The problem of blackness has been a widespread issue of America since its founding. White supremacy appears to dominate throughout all periods of time, especially after the civil war, when trying to figure out what role blacks played in society according to Khalil Muhammad in Chapter 1 of The Condemnation of Blackness. Lynching, disenfranchisement, and withholding of votes are examples of social practices happening in slave society by whites because of their feelings, Muhammad argues. Michele Mitchell’s chapter 1 of Righteous Propagation begins pre-slavery and discusses the destiny of Africans and what exactly can blacks do in a society where they do not fit in. In the first chapters of both texts, there are several similarities and differences.…show more content… What exactly was the destiny of a group who simply did not fit in in America? And what would it look like to be black in a back nation? This lead toward the strategy of emigration, which simply involved blacks going back to Africa. Working class African Americans particular idolized Liberia because it was a haven in terms of seeking economic refuge. “Working people viewed Liberia as a place where they could improve their prospects and feel the self-possessed satisfaction of uncontested citizenship” (Mitchell 18). Mitchell shows in her text that blacks at this point linked emigration, colonization and the reclamation of manhood within the African American community. “African Americans and Americo-Liberians... viewed Africa as a haven where black men could at long last express, flaunt, and flex their manhood” (Mitchell 19). Muhammad discusses that the Liberia Exodus Association argued that leaving the United States would rehabilitate black men’s sexuality, attempting to follow the example of white men maintaining their manhood through the subjugation of other lands and peoples. The move to Africa proved to have imperialist overtones all the while, African Americans were opposed to white imperialism. This is apparent between 1820 and 1840 when Michelle informs her readers that blacks rejected the emigration to Liberia. This rejection was caused by…show more content… Negatively, Muhammad critically analyzes the use of crime statistics and biological differences used by social scientists to prove the inferiority of blacks as a group to whites. Through the lens of whites, a few of the scientists discussed in Muhammad’s text include Samuel George Morton, and Nathaniel Southgate Shayler. Samuel George Morton was a natural scientist, or a naturalist. This meant that he believed in studying physical sciences or natural history to answer most (if not all) of man’s questions. This propelled him to help write about scientific racism, particularly involving craniology, which is the studying of the shape and size of skulls of different human races. He published Crania Americana” which goes into detail comparing skulls of different races. It is worth mentioning in his introductory essay, when describing the “Caucasian” race, he uses words like “fair”, “large skull”, and “well-proportioned features”. However, when describing the Ethiopian race, he describes them with “woolly hair”, “lips thick”, “long narrow head”, and the “lowest grade of humanity”, nothing like the positive description of the Caucasian. Morton, being a white naturalist himself, presents a biased analysis of a so-called “scientific fact” attempting to be presented in his collection of essays, thus “proving” whites had larger brains than blacks. Nathanial Southgate Shalyer,
