Keynote talk at the 2017 State of Oregon Diversity and Inclusion Conference, Sept. 26 and 27, 2017

1. THE REVENGE OF
HISTORY
RACE AND POWER IN THE UNITED STATES
Kevin Gannon
Grand View University
thetattooedprof.com
Twitter: @thetattooedprof

2. When were you first “told”
that you were __________ ?
Flickr user Chris Sampson

3. Flickr user Greg Grimes

8. Giulia, “#9 Difference,” Flickr
Where does the concept of “Race” come from ?

9. “Humanity is divided into two:
the masters and the slaves; or, if
one prefers it, the Greeks and the
Barbarians, those who have the
right to command; and those who
are born to obey.”

10. Flickr user Grid Engine
One of the key features of Enlightenment intellectual
culture was an imperative to sort, to categorize, to
classify and “rationalize.”

11. “In the beginning all the world was America.”
John Locke
Flickr user Jacob Botter

13. Bartolomé de las Casas Juan Ginés
de Sepúlveda

14. Flickr user Son of Groucho
The European encounter with West Africans, coupled with the
“discovery” of indigenous Americans, accelerated the process of
race-making.

15. Europeans continued to try
and square the existence of
black Africans with their
particular understanding of
human origins.

16. Robert Boyle, in Of the Nature of Whiteness and
Blackness (1664), argued that physics proved
that white was “the chiefest color.” Blackness,
then, became the “ugly” deviation—or
deficiency—from the norm.

17. If blackness was the corruption of whiteness,
the deviation that proved the norm, then
what else would it become for Europeans?

18. What do our conceptual understandings depend upon?
Flickr user Kirsty Hall

19. Flickr user ckmck
# of genes that determine
pigmentation: ≤40-100
# of genes that determine
height: ≥400

20. There is no genetic basis for the categories we call
“race.”

21. Witchcraft
Racecraft

23. “disease is the natural offspring of negro liberty–the liberty to be
idle, to wallow in filth, and to indulge in improper food and drinks.”
-Samuel Cartwright, southern “physician”

24. “When left to himself, the negro
indulges in his natural
disposition to idleness and sloth,
and does not take exercise
enough to expand his lungs and
to vitalize his blood…the blood
becomes so highly carbonized
and deprived of oxygen, that it
not only becomes unfit to
stimulate the brain to energy,
but unfit to stimulate the nerves
of sensation distributed to the
body.”
Samuel Cartwright, “Diseases and
Peculiarities of the Negro,” DeBow’s
Review, 1851

25. “[h]e will be known for his
sound judgment, mechanical
ingenuity, strong affections,
thoroughness, and uniformity;
for his love of truth and
disposition to fulfill his
engagements, and to treat
other men with justice and
proper considerations.”
William Painter’s phrenological
examination report

28. Flickr user Alan Levine
What does “freedom” mean?

29. In 1865:
• No black suffrage in 19 out of 24 states in the North
• Blacks could not serve on juries in any northern state
• Blacks could not even testify in court in 10 northern states

30. The Thirteenth Amendment
SECTION 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,
except as a punishment for crime whereof the party
shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the
United States, or any place subject to their
jurisdiction.
SECTION 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this
article by appropriate legislation.

31. The Thirteenth Amendment
SECTION 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,
except as a punishment for crime whereof the party
shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the
United States, or any place subject to their
jurisdiction.
SECTION 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this
article by appropriate legislation.

32. “We must now make a code
that will subject as many
crimes to the penalty of
involuntary servitude, and so
reduce the Negroes under such
penalty again to practical
slavery.”
-southern white clergyman, testimony before
the Joint Congressional Committee on
Reconstruction, 1866

36. The Prison Abolition Project

37. Pennsylvania
School Funding by
districts’ racial
composition
Yellow=% of white
students above the
mean for that poverty
decile
David Mosenkis, “Racial Bias in
Pennsylvania’s Funding of Public
Schools,” 2014

39. Flickr user Alan Levine
What does “freedom” mean?

40. A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high
sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian
massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the
Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the
man…
As we have taken into our national family seven millions of Negroes, and as we
receive foreigners at the rate of more than five hundred thousand a year, and
assimilate them, it would seem that the time may have arrived when we can very
properly make at least the attempt to assimilate our two hundred and fifty
thousand Indians, using this proven potent line, and see if that will not end this
vexed question and remove them from public attention, where they occupy so
much more space than they are entitled to either by numbers or worth.
Capt. Richard H. Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian School, 1892

41. Rebecca Onion and Claudio Saunt, Slate, June 17, 2014.

42. The Real Weekly Show
“the social alchemy of racecraft transforms racism into race,
disguising collective social practice as inborn individual traits.”
Fields and Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

43. Ideology never says ‘I am ideological’.”
-Louis Althusser

44. Flickr user ume-y
Structures of inequality will always reproduce themselves
until we intervene to stop that reproduction.