Journal Comparison
On the essays on “The Special Plight and Role of Black” and “A Red Record,” the main issue that was talked about is on the Blacks in America. It has talked about the plight and the role of the Blacks in the eyes of the Whites. Slavery of the blacks has been the case many years ago and even in the recent years there is still race discrimination on the Black people. From north down to the south, discrimination and slavery are the major issues in these essays. There are also discussions on how these issues have changed slowly over time. They provided a critical exploration of African American history that encompassed the global implications for past and contemporary black liberation struggles.
Black in America is continuously plagued with various race-related problems of extremely escalating severity. For example, many black males are considered as less desirable employees and are less likely hired in most jobs. There is a notion that blacks should be separated and accorded different treatment from the rest of the population because of their racial inferiority (1989;, 1988). Black Americans have forever labored under binary oppositions: slavery vs. freedom, equality vs. inequality, accommodation vs. agitation.
Historical stories about African Americans typically cover only the period immediately before the Civil War when the Underground Railroad was firmly established and freedom was getting closer. Most stories about slavery take place in the South. The long fight for equality for African Americans is not over yet until the present time.
In the past, the White Americans has owned the Black Americans, their body and their soul. They had the blacks as their slaves and even give them physical punishment, and even treating them inhumanly. Moreover, they referred the Blacks as objects that can be owned.
In December 1865, the American states ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, formally emancipating over 4 million blacks in former slaveholding states (1970).
The deinstitutionalization of slavery and its effects have been studied by a number of intellectuals since the late nineteenth century, ranging from (1935) inquiry into the political potential for greater race and class equality in southern reconstruction to the large-scale quantitative analyses conducted under the impetus of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (1930; 1927).
Despite this early flurry of scholarship, however, more recent efforts in social history have often focused on the institution of slavery itself rather than its legacy (2003; 1989), while examinations of slavery's consequences have emphasized aggregate, macro level effects (2001). Lacking longitudinal analysis at the micro level, the legacy of American slavery remains poorly understood for individual blacks emancipated from this peculiar institution (1956).
After emancipation happen and the ownership of the White Americans on the Black has ended. But either way the mistreatment of the whites to the blacks continues. In the time that they can own a Black as their slaves, they tried not to go beyond there anger in order to not to kill their slaves because they thought it would be a great loss to them like an asset that is lost.
But when emancipation happened, the Blacks are not only injured and treated inhumanly but rather even brutally murder them. Their excuse is that the necessity of the white man to repress and stamp out alleged race riots. The second excuse happens during the reconstruction. Moreover, Negroes had to be killed to avenge their assaults upon women. They accused black men raped the white women.
With the two essays it has discussed about the meaning of slavery as owning the Negro’s body and soul. Both has also emphasizes the unchanged treatment of the whites to the blacks. Brutality is present and the whites are likely to dominate over.
Moreover, discrimination was still widely happening over the whites and the blacks. With the ratification of the constitution which has formally emancipated the blacks, blacks have been given the right to vote and their votes have largely affect elections. But that has not been long because the blacks has given the right to vote but still had denied them with the right of protection. Murders on blacks are spreading but there were no murderers that have been convicted. The rights of the Black people were taken for granted by the law. This is because the Black people have thought that they are born to be slaves. They have low education and they are ignorant of the laws. Many of them are poor.
However, emancipation meant a tremendous increase in the degree to which freedmen and freedwomen controlled their private lives, but, at least for the majority employed in sharecropping arrangements, there was not always a commensurate increase in economic autonomy. The reasons were twofold. First, the debt load imposed by unscrupulous merchants often forced ex-slaves into material penury that placed them in a tier of socioeconomic status similar to that which they had experienced as field hands (1992). Even those who were fortunate or talented enough to escape low-status occupations usually spent a period as unskilled laborers accumulating cultural or economic capital. Second, the authority exercised by merchants and landlords and effective serfdom of many ex-slaves meant that the cultural distinction between chattel slavery and "free" wage labor was likely to seem ambiguous to some. Clearly the frequency of physical coercion was reduced under freedom, but even this crucial improvement in the lives of ex-slaves was far from universal (1976; 1979). Other examples of practices descendent from slavery institutions included the enforcement of black codes by police and the harassment of blacks by white patrols and vigilante groups convened to regulate African American behavior.
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