Free Write – Assignment 2 – Brainstorm
I strongly believe that DW Griffith’s film would not have been such a “success” had the discourse communities of science and law alienated the non-white Americans so fully that the feeling of discontent with the differing races never quite left the white Americans. Politicians played off the hate and fear of the races, pitting them against each other and making the creation of a superbly racist film even possible, and successful at that. The film drove home some of the deepest fears of the white American public. Hoffman claimed that intermixing between races produced inherently flaws offspring, that it would lead to a complete devolution of the human race and ultimately by breaking these societal laws, it would taint and crumble civilization as you know it; he fear mongered. John Tyler Morgan fought against just about everything that the non-white Americans put into office, he used his platform to rationalize that the blacks would always be inferior to whites, and that they could never be educated because they just won’t comprehend the knowledge. “They ain’t as smart as us white folk.” He was from Alabama and actively made his disdain for the black Americans very obvious. But, ultimately both of these men’s arguments sum up to the Mismeasure of Man, and how the author of that particular piece of literature broke down every falsehood and failure of the supposed “science” of measuring a person’s intelligence and human worth through the weight, width, etc. of their skull. All of this formed a discourse community that had convinced itself that it was right above all else, the soul voice in this cacophony of ignorance was W.E.B Du Bois; an black American author that published many essays appealing to the “fence sitter” population of white Americans. He wrote from the heart, personalizing his essays to make any reader understand and feel his plight as a black man growing up in a society that continuously hated him strictly for the color of his skin. This was a strong argument in opposition to the ignorance surrounding the media everyday, but it wasn’t enough to sway hardly anyone when The Birth of a Nation hit screens all over America. DW Griffith thought he was making a piece of masterful, historically accurate grandeur, but he was only inciting race hatred further; like throwing gasoline on a simmering fire. The discourse communities had preached and fear mongered about how the black man was violent, and lewd, and dangerous to the white American, and what scene does DW Griffith put in his “masterpiece”? A white woman being chased off a cliff by a black man, while her brother watches helplessly. He shoves a scene in about a father wanting to kill his daughter just to save her from the “abomination” in her womb, of a mixed baby. Everyone hailed him as making a piece of fine cinema, but it only stoked the flames of racial diversity in the country.
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