2 Responses required - 1 page each - Due in 9 hours

January 24, 2018

AAST 215 or RCST 202 or AAST 220

Response Paper to: Documentary about Blacks and Sports

Leaders in Virginia used cultural and social institutions to dispense a dominant ideology and lay the foundation for a system of White cultural violence against Africans in America. Virginia is regarded as the archetype in America for setting into motion a system of oppression that resulted in the enslavement of Africans (Higginbotham, 1978). The record is clear about Virginia creating some of the first laws to initiate the system of American slavery. The first population of Africans brought into colonial America arrived in Virginia during the early seventeenth century as servants and before the end of the seventeenth century law defined exclusively them as slaves (Toppin, 1996; Higginbotham, 1978). Rather than discussing Virginia and slavery, the purpose of this present argument is to demonstrate Virginia’s significant role in using their authority and cultural and social institutions to lay the foundation for a system of White cultural violence against Africans during the early stage of America. This study is not intended to introduce new historical data about Virginia, but to frame some of the activities conducted there into a context which highlights the social construction of a perpetual ideology against Africans in America. Johan Galtung (1999) says “cultural violence” occurs when a dominant group uses cultural and social institutions, or any aspect of a cultural domain, to spread and maintain an ideology about the inferiority of a subordinate group (pp. 39-43). This set of ideas and images became part of what Rebecca Ann Lind (2004) calls the, “dominant ideology” (p. 7), because it embodied and imposed the idea of a divine presence and inherent superiority of Europeans (whites) over the darker Native Americans, Mexicans, and Africans in the New World. The focus in this study is how the dominant ideology of African inferiority was used against Africans in Virginia. By controlling how a subordinate group is framed in a cultural and social context, dominant groups can influence attitudes and actions toward subordinate group members (Lind, 2004). The deployment of cultural elements by cultural and social leaders in Virginia permitted the entrenchment of African descendants into American culture as immoral, criminal, animal, cursed, savage, violent, and best suited for slavery.