AMH Unit 3 Reflections

  

 As we closed out of the final unit, I would have to say that Unit 3 was my favorite despite the traumatic information that I learned that made me sick to my stomach. Being educated on the lynching’s that happened back in the day was something that I was not ready for. When the lynching’s are shown on television for movies or tv shows it’s something that I skip pass because I can’t bear the fact that my people really had to go through that gruesome punishment. People always tell the Black community to let go of the past, but how can we ever let it go when a lot of us have family members who are still here living this earth who was around when all the lynching and brutality that happened to them back in the day. I feel like until we confront our history of racial injustice and its legacy, we really cannot overcome the racial bias that exists today.

  Mary Turner is a woman who was lynched in the early 1900s that I knew nothing about, but I am not surprised because in today’s education we get talked about the same 4 Black Americans. What Mary endured while she was 8 months pregnant is inhumane and truly disgusting and the monsters who did that to her never made it to the pearly white heaven gates. She was brutally murdered because she wanted justice for her innocent husband so in retaliation the white mob bounded her feet hung her from a tree with her head facing down, threw gasoline on her and burned her. As she was still alive one of the white men took a knife and cut open her stomach which caused the unborn child to fall and that led the man crushing the baby’s head by repeatedly stomping on it with his foot. Since they felt as if that was not enough damage in my eyes, they then shot her with hundreds of bullets that ended up killing her.

   I almost broke down in tears when I heard about the baby being stomped on because babies are the most innocent humans in the world before they get influenced by their parents on what they feel about what is right and wrong. My people were lynched based off accusations of murder against white people and or looking, speaking, etc. to white women.

  Another lynching that we talked about was a 14-year-old boy who was from Chicago and was visiting his family members who lived down in the south. His name was Emmet Till and I was familiar with this lynching only because his mother made sure everyone knows what they did to her sweet boy. This is another heartbreak that I could not get over because seeing his face before and after the lynching leaves you with an unbearable feeling.

   I was not too fond of listening to the interviewee who had interviewed the woman who said that Emmet had catcalled her. We were only listening to blatant excuses and pity that we should be used to nowadays by racist white people. I don’t think anyone should have given her a platform to be interviewed or let her write a book because the only thing she tried to do is play victim when she brought up the fact that her husband was extremely aggressive, I was certainly not going for any of that sob story that she was trying to sell. I don’t believe that she feels guilty. I believe that she is in her dying days, and she wants to unleash all her hidden demons so she can reach the pearly white gates of heaven when in fact she’s going to hell.

   

Now as this semester slowly came to an end, I can say that I enjoyed my time being in this class learning more about African American history. This class has taught me so much and I think I’ve grown so much better as a Black young woman. I went from calling dread locs to locs because I did not know the significance and meaning behind the word dread locs. I loved this class so much that I was hoping it would have been another part of this so that I can register for it in the spring semester. I never got this kind of experience from where I’m from and when I went to HBCUs I did not get the opportunity to take it and I’m glad that I waited because Dr. Oliver teaches very beautifully.

AMH 2091 UNIT REFLECTION

 Unit 2 Reflection

   Unit 2 was a lot of information for the most part, but the last 3 chapters of this unit stuck out to me when we got into real depth about slavery and how the slaves were not necessarily free it was just a play on words from the examples Dr. Oliver shown us. As we closed out of the unit, I was mainly stuck on chapter 7 because it brought a lot to my attention on how the constitution and compromises uses a lot of play on words that you will miss if you’re not careful.

 

  The focus in chapter 7 to me is the phrase “The word freedom does not mean you’re “free”. Freedom is “having the ability to act or change without constraint or to possess the power and resources to fulfill one’s purposes unhindered. Blacks were never free because their freedom was limited to, and they never had any possession of any power. The whites limited everything that the Blacks did whether they were trying to access jobs, receive an education, housing, and ride public transportation. In Indiana they made a law where any free Blacks wanted to settle there they would be whipped until they left. What is the point in saying that they're free if they are still being whipped for wanting to settle down?

 

Towards the end of chapter 7 it talks about how white mobs would frequently attack Black neighborhoods, Black businesses, and Black churches. I would always ask my friend If they were so afraid of us and talk about how hostile we were and portrayed us to be monsters back then why would they come to our neighborhoods and fuck with everything we built. Therefore, that is why I’m big on the government giving back reparations to African Americans because they destroyed homes and businesses the African Americans would use for income, and they had to restart each time. Don’t understand how we got labeled as this when they were the ones doing the destruction and throwing fits when they felt like we did not need them anymore.

 

  Black/African Americans have received a lot of stereotypical backlashes for years and it is still happening till this day. Black women still get labeled as the angry Black woman just for voicing her opinion and defending herself, which is known as the sapphire. How can you teach your daughter the right to defend/protect herself if you have people labeling her as the “mad Black woman”? I do think there are a lot of jezebels today, especially in the music industry, mainly from the new upcoming artists that involve rap, r&b, and Latin music. I don’t agree with women over sexualizing themselves for an audience gain, but I guess it is because I grew up with parents who adored oldies and I tended to grow up with that every Saturday when I heard my mother cleaning the house.

Online AMH 2091 Unit Reflection

 

Beginning this course, I was not expecting to learn and have deep thoughts about what African American history really is and what it surrounded itself with. The knowledge that I gained from the first four chapters alone I can say that I was entirely shocked. In this generation you can only gain knowledge of our African American history through entertainers and/or learning on your own from black writers/authors. 

 

  I used the quote by Assata Shakur who is a political activist that talks about us having to gain our own knowledge to learn about our history. Which made me realize that white people stopped African Americans from reading and writing and till this day the white people are trying to stop African Americans and others from learning about the history of our ancestors. 

 

  First day of class we got asked two questions “what are the first words that come to mind when you hear the term Africa?” and “who is the wealthiest man alive?” that led us into the introduction of the kingdoms in Africa. When we learned about Mansa Musa I was surprised because I never heard of an African man being one of the richest man alive and this is where I feel like white people deprive the descendants of African Americans of their history about their ancestors. I always knew that there were good places in Africa, but I just never understood why movies and televisions would only show the bad parts of Africa when there are many beautiful places to show for.  

 

As we moved further throughout the unit, the discussions that caught my attention is when we started discussing what is a black/white race, how slavery started and how biracial people came to be. I was very interested when we started talking about this topic because it always occurred to me on how white people can call us all degrading and vulgar names, but still rape and fall in love with our Black women. They raped our women, and the kids could not take their fathers status only because it would have showed that they were sleeping with slaves and that just made a lot of biracial people in the slave era and still to this day. They would advertise about the monsters that they claim that African Americans were, but never saw that within themselves and talked about how they are the true monsters about what they would do to my people.