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Title: Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries by Orlando Patterson ISBN: 1-58243-039-X Publisher: BasicCivitas Books Pub. Date: 01 December, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.2 (5 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: Sacrificed to Dionysus? ¿ Are Blacks really scapegoats?
Comment: This book's author is a Black sociologist at Harvard University who wears a suit, tie and glasses and sympathizes with Christianity. He is a stylish writer who is as at home with social statistics as with Madonna's complaints that her one-time Black lover -- the basketball star and transvestite, Dennis Rodman -- failed to give her cunnilingus when the pair met for sex. More especially, Patterson abjures constructivism; he thinks American Blacks are in a "desperate" state of criminality, drug-addiction and family breakdown; he agrees that Black teenage pregnancies are "catastrophic" for both mother and child; and he denies that Black social problems are attributable to poverty or to the daily grind of White racism. Altogether, Patterson looks as promising a Black sociologist as Whites are likely to find.
What, then, can have inspired Patterson's latest title, Rituals of Blood? Why, nothing less than a belief that Black ghetto bastardy and violence - not least to Black women and in turn from these women to their Black children - can be blamed on nineteenth-century Whites. These primitives, not content with enslaving Blacks and denying them marriage prospects, proceeded to hack off Blacks' ears, fingers and genitalia in the process of roasting them alive at joyfully attended lynchings. According to Patterson, this meant that Black males were in no position to supply adequate male role models to the children they casually sired; that Black womenfolk learned to despise them; and that Black men in turn came to hate their own mothers and Black women in general. Patterson sees only more trouble ahead. Niggas with attitude, like the musician Puff Daddy, apparently serve the function only of letting Whites indulge the 'Dionysian sides' of their natures. Meanwhile, rap artistes lead Black youth to impossible dreams and to a sustained non-involvement with the normal world of work and family life that will outlast all the corresponding efforts of affirmative racists and welfarists. In their "Dionysian entrapment", "hypnotized" Black youth replace Uncle Tom's cabin in the sky with the "all-or-nothing hope of one day slam-dunking the basketball net" and head towards their "fateful moment" of the gathering future.
At the core of this dramatic account of forever-collapsing Black culture lies an impressive collection of survey statistics which bolster Patterson's feminist analysis of the essential modern problem of American Blackdom. So hostile and suspicious are the two Black sexes that 46% of Black men have never been married (compared to only 27% of what Patterson calls 'Euro-American' men). A Black woman in the USA can expect to spend just 22% of her lifetime being married (compared to the 43% spent by Euro-American females in one or more viable marriages). Surveys reveal the reasons for the frostiness between the Black sexes: 56% of young Black men say they cheated on even their very first sexual partner - which the refreshingly judgmental Patterson finds nothing short of "deplorable." "....the great majority of Afro-American mothers," says Patterson, "have been seduced, deceived, betrayed and abandoned by the men to whom they gave their love and trust." Tracing these problems further back, Black children experience high rates of sexual abuse: Blacks are a minority of the population in Chicago, but 70% of child sex abuse in that city is Black-on-Black. Nor does Black isolation occur just because a third of young Black men are in jail at any one time. Contrary to what Patterson calls the myth of Black brotherhood, Black men have markedly impoverished social networks compared to Whites; and their minimal contacts seldom link them with any realistic world of employment that is both gainful and legal.
Thus it is that Patterson proposes his solution to US Blackdom: that the urban ghettos be broken up and Blacks dispersed among Whites who will be further assisted to marry them by laws which would guarantee Blacks 'equal opportunity' to marry a decent proportion of Caucasoids - who currently miscegenate freely with all races/ethnicities except the unhappy Negro.
What can be said of this engaging thesis before 'equal opportunity' enthusiasts take their next step forward to oblige childless White suburban women to take Black lodgers and turn them swiftly into husbands? There are in fact three remarkable omissions from Patterson's story.
First, the attribution of Blacks' problems to White enslavement and the "lynching cult" neglects that Africa had its own pattern of Black-on-Black slavery, inter-tribal violence and brutal tyranny long before White sailors ever showed up to buy the slaves readily supplied by Black potentates and princelings. The notorious Zulu king Chaka was witnessed despatching 60 twelve-year-old boys before breakfast and massacring 500 women for witchcraft. Patterson fails to establish his causal thesis that the White man's slave trading can be blamed for anything very much.
How, then, do there occur the appalling relations between the Black sexes? Astonishingly, Patterson shows little sign of having heard of Africa -- let alone of personally visiting or studying the Dark Continent. On West Africa's Gold Coast, he could easily have learned that women mistrust Black men and that men reciprocate exactly in the pattern of America's slave-holding South and the inner-city ghettoes of Kingston and London today. Just as in Virginia of 1800, hardly any Black woman in West Africa will trust her man for a day.
As its last omission, Rituals of Blood entirely ignores the levels of crime, bastardy, welfare dependency and inter-sex suspicion among Whites having the same levels of IQ as Blacks. Despite The Bell Curve having copiously documented the causal role of low IQ in social pathology, the names of Charles Murray, Richard Herrnstein, Arthur Jensen and Phil Rushton are simply not thought worth a mention by a Harvard sociologist - indeed, intelligence and IQ also remain unmentioned. Such a high level of wilful ignorance is astonishing. Patterson should recall Mark Twain's observation that a man who won't read books can claim no serious superiority over a man who can't read them.
Rating: 4
Summary: Rituals of Blood a sterling contribution to the debate
Comment: This is the second book in a trilogy.It satarts from where the first book Paradox of integration ends.It is essentially divided into 3 essays The first essay is entitled broken bloodlines and discusses present day gender conflicts in the African American community.Emphasis is laid on issues such as Increasing divorce rates and singles also declining remarriage rates.These are traced back to the days of Slavery and sharecropping till he gets to the present day.The educational disparity between males and females is also discussed. The second essay Feast of blood deals with the heinous practise of Lynching and the macabre postcard industry it spawned also discussed is the role of clergy and the African American response. The third essay American Dionysus discusses the image of African Americans today with various examples.This is related to Greek mythology. In conclusion i recommend this book.It indeed has illustrative charts and pictures which are quite nice for a better understanding of the issues at stake.
Rating: 3
Summary: Complex, difficult, and disappointing...
Comment: Orlando Patterson's thesis is that America's experience with slavery and post-Reconstruction violence against black persons(extending over another 100 years), and black men in particular, continues to taint and distort American race relations. On one hand, he writes breathtakingly well, passionately, fluidly, and coherently. It is hard not to feel the shame and sorrow of American racial life. On the other hand, he characterizes modern racial life - and especially the thinking of white men - as tortured as that which preceded the Civil Rights era. His examples? Dennis Rodman and his sexual encounter with Madonna. O.J. and the murder of Nichole. By using these examples, he substitutes (white? male?) prurient interests for good sociological analysis and the results of yellow journalism and bad justice for coherent models of how America thinks about race.
He is a brilliant writer, so he almost carries it off. Almost.
I was reminded of Garcia Lorca's play, Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding). In America, we are wedded together, at times loving one another and at times drenched in the blood of our past. Even this fine writer and thinker knows that we cannot restore innocence to our thinking and behavior, which is why Lift Every Voice is the first hymn in our hymnal. In the face of our bloodlust we can never find innocence, but better to go ahead as best we can than to be captured in the idea that our bloodlust is permanent, indelible, and inevitable. Can we never truly love one another, as our ancestors could not and did not?
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Title: The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America's "Racial" Crisis by Orlando Patterson ISBN: 188717897X Publisher: Perseus Book Group Pub. Date: November, 1998 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study by Orlando Patterson ISBN: 067481083X Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: March, 1985 List Price(USD): $22.50 |
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Title: Freedom: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture by Orlando Patterson ISBN: 0465025323 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: September, 1992 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community by Elijah Anderson ISBN: 0226018164 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: November, 1992 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of the Lynching of African-Americans in the American South, 1882-1930 by Stewart Emory Tolnay, E. M. Beck ISBN: 0252064135 Publisher: Univ of Illinois Pr (Pro Ref) Pub. Date: February, 1995 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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