5 articles needed *due*24 hours

weapons of whiteness

whiteness is defined by the “other”

“[whiteness] is defined by what is it not: the racially coded “other.” sociologists who have studied the historical evolution of contemporary racial categories…demonstrate that what ‘white’ means has always been understood through a process of exclusion or negation. when European colonists described Africans or indigenous Americans as wild, savage, backward, and stupid, they cast themselves in contrast as civilized, rational, advanced, and intelligent. when American slaveholders described their Black captives as sexually uninhibited and aggressive, they in contrast built an image of whiteness as pure and chaste. when white people today stereotype Black and Latino boys as bad, dangerous kids, they counterpose white kids as well-behaved and respectable. when we describe Latinas as ‘spicy’ and ‘fiery,’ we in turn construct white women as tame and even-tempered.

as a racial category devoid of any racially or ethnically coded meaning, ‘white’ is all that it is not. as such, whiteness is something loaded with social, cultural, political, and economic significance.”

—Nicki Lisa Cole

“the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves— result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”

Marshal McLuhan “The Medium is the Message.”

“if the arrow is an extension of the hand and the arm, the rifle is an extension of the eye and the teeth. and it may be to point to remark that it was the literate American colonists who were first to insist on a rifled barrel and improved gunsights…it was the highly literate Bostonians who outshot the British regulars. marksmanship is not the gift of the native or woodsman, but of the literate colonist. so runs this argument that links gunfire itself with the rise of perspective, and with the extension of the visual power in literacy. in the Marine Corps it has been found that there is a definite correlation between education and marksmanship.”

McLuhan, “Weapons: War of the Icons”

“weapons proper are extensions of hands, nails, and teeth, and come into existence as tools needed or accelerating the processing of matter.”

“since our new electric technology is not an extension of our bodies but of our central nervous systems, we now see all technology, including language as a means of processing experience, a means of storing and speeding information. and in such a situation all technology can plausibly be regarded as weapons.”

“our highly literate societies are at a loss as they encounter the new structures of opinion and feeling that result from instant and global information. they are still in the grip of ‘points of view’ and habits of dealing with things one at a time. such habits are quite crippling in any electronic structure of information movement, yet they could be controlled if we recognized whence they had been acquired. but literate society think of its artificial visual bias as a thing natural and innate.”

Django Unchained. dir. Quentin Tarantino. 2012: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aP5LXYVQXLi3Mfy7H_nt5hTcYdprdkL_/view?usp=sharing

principals of phrenology

-the brain is the organ of the mind.

-human mental powers can be analyzed into a definite number of independent faculties.

-these faculties are innate, and each has its seat in a definite region of the surface of the brain.

-the size of each such region is the measure of the degree to which the faculty seated in it forms a constituent element in the character of the individual.

-the correspondence between the outer surface of the skull and the contour of the brain-surface beneath is sufficiently close to enable the observer to recognize the relative sizes of these several organs by the examination of the outer surface of the head.

Harper’s magazine in 1851 described the “Celtic physiognomy” as “simian-like with protruding teeth and short up-turned noses.” Similarly, the 1871 book New Physiognomy written by the American phrenologist Samuel Roberts Wells, described the Irish woman as being governed “by lower or animal passions,” seeking her chief pleasure from things physical and animal,” and unable to see “beauty in that which can not be eaten or used for the gratification of the bodily appetites or passions.” she “is rude, rough, unpolished, ignorant, and brutish.”

“a gulf certainly, does appear to yawn between the gorilla and the negro. the woods and wilds of Africa do not exhibit an example from any intermediate animal. but in this, as in many other cases, philosophers go vainly searching abroad for that which they could readily find if they sought for it at home. a creature manifestly between the gorilla and the negro is to be meat with in some of the lowest districts of London and Liverpool by adventurous explorers. it comes from Ireland whence it has contrived to migrate; it belongs in fact to a tribe of Irish savages: the lowest species of Irish yahoo. when conversing with its kind it talks a sort of gibberish. it is, moreover, a climbing animal, and may sometimes be seen ascending a ladder laden with a hod of bricks.”

Punch magazine (England, 1862)

-diarist George Templeton Strong, for example, wrote that “the gorilla is superior to the Celtic in muscle and hardly their inferior in a moral sense.”

-one American philanthropist claimed that Irish immigrants “are content to live together in filth and disorder, and enjoy their balls and wakes and frolics without molestation.”

Civil War, 1861-1865

Mexican War, 1846-1848

wars where Irish soldiers make a name for themselves and come back to U.S. cities as heroes.

Tammany Hall Democratic political machine in N.Y. that had a grand corrupting influence on politics from the 1850s to the election of mayor Fiorello La Guardia in 1933.

William “Boss” Tweed politician and “boss” of the Tammany Hall political machine from 1858-1871

The Five Points neighborhood

Dead Rabbits Riot (1857) Dead Rabbits vs. Bowery Boys

what is a knife saying?

what are the memories of a locket?

what is gaslight revealing?

what history is a cross carrying?

The Five Points neighborhood

“the city, itself, is traditionally a military weapon, and is a collective shield of plate armor, an extension of the castle of our very skins. before the huddle of the city there was the food-gathering phase of man the hunter. even as men have now in the electric age returned physically and socially to the nomad state. now, however, it is called information and it ignored and replaces the form of the city which has, therefore, tended to become obsolete. with instant electronic technology, the globe itself can never be more than a village, and the very nature of the city as a form of major dimensions must inevitable dissolve like a fading shot in a movie.”

-McLuhan

what is a knife saying?

what are the memories of a locket?

what is gaslight revealing?

what history is a cross carrying?

Gangs of New York. dir. Martin Scorsese. 2002: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zn-t3prbaxvvB3yPU0s0TgipkZ2UzGj1/view?usp=sharing

what is a knife saying?

what are the memories of a locket?

what is gaslight revealing?

what history is a cross carrying?

Boddy Seale: “take careful note of the racist California legislature aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned, demonstrated, and everything else to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetuated against black people the time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.”

Malcolm X: “[the government was] either unable or unwilling to protect the lives and property” of blacks, he said, they had to defend themselves “by whatever means necessary.”

“the gun is the only thing that will free us— gain us our liberation.”

-Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a permit to carry a concealed firearm in 1956, after his house was bombed.

-his application was denied, but from then on, armed supporters guarded his home.

-one adviser, Glenn Smiley, described the King home as “an arsenal.”

-republicans in California eagerly supported increased gun control.

-governor Ronald Reagan: “[r see] no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.”

-he called guns a “ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.”

-Reagan said he didn’t “know of any sportsman who leaves his home with a gun to go out into the field to hunt or for target shooting who carries that gun loaded.”

-The Mulford Act, he said, “would work no hardship on the honest citizen.”

saturday night special cheap, inexpensive, easy to attain handgun

more controversially, the laws restricted importation of “saturday night specials”—the small, cheap, poor-quality handguns so named by Detroit police for their association with urban crime, which spiked on weekends. because these inexpensive pistols were popular in minority communities, one critic said the new federal gun legislation “was passed not to control guns but to control blacks.”

Karl Marx & Frederick Engels

“to be able forcefully and threateningly to oppose this party, whose betrayal of the workers will begin with the very first hour of victory, the workers must be armed and organized. the whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens’ militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed. where the formation of this militia cannot be prevented, the workers must try to organize themselves independently as a proletarian guard, with elected leaders and with their own elected general staff; they must try to place themselves not under the orders of the state authority but of the revolutionary local councils set up by the workers. where the workers are employed by the state, they must arm and organize themselves into special corps with elected leaders, or as a part of the proletarian guard. under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary. the destruction of the bourgeois democrats’ influence over the workers, and the enforcement of conditions which will compromise the rule of bourgeois democracy, which is for the moment inevitable, and make it as difficult as possible – these are the main points which the proletariat and therefore the League must keep in mind during and after the approaching uprising.” 1850

“Why Some Black Americans Need Guns to Feel Safe in Their Country.” New York Times | Opinion. 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSqTKE5apxE

“a senior Pink Pistols member said that if patrons had been armed at the Orlando nightclub, they might have prevented the shooting for minimized loss of life

‘i think there is a possibility that it could have prevented it…or helped to make the death toll less. if we could have sent one more person home to their family alive instead of in a body bag that would have been something,’ said Gwen Patton, a spokeswoman for the Pink Pistols.

Patton said that membership of the group’s facebook page had tripled from 1,500 before the Orlando massacre to 4,500 by thursday. but with no formal registration system or fees for joining the Pink Pistols, there were no reliable membership numbers available for the group itself, she said.”

Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution. dir. Stanley Nelson. 2015: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ShTEDXUlTu_um_4VS-e744uL92KiTIpe/view?usp=sharing