide audience and be free from censorship.
- 3) The main differences between the two are the types of activism employed and Trotter’s belief that he could essentially call in favors in exchange for votes vs. Du Bois’ approaching change through his influential role in the NAACP. Trotter employed the use of marches and protests on top of his newspaper to spur change while Du Bois mainly tried to effect his change through essays and other academic works.
- 4) As I alluded to previously, Trotter used marches and protests outside the cinema to disrupt the screenings.
- 5) Lynching was common in the United States at this time and The Birth of a Nation was feared as a possible accelerant of this because it justified and even glorified the use of such violence in the film. The film sparked the revitalization of the KKK in the south and these types of crimes to multiply.
Jake's Expanse 