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upstart [soylentnews.org] writes:

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upstart [soylentnews.org] writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1957:

The Secret Power of White Supremacy [politico.com]:

However, during the Crusades such universalism ceded its primacy to an association between dark-skinned people and Islam. European culture picked up on the connection, and Black people were erroneously taken as the depraved antagonists of Christ and Christians.

Medieval texts, such as popular romances in which white Christian heroines are threatened by Black non-Christian men, are a precursor to the color-coding that informed African slavery in Europe and then, on a far greater scale, in the Americas. This association was later made more concrete by the mass enslavement of Africans in the Americas. Then, through the racial sciences of the 18th and 19th centuries and the development of municipal policing born of the slave patrols that enforced Black servitude in the South before the Civil War, Black people came to be seen as especially suspect.

Now, in the 21st century, the association between Blackness and criminality is so entrenched that sociologist Jason Eastman was able to prove that legal ramifications including incarceration are significantly worse for U.S. Blacks who are charged with “doing the exact same thing, in the exact same place, at the exact same time” as whites.

When whites invoke the association between Blackness and criminality, they also often invoke their ownership of chivalry. Take, for example, when the Missouri couple Mark and Patricia McCloskey pointed firearms at passing BLM protesters. Though the protesters had no interest in the McCloskeys, Mark McCloskey characterized his and his wife’s actions as “daring to defend our home [bbc.com].” McCloskey said he saw the protesters as a threat, while he saw his own behavior through the lens of chivalry. Indeed, McCloskey has regularly portrayed himself in a chivalric light, for instance in his work as a lawyer in which he has claimed to defend the civil rights of clients.

The McCloskeys’ actions and comments offer clear evidence that the dangerous interaction between chivalric values and the idea that Black people pose a criminal threat is still at work in our society.

Being white has become associated with chivalry and valor, with defending the defenseless. Being Black has become associated with criminality and a lack of honor. But there is no good reason that white Americans should have a monopoly on valor and honor. And one response is for Black people to create an alternative Black chivalry.

Indeed, Black agitators for racial justice have experimented with Black chivalry before. Notably, in the Harlem Renaissance, that “flowering,” to use James Weldon Johnson’s term, of Black arts and literature that characterized the 1920s and '30s, Black thinkers leveraged their knowledge of European literature and history, real and imagined, to assert Black people’s equal place in the world. As early as 1908, W.E.B. Du Bois used the idea of the Middle Ages in his fiction. Du Bois was not alone. Black medievalism appears, in obvious and subtle ways alike, in contemporary works by Jessie Redmon Fauset, Claude McKay, and other leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance. These writers treated Black chivalry as a corrective to the notion of Black inferiority.

Black chivalry erodes the idea that chivalric valor is the exclusive domain of Europeans and their descendants. Modern stories by Du Bois and other 20th century Black American writers depict Black heroes chivalrously courting beautiful heroines and overcoming insurmountable odds against individual villains and conceptual villains, such as racism, alike. Stories also depict knights courting beautiful Black heroines. They came by their stories honestly. Medieval romances also depict Black-skinned knights who are supremely chivalrous and Black lady-loves who are desired by Black knights and white knights alike. That Black people have had roles in the literature and culture of the Middle Ages makes clear that chivalry does not belong to whites alone.

Black medievalism and chivalry also break down the association between Blackness and criminality. As the 20th century progressed, Blacks became increasingly associated with advancements in arts and entertainment such as jazz and professional sports. Increasingly, Blacks were linked with modernity—with progress and its pitfalls alike—and Black medievalism fell out of favor.

Original Submission