African American Historical Popular Music Analysis

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In 2008 the United States elected its first African-American president, an event that many believed would never happen in their lifetimes. Statements made by both black and white Americans, coinciding with the disbelief shows the awareness of the racial aversion and prejudice towards African-Americans in the United States. This became evident when a series of racist speeches, videos, and posters with the announcement of Barack Obama as the democratic nominee. To name a few, Obama had been portrayed as a monkey, as a domestic servant, and as a savage, all of which are considered racist and insensitive given past history for the majority of African-Americans. When the creators of these images were contacted they said that they didn’t mean any harm or mean to offend anyone with them. This leads us to question: why don’t white Americans know that only a few decades prior, African-Americans were associated with animals because they were seen as less than human. …show more content…

In “Politics And Race In American Historical Popular Music: Contextualized Access And Minstrel Music Archives” by Maurice B. Wheeler, the author argues that archivist and historians should write about history as it was and not as they want or believe it to be because doing so leads to the omitting of facts. Wheeler supports this by using the creation of minstrel shows and its influence on American culture, to show how editing and censoring of important documents can affect people today and how it can affect people in the

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