CSA: Confederate State of America

Hannah Crouser

In the film The Confederate States of America it is easy to see how close we were to living the reality painted in the film. As well as how many events they did not have to change from real history to make the reality true. White Americans have used race as a way to tell who is greater than others for decades. Just look at Jim Crow laws, or T.V. shows shown today. For a long time, we believed that black people were more likely to be criminals because of a difference in their skull shape. Even if we have proven that these pseudoscience ideas are not true the implications of believing in them are still seen today. Black women’s pain is taken less seriously, and Black men are over-represented in our prison population. White people don’t want to admit that they are equal to people who look different from them, so they use those differences as a way to explain the way they treat them. The consequences of doing so are still seen today, yet we continue to do it. We have incarcerated so many Black fathers that we have created a generational predisposition, where their sons are more likely to end up in prison. Many white people don’t like to admit it but the United States was founded on the idea of Whiteness, and anyone not fitting that idea was treated as less than. 




Comments

  1. David BernellJanuary 28, 2023 at 6:07 PM

    Your comments point to the circumstance in which a succession of arguments over time, involving charges of inferior intelligence or tendencies to criminality, and grounded in pseudoscience and made up social science, have been provided to justify unequal and so often violent treatment of black people in the United States. While the racism and bigotry are constants, the justifications for them have changed.

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