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This is a very powerful movie about the black and white divide in America that existed for more than a century after the Civil War. It focuses on the role of black maids in the south during the time of "Jim Crow".
I think that it is time to replace the innocuous sounding "Jim Crow" with a more appropriate title for what America maintained in that century. I have come around to the view that the reality of that situation would more appropriately be called the American Apartheid.
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Tuesday, August 30, 2011
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Great point YA, and I like the proposal. Here are a few more thoughts in this direction.
ReplyDeleteThe phrase "Jim Crow": While I've long understood that "Jim Crow" generally referred to the long post-reconstruction era of segregation and discrimination, I've never had any idea of the origins of the phrase itself. I looked it up and apparently many years ago it was a racial slur. I guess this meaning has been lost over time. I agree with YA that it now sounds almost innocuous. At any rate, the term is devoid of meaning to an extent that I'll try not to use it any more unless I'm pointing it out as an archaism.
YA's proposed language: On the other hand, there has been an effort toward international understanding of the term "apartheid" so that the meaning of the phrase "American apartheid" is not likely to be lost on history.
Some possible downsides to YA's proposal (these don't dissuade me but I thought I'd point them out):
(1) I did wonder whether the term "apartheid" would have any resonance with most US citizens. As a possible alternative, the word "segregation" is fairly well understood and is certainly better than "Jim Crow". But, I guess it doesn't quite capture the kind of pernicious and institutionalized discrimination that was practiced at the time.
(2) This is going to sound awful I know, but for me when words like "genocide" and "human rights" and "apartheid" are appropriated by the UN, they lose some of their impact and I start to think of them as messy and amorphous and politically freighted. That said, the UN's use of the word "apartheid" (I looked it up) does seem to accurately apply to what was going on in America from the Civil War until Civil Rights. And if we are able to embrace the application of that term to our own historical circumstance, that might give us more credibility in speaking to what's currently going on in other countries (Chinese treatment of Tibetans, for example).
(3) I did wonder if perhaps "Southern apartheid" would be a more appropriate phrase. But, it seems to me that there was surely enough complicity at the national level for this to be an American problem, not just a Southern one.