University Chronicle Extras:
Movies
|
Rate a Pic
|
Horoscopes
|
Career
|
Scholarships
|
Travel
|
GradZone
News
Briefly
Calendar of Events
Commentary
Sports
Diversions
World News
Classifieds
Login
Letter Submission
Search
Archive
Publishing Policy
Mail Subscriptions
St. Cloud State University
College Publisher
Home
>
News
Nadel shares thoughts, book
By Michael Davies-Venn
Published:
Thursday, March 6, 2003
Media Credit: Blair Schlichte
Film and Literature Professor Alan Nadel offered insight Tuesday into a book he is writing called �Reinventing America in Black-and-White: Cold War Television and the Legacy of Racial Profiling.� Nadel was first in a series of speakers hosted by the proposed Humanities Program. The new program would prepare students for an intercultural, public world.
(Editor's note: This article contains offensive language)
The first of a series of speakers sponsored by the new Humanities Program was underway at the Atwood Theater Tuesday with a debut lecture by Professor Alan Nadel.
The brains behind the program, English professor Judy Dorn said the program will "give university education an exciting sense of purpose," suggesting that the Humanities have been stuck in time, but that this new program would adapt to cultural changes. Dorn's remarks were weighted with the opening lines of Nadel's lecture.
"The distinguished scholar, Cornell West, while driving from New York to teach at Williams College, was stopped by police who suspected him of trafficking cocaine," Nadel said. "When he said that he was a professor of religion, the police officer replied, "'yeah, and I'm the flying Nun. Let's go nigger.'
"In 1931, nine black youths, riding the rails through Alabama were arrested and accused of raping two white woman whom they had never even seen. In less than three weeks, each was tried and convicted; all were sentenced to death, Although after two United States Supreme Court rulings in their favor and four trials-the sentences were never carried out, each of the Scottsboro boys, as they were known, spent about six and nineteen years in jail.
"The Hyde Park Chicago property Owner's Journal of 1919 and 1920 stated unequivocally: "...every colored man who moves into Hyde Park knows that he is damaging his white neighbor's property. Therefore, he is making war on the white man.
"Over the full half-century between 1884 and 1937, a black person in the United States of America was lynched, on the average, once every five to six days. In the worst single year, 1892, a black person was lynched every 2.2 days."
Those were the details Film and Literature Professor Alan Nadel opened his two-hour lecture with. Nadel said incidences like the ones he described are not uncommon in American society and that they "constitute a chronicle of discrimination and persecution nearly four hundred years long and 3,000 miles wide." And that they are rooted in the "tacit assumption of Anglo-Saxon privilege."
Nadel told the room full of students and professors that public space in the American society is not only gendered but also racists. He suggests that the evidence of discrimination he noted earlier were as a result of the reliance on the "unspoken assumption that public space is white."
Nadel is currently authoring "Reinventing America in Black-and-White: Cold War Television and the Legacy of Racial Profiling." Much of his lecture was presenting and arguing some of the main points in the book in which he argues that in the 1940's and 1950's television created a mode of understanding that promoted the assumption that public space is racially "white." With aid from the film "The Fugitive" and the Rodney King incident. Nadel argued that the film recontextualized the Rodney King incident "in such a way as to evoke the black and white era of television. And erase the problematics of the King video and thereby reconcile notions of white justice to the efficacy of a ubiquitous police state."
Rodney King is an African American who Los Angeles police officers: Laurence Powell, Stacey Koon, Theodore Briseno and Timothy Wind beat March 3, 1991. The officers were not convicted, although the beating was captured on tape and re-run during television programming across the country. The nonguilty verdict resulted in riots in Los Angeles.
Nadel said the Rodney King incident became " a black blot on white space, effectively erased from the margins of white America's vision, so that it need not view the bloody body on the floor and thus possible ambivalence about entrusting public safety to police power." He says the film "The Fugitive," reestablishes the ethics of bringing the racial and the spatial together, highlighting the premiere of the television series, "The Fugitive," as an example. He lamented that "something went wrong in the 60's that...provides the thematic connection between the abuses of police power and the need for them."
Nadel's concluding remarks were as poignant as they were provocative. He said media proliferation mirrors the rate of the consolidation of wealth, and that the film "The Fugitive" "may be intensely nostalgic, evincing the desire to return to earlier black and white format, (of television) in which the personal narratives of minority populations remained largely silent and invisible. This can seem so much easier than finding a place where Rodeny King can speak."
Dorn said Nadel's "scholarship represents the inter-disciplinary work we hope SCSU can make room for from now on." Studies, she said, that integrate visual media together with critical methods from various disciplines in the social sciences, arts and humanities in order to carry our interpretation and analysis of culture past, present and future.
Dorn said the new humanities major is expected to be taken as a second major that would allow students to take classes that they may gain an education that prepares them for a current multi-media and intercultural public world. She said students taking several advance courses within several fields now, do not receive any credential for doing so. The new Humanities program would change that. The program proposal is currently being held at the administrative affairs office, awaiting a decision.
The new program comes at a time when the university is looking for ways to cut cost to fill a budget gap meager funding from the state would create. But Dorn says the administration has caught on with the idea that the new program would increase enrollment in higher division classes.
