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“Race”, a tightly weaved fabrication that has been adeptly warped and knitted into the tapestry of time always finds a way to spin and roll itself into every social justice conversation and debate in modern day America. With each passing generation, the hot topic on race refuses to fizzle out. Yet, race does not exist, scientists have maintained constantly. Then, why do we still believe it does? Let’s look at the early origins of slavery.  The documentary, “Race: the power of an illusion” narrates how in Early America there was no division along color lines, rather the obvious division was class. In other words, “Race is a modern idea – it hasn’t always been with us. In ancient times, language, religion, status, and class distinctions were more important than physical appearance” ( ). Basically, the main question at the time was not about who was coloured or white but who had more wealth, influence and lands than the other. The advent of the transatlantic slave trade business and forceful capture of Africans into the Americas introduced a deceptive division. Chain business transactions (pun intended) would create a division so wide, false ideology and pseudoscience could only account for it. In simplistic terms, the historical buying and selling of human beings breathed life to the lie called “race”  Albeit, modern scientists maintain that if race actually exists then there is only the human race.  Continue reading “Making Sense of the Shadows: An Allegory of Modern Day Slavery.”

Leading into reading this novel, I was internally struggling with how I was going to get through this class. I am not a fan of science fiction, and the syllabus felt overwhelming, especially when considering the entire class was centered around science fiction novels. However, since the first chapters (Past 1, etc.) I have been extremely interested in the narratives that Butler has created.

I have found myself becoming immersed in the reading, and not wanting to put it down after I had finished the sections assigned for each class. I often found myself conflicted with the ideas of how I felt I should have been feeling based off of the things we discussed in class, such as the concepts of consent and humanity. In a way, I often found myself being disturbed because I was more comfortable with the super-natural beings in the enclave who often defied the laws of consent and “ruined” so many peoples’ lives and I found myself annoyed and uncomfortable with other characters such as Blake. Why am I finding myself being more accepting of these characters that are so destructive in their ways and wishing those who are victims of these people to disappear? I am interested in the ways that Butler’s future novels that we read will lead me to conflicting feelings once again.

My first impressions of this class were clearly wrong, and I’m happy to have found another English class that leads me to think about class discussions and the themes in the books we read long after I have left the class. It also doesn’t hurt that I look forward to reading in between classes.

“But whites ascribed black women’s sexual availability not to their powerlessness but to a key tenet of scientific racism: Blacks were unable to control their powerful sexual drives, which were frequently compared to those of rutting animals.”

This blog is mainly dedicated to the term, “scientific” racism. I have heard the words race and racism countless times in my lifetime and have argued and interpreted the meaning to those two words. I took an INTD course my first semester at Geneseo about racial identity and families and have had conversations concerning the term race. While reading Medical apartheid, I came across a new term that I never knew existed. Scientific racism. As a biology major and science enthusiast, science is the study of facts concerning the atoms, body, etc. The actual definition of science is,  “a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws”. Truth? Fact?  What about racism is backed up and supported by science?

Encyclopedia.com defines and elaborates on scientific racism but it has been studied that race is not biological, therefore race has nothing to do with science. Racism is not and will never be backed up by science or any other subject.

For the purposes of this post, I split my writing into three sections:  Paternal Power, Jaws, and Ghosts.  These sections function largely as organizing principles, and are by no means the exclusive focus, or outside source discussed, in each section.  I conclude with a brief discussion of how I would add The Devil in Silver to a course’s curriculum.

Continue reading “Looking Back and Moving Forward”