Author: Paulina Day

This article made me realize how deep the roots of white supremacy ran in the world. America was already home to so many race issues, and beyond America, the same race issues were present. White people from Europe were trying to claim parts of Africa as their own, invading and colonizing. On a large scale, the struggle was between the workers/oppressed and the controllers/claimers. White people in the working class who suffer similar oppression under the privileged community were STILL siding with the upper class. In this case, lower class whites aligned with other whites in the name of sticking to their race. This idea of white supremacy was evident globally and in America. Racial separations at this time were stronger than class separations, even though class separations directly disadvantaged people of all colors in the working class.

Reading the Civil Disobedience article made me think about how normalized white southern violence was during these times. It seemed like basically the author was saying if the black community acted out in civil disobedience, then they know what’s coming to them. The author seems to say “We all know how the south can be”. This enables white southern violence instead of condemning it. Instead, it appears that the black community is being condemned for trying to stick up for themselves in the face of white violence.

White violence was pushed under the rug while the black community was criticized for wanting to do something to fight it.

While reading “Brown as a Cold War Case”, I noticed that the value of context in relation to historical events is great. In high school when I learned about the Brown Case nothing beyond what it was and what it did was taught or discussed. Through reading this article, it relates the case to what was going on in the world at the time and emphasizes the importance of considering context when studying history.

Since the Brown case was an international story and America was under a microscope because of their leader role in the Cold War, I wonder if the result would have been different had there been less publicity and attention. Is the public attention what swayed the case?

Context is so important because it influences events so strongly. Merely studying the event itself isn’t deep enough because there’s so much happening around it that shapes it.