Anthony Kennedy

202-580-548

September 17, 2004

Take Home Final Exam

I. Does Historical vindication entail some initial provocation? If so what was the specific provocation the case of Drake? Explain.

        Historical Vindication does entail some provocation, as had been discussed that the steps to vindication were that firstly, vindication is provoked by someone or an institution asserting something to be the case against someone or a community, thereby illicting a response. Secondly, that refutation begins with asserting that if that someone or institution is wrong about a given issue, what else are they wrong about, and thus that their thinking in general must be wrong.  Drakes provocation comes in his  refutation of the works of Carl Degler, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian on the faculty at Stanford University, and his Manichean conclusion made in his book Neither Black nor White: Slavery ad Race Relations in Brazil and the United States, along with  Kenneth J. Gergen and his article, Daedalus. With the Degler-Gergen Propositions, termed for their report at the Copenhagen conference in September of 1965, Drake argues that “the Degler-Gergen Proposition speculates about human propensities to contrast light and dark, black and white, or the universality of early life experiences that lead to the derogation of ‘blackness.” (Page 121) The Degler-Gergen theory is that Blackness is a universally negative stigma, to which dark-skinned people blacks want to be light-skinned, and light skinned blacks want nothing to do with Black as all. Drake’s thesis is that there cannot be a just one gross simplification that if one domain is negative about blacks cannot hold true for all domains and “question whether its true that Africans (even those who never made contact with white people) naturally dislike “blackness” and want a lighter skinned body image than their own?” P121

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II. In responding to the provocation, what sort of evidence does Drake marshal to make his case?

        Drake goes about refuting the Degler-Gergen Manichean theory by dealing with the black experience before European expansion into the Western Hemisphere, and that, in fact compromises the thematic substance of his book. He provides evidence to prove that the idea of “black as inferior” was not always the case; not in ancient Africa or even during medieval Christiandom. Color symbolism in ancient Egypt shows no correlation with the Manichaean principles. Statues of their royalty show that they exhibit characteristics, which anthropologists would ...

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