• Auteur: director; puts their own personality in a project
• Diegesis: objects, events, the characters that inhibit them, actions/attitudes not explicitly stated
• Flash-back/Flash-forward: jump backwards/forwards in time
• Focus: shallow, deep, racking
• Mise-en–scene: everything put in scenes
• Iris– round/moving mask; adds special attention to scenes
• Crosscutting: alternates two scenes happening at same time; suggest history repeats itself
• Typage: actors picked based on physical features; uses stereotypes to communicate essential characteristics
• Decor: objects & setting; defines characters/ emotion & mood of film
• Costume: distinguishes characters; conveys time period

The way that the law and science discourse communities shaped the audience’s ways of thinking is that false stereotypes, prejudices, and blatant racism were extremely prevalent in the film. During this time, every institution had racism deeply embedded in them. It would be very difficult to find a non-racist policy or anything in these law and science communities.

• Griffith is depicting the South as dangerous and not a safe place for a white family. There’s a lot of fear and poverty also depicted.

• Griffith wants the audience to see that Silas and Lydia compared to biracial Americans are not equal.

Strivings of the Negro People:

-DuBois discusses the “double-consciousness”

-had both visions of an insider and outsider

-saw strengths & weaknesses of society; also saw the deprivation of blacks having a secure sense of identity; he judged himself by white standards

-even though black people were technically free, they still had a lot of freedoms to gain individually. They had to try and live in a world where all they faced in life was oppression.

The Race Question in the United States:

• John Tyler Morgan: total racist; opposed Blair Bill (thought it would make blacks overeducated); in favor of bill that prevented black people from voting; believed that race mixing should not occur; said Africans were inferior to whites.
• Thomas Dixon: even worse than the dude above; called for brutality against black people
• Purpose of 14th & 15th amendments: protect black people from hostility of the whites
• They did not want black people to become involved in politics
• The Indians would rather face death than become slaves

Mismeasure of Man:

• Human races were separate from the beginning
• Morton’s drawings from Egypt depicted blacks as servants and slaves
• However, societies depicted blacks as rulers
• His data surrounding skull measurements were inaccurate; he falsified the information on purpose to make them look inferior

-Gap: race mixing isn’t huge problem, but the babies propose problems

-Claim: race mixing leads to destruction of a healthy/normal civilization

-Evidence: he uses biased information

Warrant: Hoffman= White supremacist

Counterargument: People need to not mix races in order to maintain the ideal civilization.

Reason: the law of similarity

Race Amalgamation:

-Scientific Racism: Africans were on lower evolutionary scale; outcasts; incapable of reaching full development.

-“The Law of Similarity”: “A civilized race does not readily intermingle with one less advanced in civilization, for the same reasons which prevent a lord from marrying a peasant girl… helps to keep the race separate”.

-says children of black women and white men are inferior to “pure blacks”

-Race mixing caused degradation in offspring; intelligence was superior though (higher brain mass).

TMM:

-Morton misconstrued data to make White data seem better

-believed he could identify races just by looking at the skulls

-skulls never grouped by sex

Prompt 1: The intercommunication of the members.

Prompt 2: They wrote academic journals. This is how their information spread.

Prompt 3: Because of the inaccurate data about black people in these “academic journals”, the readers took that false information and ran with it. Misinformation harms society and creates panic, and makes more room for ignorance.

Plessy Vs Ferguson:

• Miller: 1st intention of amendment: abolish slavery, give black people rights
• White League: killed blacks in order to deter participation in voting
• Harlan: “insisted on extensive interpretations of the Thirteenth Amendment; found additional support in the Fourteenth Amendment for Congress to enact the 1875 Civil Rights Act to create new right for United States citizens”

Mismeasure of Man:

• Hard-liners: blacks=inferior; biological status justified their enslavement
• Soft-liners: blacks=inferior; freedom doesn’t depend on intelligence.
• Skull size differences meant black people were inferior. Inaccurate science data tried to prove this theory.
• Compared black people to apes
• Blumenbach: “attributed racial differences to the influences of climate”
• Monogenism: origin from single source
• Recapitulation: higher creatures repeat adult stages of lower animals
• Charles White: against climate theory, proposed that physical differences show inferiority.
• Agassiz: wasn’t opponent to slavery. -“Centers of Creation” -“Taxonomist splitter”
• Agassiz: thought blacks were different species

• biological determinism: “hold shared behavioral norms, and the social and economic differences between human groups – primarily races, classes, and sexes – arise from inherited, inborn distractions and that society, in this sense, is an accurate reflection of biology”
• Mettle: worthiness of people
• Agassiz: naturalists should have the right to view the physical relations of men as scientific questions and nothing related to politics or religion.
• “If the status quo is an extension of nature, then any major change, if possible at all, must inflict an enormous cost- psychological for individuals, or economic for society- in forcing people into unnatural arrangements”.
• “The purely relativistic claim that scientific change only reflects the modification of social contexts, that truth is a meaningless notion outside cultural assumptions, and that science can therefor provide no enduring answers”.

• Purpose: Serving doesn’t define you as a servant.
• “the meaning of the language used in menus are socially and culturally embedded in the context of the specific situation or restaurant”
• They print the menus in foreign languages so the customer has to speak to the waiter to gain control.
• The Gap: identify/understand literacy; realize when it’s not textual.