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Location: Vienna, Virginia, United States

A graduate of Dartmouth College (2005) and Washington and Lee University School of Law (2010). These are my personal blogs, and the musings expressed on them do not reflect the positions of my employer. They do reflect my readings, thoughts, and aspirations, which I figure is good enough.

Wednesday, January 19, 2005

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As an addendum onto my last post:

If anyone wants to see an excellent movie on the topic of how morality changes, and how it has to do with laws and politics, I would thoroughly recommend the movie "Unforgivable Blackness", a movie about the famous African-American boxer Jack Johnson.

Miscegenation, interracial unions (specifically a black man with a white woman for early 20th century legistators), were considered seriously morally bankrupt by most and was seen as a threat to society. To a large extent, they still are, although it flies under the radar nowadays, a silent rage. The black man was seen as a dangerous beast, and white women needed to be protected by the law from their unbridled animal nature.

There was an article in "The Dartmouth" just a couple of days ago, detailing how a lot of people here were outraged that for our Martin Luther King Jr. Day commemorations, we had a white lesbian keynote speaker. Something about the civil rights movement of the 1960's having nothing to do with the modern gay rights movement.

I'll concede that there are differences, and that if they don't want to be associated with a movement don't feel connected with, then African American activists shouldn't have to be. Nevertheless, it isn't different on moral grounds, in that the basic emotion that drives it is fear. And for that reason, we shouldn't have too much troubles with inviting a non-black, non-heterosexual, female speaker to talk on the topic of ongoing activism.

Back then, it was the fear of blacks infiltrating white society, taking jobs, taking women, destroying everything "American" about America. Now it's arguably more pervasive fear, because you never know who is gay in your life. Might be the guy working next to you. Might be your next door neighbor. There is an "Onion" article ("Blackdar") this week that pretty much replaces the word gay with black, and it's a pretty telling article.

Anyway, check out the movie. It's pretty good. Very informative. And if you're a baseball fan, Rube Foster, Kennesaw Landis, and Harry Frazee make appearances. Pretty good cameos if you ask me.

1 Comments:

Blogger Wm said...

You know, William, there was once an identical type of discrimination against left-handed people as there is about homosexual people. It even came in flavors like: 1) treating southpaws as evil due to nonsensical superstition and misinterpretation of the Bible. 2) treating southpaws as afflicted with some sort of developmental disorder and trying to identify them as children "cure" them with Draconian methods. If I wasn't otherwise occupied, I'd even provide you with some sources.

12:17 AM  

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