Heart of whiteness. The heart of whiteness : confronting race, racism, and white privilege : Jensen, Robert, 1958 2022-12-25
Heart of whiteness Rating:
4,2/10
1976
reviews
"A Midsummer Night's Dream" is a comedy written by William Shakespeare in the late 16th century. The play follows the misadventures of four young lovers, a group of amateur actors, and a fairy king and queen as they navigate the complexities of love and the supernatural.
At the center of the play is the relationship between the four young lovers: Hermia, Lysander, Demetrius, and Helena. Hermia is betrothed to Demetrius, but she is in love with Lysander. Helena, who is in love with Demetrius, is rejected by him in favor of Hermia. This love quadrangle is further complicated by the interference of the fairy king and queen, Oberon and Titania, who use magic to manipulate the emotions and actions of the humans.
One of the main themes of the play is the power of love and its ability to bring about both joy and suffering. The love between the four young lovers is intense and all-consuming, leading them to act irrationally and make poor decisions. The fairy magic only exacerbates this, as it causes the characters to fall in and out of love with each other at the whims of Oberon and Titania.
Another theme is the idea of illusion and the dangers of being too easily swayed by appearances. The fairy magic causes the characters to see things that are not really there, leading them to make mistaken assumptions about each other. This is exemplified by the character of Bottom, who is transformed into an ass and is not recognized by his fellow actors.
In addition to the themes of love and illusion, the play also explores the concept of social hierarchy and the expectations placed on individuals based on their class and status. Hermia, for example, is pressured by her father and the Duke of Athens to marry Demetrius, even though she does not love him. The fairy characters also have their own hierarchy, with Titania and Oberon constantly vying for power and control.
Overall, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is a delightful and humorous exploration of love, illusion, and social expectations. Its timeless themes and well-developed characters make it a classic work of literature that continues to be enjoyed by readers and audiences today.
The heart of whiteness : confronting race, racism, and white privilege : Jensen, Robert, 1958
Thus, the early settlers were not just the passive beneficiaries of a far-off Afrikan slave trade — they bankrolled their settlements in part with the profits of their own eager explorations into Native slave trading. This is typical of the English invasion forces. But our task is to live on the edge of the guilt, to use it to challenge ourselves and each other to do better. This is why the British West Indies, with their favorable climate, were less attractive to these settlers than wintry New England. I was on my way home one afternoon, sitting on one of the inward-facing benches by the door, when a pregnant black woman got on. After leaving Salt Lake, I spent almost five years in a remote village in the Cascade mountains of Washington State.
We can hold them up to the light until we see them for what they are. That meant I worked with several other copy editors who each had primary responsibility for one of those sections. When new communities of invaders were started on the edges of conquered areas, the settlers simply divided up the land. And how about Limbo? For example, as early as 1629 almost one member out of six of Virginia's House of Burgesses was a former indentured servant. And who is making the judgments that seem, in aggregate, so obviously biased? What is necessary is to underline how universally European capitalist life was dependent upon slavery, and how this exploitation dictated the very structure of Euro-Amerikan society. The Heart of Whiteness is both a cautionary tale for those who believe that they have transcended racism, and also an expression of the hope for genuine transcendence.
Eventually Pennsylvania and the Carolinas offered even more land per settler as a lure. I remember being quite proud of myself for, as I saw it, being willing to be blunt and honest. Their proportion in the non-Indian population ranged from 2-3% in upper New England to 8% in Rhode Island, to 14% in New York, and to 41% and 60% respectively in Virginia and South Carolina. . People sometimes complained when others were not as productive or efficient as they could be, but in general we all got along. More to the national difference between oppressor and oppressed, white indentured servants could look hopefully toward the possibility of not only being free, but of themselves becoming landowners and slavemasters. We can see why Virginia's Gov.
THE HEART OF WHITENESS: CONFRONTING RACE, RACISM, AND WHITE PRIVILEGE
Times— May 18, 1899. Amerika had no feudal or communal past, but was constructed from the ground up according to the nightmare vision of the bourgeoisie. When I think about slavery, I do not feel guilty. The Afrikan-owned land on Manhattan included what is now known as Greenwich Village, Astor Place, and Herald Square. Alice liked to sing. As much as two-thirds of the tilled land in Pennsylvania during the 1700s was occupied by white squatters, protected by settler solidarity.
The Heart of Whiteness: An exploration of white guilt
During the course of the Sixteenth Century wages in the building trades went down by over half, while the price of firewood, wheat and other necessities soared by five times. And the new settlers, lusting for individual land and property, were willing to endure hardships and uncertainties for this prized goal. The large majority of settlers were of the property-owning middle classes insofar as classes had yet become visible in the new society : tradesmen, self-employed artisans, and land-owning farmers. So when we hear that the settlers "pushed out the Indians" or "forced the Indians to leave their traditional hunting grounds", we know that these are just codephrases to refer politely to the most barbaric genocide imaginable. At the turn of the century a newspaper as "respectable" as the New York Times could editorially threaten that those peoples who opposed the new world capitalist order would "be extinguished like the North American Indian. This book offers an honest and rigorous exploration of what Jensen refers to as the depraved nature of whiteness in the United States.
The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism, and White Privilege by Robert Jensen
Public opinion was so strong on this that the early English textile factories were filled with Irish and Welsh immigrants, children from the poorhouses and single women. There are, however, more productive ways to understand white guilt. Even prosperous yeomen often could not get the land they desired for their younger sons. A recent episode of this sort shamed me into a promise to put my past in order. So why is such guilt so common among white people? And if we ourselves never say a slighting word about those others or smile in a certain way at the dramatic fulfillment of a stereotype, our children, living in our world, will still see and hear such things and be touched by them. Everyone can — and the overwhelming majority of people do — feel it.
To go back and understand the lives and consciousness of the early English settlers is to see the embryo of today's Amerikan Empire. . As soon as a workman had accumulated a small amount of money he could, and in many cases did, take up a tract of land and settle on it as a farmer. . Later, the English settlers would pass laws against Afrikan land ownership, and take these tracts from the free Afrikans. The most famous Colonial-era settler artisan, Paul Revere, was not only a silversmith and an artist-engraver, but also a dentist and the small capitalist operator of a copper foundry.
We have settled into a comfortable relationship with a justice system that is palpably unjust. If possible, one can take steps to try to rectify any damage done to others. Indian slaves were common throughout the Colonies — in 1730 the settlers of Kingston, Rhode Island had 223 Indian slaves as well as 333 Afrikan slaves. To universal derision, these European settlers claim to be the only rightful, historic inhabitants of South Afrika. At that time there was a crisis in England over land ownership and tenancy due to the rise of capitalism. As she learned the system, Jane had a few rough nights, as did everyone else.
And we can see that the guilt was the right thing to feel, and one hopes spurred us to repair the damage if possible and not repeat the mistake. Jensen acknowledges this self-indulgence and he writes on anyway. Dutch and English settlers unite to slaughter the Pequots — 1637 The mythology of the white masses pretends that while the evil planter and the London merchant grew fat on the profits of the slave labor, the "poor white" of the South, the Northern small farmer and white worker were all uninvolved in slavery and benefited not at all from it. . We can, in time, with good will, bring logic and history and our own experience to bear on the ugly absurdities we have breathed in since leaving the cradle.
An example is Rebecca Royston of Calvert County, Maryland, who died in 1740 with an estate worth 81 £ which places her well in the middle of the small-medium farmers. . Mixing personal experience with data and theory, Jensen faces down the difficult realities of race, racism, and white privilege. The coming of capitalism had smashed all the traditional securities and values of feudal England, and financed its beginnings with the most savage reduction of the general living standard. Indian slavery died out, and was gradually lost in the great river of Afrikan slavery, only because the settlers finally decided to exterminate the heavily depopulated Indian nations altogether. No need for separate bathrooms and water fountains—if there were any black people in that scrubbed metropolis, they kept well out of sight. We feel it as a kind of accusation.
