Today's lesson brought up some great subjects. One of them was inadvertently brought up. At the school I taught at we had a few issues with the frameworks concerning Civil Rights. One of the issues was that the whole movement was south only. Definetly the south had the larger issues, but I thought it was very important that today's discussion brought us north and west. Our own MA frameworks does not even include the Boston busing and if we were to stick to the frameworks and the text books, we would paint a picture of a color blind, racism free North. I am happy that the seminar was able to bring to light a more accurate picture.
The other thing we had an issue with was the completly Amercentral view of the movement. Especailly when we get into the post WWII African nation building, we see even more clearly that this is a world movement and we are usually focused on the domestic aspect of it. Again if it was up to the text books and frameworks, only the US had a civil rights movement and Vietnam was disconnected to it. I love that today's class took us where it took us. The Anti-cololianism part was superb. I will use the Hendrix, Olympics combo in class.
My question was from the first half of the class- I can see Davarian's point that class and race are intertwineded, but I ask can it also be separate? That is to say it overlaps in many (or most places) as the Western white culture dominates most aspects of the world's economy- yet can decisions about the "race to the bottom" (which country can produce goods the cheapest gets the contract) seem to be economic. though I see that the whole thing has been set up in the favor of the Western countries in the first place.
With that in mind, what about Japan using Chinese and Malaysian labor to manufacture goods? Is race and issue there? With the same "race" but diferent cultures do we see this as an exception? Is Japan a western culture in Asia? Then if we look at some manufacturing returning to the US because of fuel costs ( I saw a PBS news story on this) do we see mixed races of black , white, latino, and asian American workers as class - since we can't narrow down a single "race" isn't this then class? And with China and South Korea moving fast, what about the use of their own cheap labor?
Zachary Simmons