By Sherwood<\/a><\/span> <\/p>\n

Okay, I’m coming clean. I hated the Jurgens Habermas reading from earlier this semester- the one that described the formation of a \u201cpublic sphere.\u201d It explained how print culture contributed to an environment in which private individuals felt comfortable identifying and discussing issues with society. Habermas’ prose was dense, confusing and overwhelmingly philosophical. For example, what is this supposed to mean: \u201cwhen applied synchonically to the conditions of a bourgeois society that is industrially advanced and constituted as a social-welfare state, the fuse into a clouded amalgam.\u201d Because of sentences like these, I found it pretty difficult to really pin down what Habermas really meant by the \u201cpublic sphere.\u201d However, in the context of this week’s reading, I feel much more confident about my understanding of the Habermas article.<\/p>\n

In \u201cProtest in Black and White,\u201d Richard Newman describes black disenfranchisement in the United States during the antebellum period. Because \u201cover 90 percent of American blacks resided in the slave South throughout the 1860s,\u201d whites frequently deterred black voters from the polls and curtailed their right to vote (180). Paramilitary groups threatened to harm them or destroy their property, while state legislatures made voter registration more difficult by requiring literacy tests, charging poll taxes and establishing grandfather clauses, for example. Newmen also explains how simply by being black, these citizens were inevitably drawn into the \u201cbroader politics of race, civic participation, and nationhood\u201d in their everyday lives (181). As free, voting, sometimes educated and sometimes wealthy blacks, they themselves were topics of controversy. Many whites were simply offended by the sight of them.<\/p>\n

Here’s where things converge. So how did black Americans, as an ethnic minority, participate in a democracy that marginalized them so? To resist disenfranchisement and oppression more generally, black Americans gained a public voice by \u201cseizing print\u201d (181). Sound familiar? Newman’s narrative of black resistance is a great example of Habermas’ public sphere. The printing press, which Newman explains was essentially immutable, empowered black Americans and gave them a means of communicating ideas over both time and space.<\/p>\n

They were able to express their political views openly despite being disenfranchised. It also allowed them to advance their position in society; in her blog post<\/a>, Avery points out that \u201cblack leaders differentiated themselves as \u2018elite’ so that they might mirror white structures of hierarchy. Because of Newman’s concrete example, I have a new appreciation for Habermas’ theory of the public sphere.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

<\/a>  <\/a>  <\/a>  <\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Sherwood Okay, I’m coming clean. I hated the Jurgens Habermas reading from earlier this semester- the one that described the formation of a \u201cpublic sphere.\u201d It explained how print culture contributed to an environment in which private individuals felt comfortable identifying and discussing issues with society. Habermas’ prose was dense, confusing and overwhelmingly philosophical. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-private","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1366\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}