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Rituals Of Blood: The Consequences Of Slavery In Two American Centuries
by
Orlando Patterson
3.61 · Rating details · 33 ratings · 4 reviews
In the first essay, Patterson analyzes the very latest survey data to delineate the different attitudes, behaviors, and circumstances of Afro-American men and women, dissecting both the external and internal causes for the great disparities he finds.In the second essay, Patterson focuses on the lynching of Afro-American boys and men during the decades after Reconstruction, particularly on the substantial number of cases that constituted apparent ritual human sacrifice. As no one has done before, Patterson reveals how the complex interplay between Christian sacrificial symbolism and the deep recesses of post-bellum Southern culture resulted in some of the most shameful, barbaric events in American history.The third essay brings us into the late twentieth century, with an investigation of the various images of Afro-American men portrayed by the media. From the demigod (Michael Jordan) to the demon (Colin Ferguson) to the demigod-turned-demon (O. J. Simpson) and the crossers of racial and gender boundaries (Michael Jackson and Dennis Rodman)—all contribute to the cultural complications of our contemporary society.Rituals of Blood advances Patterson's new model of ethnic relations that opens American society to a new and freer dialogue. (less)
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Mar 10, 2020Shawn rated it really liked it
A very informative and educational book. And yes, the last paragraphs, so eloquently written, sum up the power of the arguments in this book. I'll quote,
"Another effect of this now pervasive influence is the near-complete rejection of intellectual achievement as a model to be strived for." (278)
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I recommend this book. There is a substantial amount of statistical information and it is employed by the pen of a genuine scholar. Patterson references not only the analyses of other sociologists but explores myth, South American (Tupinamba) tribal behaviors, and West African patterns of kinship and their hierarchy of relations, I could go on. It is a great read for it is thorough in revealing the glaring problems.
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"...those few who, by some sociological miracle, become engaged with their studies and do well at school must find ways to camouflage their interest, either through clowning or through overcompensatory involvement in sports." (278)
"America's conservative leadership, who dishonorably disclaim all responsibility for the unhealed injuries of the nation's shameful racist past." (279)
"But the entrapment is, above all else, the making of Afro-Americans themselves, a large proportion of whose men contemptibly choose to abandon their children to the welfare of the state, the authority of the streets, and the seductions of gang life and drugs; whose women choose to have more children than their emotional, economic, or social resources allow; and whose youth choose to reject literacy in favor of orality and choose to drop out of the educational system before achieving minimal levels of skills for survival in an advanced postindustrial society...who condemn intellect, debase women, demonstrate by their fortunes and illiteracy the absurdity of ordinary work and pay," (279)
I found this book enlightening, and disturbing. It has three parts, the first part is the longest, and the middle part is nauseating for its subject of lynching, and the third part is entertaining and somewhat a softening conclusion to so weighty a theme. Gosh, I felt in my heart several times in reading this book a profound appreciation for scholars such as Orlando Patterson who dedicate their time and direct their will for the betterment of our nation and the world. (less)
Nov 24, 2016Rachel rated it it was ok
Shelves: read-unowned, trauma-atrocity, history, colonialism-and-race
Rating this book is difficult; the second essay (which is a searing, unflinching analysis of the ritualistic aspects of lynching) definitely deserves four stars, but Patterson's methods of analysis in the first and third troubled me. I'm still planning to read On Slavery and Social Death, but I need to spend some time pondering Patterson's subject position and methodology.
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Aug 29, 2008Elyssa rated it really liked it
Shelves: sociology, social-justice
Excellent examination of the effect of slavery on African-Americans. I appreciate Orlando Patterson's objective evaluation using statistics and studies. He is straightforward with his analysis, even when it is painful to expose. At the same time, he is optimistic and solution-oriented.
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Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2009
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Patterson has successfully taken on so many "big" issues in his lifetime that to recommend him for his contemporary social analysis might seem like damning him with faint praise. That is hardly my intent, but I would like to suggest to readers unfamiliar with his work and perhaps not up to the challenge of his cosmically-dimensioned books on Freedom, Slavery, and Social Death that he is a one-of-a-kind social commentator and provacateur as well. His singular profession as a historical sociologist (or sociological historian)allow him access to statistics that illuminate America's racial history in a way nobody else I know has ever accomplished. Of course, he CHOSE those statistics, an act of genius in itself, but the questions he asks of them and his analysis of the answers makes him, in my opinion, indispensable reading. He has somewhere in this book or another (I've read nearly all)cited the statistic that, when asked what percentage of the American population is African American, both white and black Americans over-estimate the actuality by a multiple of between 3 and 4. That is an astounding stat, and explains so much about our recent world, much of which Patterson takes on, but the balance of which should give food-for-thought to the rest of us. And that is only one, relatively incidental, issue the man takes on. Bravo to Patterson for ALL his work!
Reviewed in the United States on May 26, 2011
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Referred to Patterson's book by a colleague in anthropology and sociology, I was unprepared for the thrill and shock of the information contained in Rituals of Blood. Thrilled, because critical sociological data on two centuries of American slavery are well-codified and catalogued in one place. But while my colleague and I may argue with some of Patterson's conclusions, this does not detract from the shock of seeing documented those factors and conditions that shape the status of twenty-first century Afro-America and the human relationships African Americans attempt and fail to form. I welcome the book's evidences of what has warped friendship, intimacy, and sexuality and find the background reality that created the warpage far more egregious in their impact than I had ever imagined. Not so shocking is how clueless is American society as a whole and Black American society in particular to this reality. (The truism about a serious dearth of marriageable black men for every eligible black woman, we learn, is hardly a recent development.) The data certainly provide new outlines to draw from for understanding why the status of friendship, relationship formation, and constructive marriage among African Americans borders on tragic. (Patterson allows us to recognize more objectively that Tyler Perry's cinematic works, like "Why did I ever get married?", are more painfully accurate than is comfortable for many observers to bear.) There is much work to be done in the area of mental-emotional "reparations and recovery" of Afro-America as an urgent prerequisite for group survival. At least Patterson has created a map of the socio-psychological territory and how it shapes the cultural, political, and economic terrain in which Black Americans struggle to live their lives.
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Carl Chambers
1.0 out of 5 stars A West Indian negro's "collection of essays" on Black People
Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2009
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Firstly, What's the purpose of this "book," and who is the target audience?
Since Mr. Patterson has chosen to refer to Black People as "Afro-Americans," a term we don't use in referring to ourselves, I'll kindly refer to Mr. Patterson as "the negro."
I see no purpose or motive in the execution of this "work" other than to cause commotion and create confusion as it pertains to "race relations" within the United States. Why would a West Indian Negro (Patterson) devote himself to measuring Black People against Whites using carefully selected "statistics" that totally place the current condition of Black People in America as the fault of (according to this negro Patterson) no-good, abandoning and battering, sexually promiscuous, hip hop Black Men? And why the direct attack on American-ized African Men only? Wasn't there slavery in Jamaica where Patterson was born and raised, and aren't there African Men there that can be included in this "study" of the dynamics and damages caused by slavery?
Why just Africans in America, Orlando?
Who at Harvard put you up to this?
Is there anything good to be found in Black People in general, and Black Men specifically? After reading this propaganda, some people may be hard pressed to find it, if you believe this negro's "statistics" and account.
This Negro speaks of "lower-class" Black People as if there is more than one class of Blacks within the United States, which is usually judged at a distance, solely by color. This is not Jamaica, or at least the parts where Patterson is from that has a color caste system of "light-skin/dark-skin" confusion. No matter how much money you have or where you're employed, there is but one class of Blacks in America, and you can ask your lodge brother Skip Gates if you doubt me.
These "essays" are a complete and total waste of time for any person who is interested in Positive Movement towards a better understanding of race relations in America, or globally. Just the term "Afro-American" as used throughout the book is demeaning and condescending, coming from a negro who probably attempts to pass as Black. (when convenient).
No mention of Garvey?
Elijah Muhammad?
Malcolm X?
But you see Du Bois throughout. No wonder.
Another Harvard agent.
Patterson's "essays" are a disgrace to even the appearance of African People, and this is a slick attempt to masquerade this hit piece as "scholarship."
Complete and total waste of time and money. Thumbs down.
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Chris Brand
1.0 out of 5 stars Sacrificed to Dionysus? � Are Blacks really scapegoats?
Reviewed in the United States on February 19, 2004
This book's author is a Black sociologist at Harvard University who wears a suit, tie and glasses and sympathizes with Christianity. He is a stylish writer who is as at home with social statistics as with Madonna's complaints that her one-time Black lover -- the basketball star and transvestite, Dennis Rodman -- failed to give her cunnilingus when the pair met for sex. More especially, Patterson abjures constructivism; he thinks American Blacks are in a "desperate" state of criminality, drug-addiction and family breakdown; he agrees that Black teenage pregnancies are "catastrophic" for both mother and child; and he denies that Black social problems are attributable to poverty or to the daily grind of White racism. Altogether, Patterson looks as promising a Black sociologist as Whites are likely to find.
What, then, can have inspired Patterson's latest title, Rituals of Blood? Why, nothing less than a belief that Black ghetto bastardy and violence - not least to Black women and in turn from these women to their Black children - can be blamed on nineteenth-century Whites. These primitives, not content with enslaving Blacks and denying them marriage prospects, proceeded to hack off Blacks' ears, fingers and genitalia in the process of roasting them alive at joyfully attended lynchings. According to Patterson, this meant that Black males were in no position to supply adequate male role models to the children they casually sired; that Black womenfolk learned to despise them; and that Black men in turn came to hate their own mothers and Black women in general. Patterson sees only more trouble ahead. Niggas with attitude, like the musician Puff Daddy, apparently serve the function only of letting Whites indulge the 'Dionysian sides' of their natures. Meanwhile, rap artistes lead Black youth to impossible dreams and to a sustained non-involvement with the normal world of work and family life that will outlast all the corresponding efforts of affirmative racists and welfarists. In their "Dionysian entrapment", "hypnotized" Black youth replace Uncle Tom's cabin in the sky with the "all-or-nothing hope of one day slam-dunking the basketball net" and head towards their "fateful moment" of the gathering future.
At the core of this dramatic account of forever-collapsing Black culture lies an impressive collection of survey statistics which bolster Patterson's feminist analysis of the essential modern problem of American Blackdom. So hostile and suspicious are the two Black sexes that 46% of Black men have never been married (compared to only 27% of what Patterson calls 'Euro-American' men). A Black woman in the USA can expect to spend just 22% of her lifetime being married (compared to the 43% spent by Euro-American females in one or more viable marriages). Surveys reveal the reasons for the frostiness between the Black sexes: 56% of young Black men say they cheated on even their very first sexual partner - which the refreshingly judgmental Patterson finds nothing short of "deplorable." "....the great majority of Afro-American mothers," says Patterson, "have been seduced, deceived, betrayed and abandoned by the men to whom they gave their love and trust." Tracing these problems further back, Black children experience high rates of sexual abuse: Blacks are a minority of the population in Chicago, but 70% of child sex abuse in that city is Black-on-Black. Nor does Black isolation occur just because a third of young Black men are in jail at any one time. Contrary to what Patterson calls the myth of Black brotherhood, Black men have markedly impoverished social networks compared to Whites; and their minimal contacts seldom link them with any realistic world of employment that is both gainful and legal.
Thus it is that Patterson proposes his solution to US Blackdom: that the urban ghettos be broken up and Blacks dispersed among Whites who will be further assisted to marry them by laws which would guarantee Blacks 'equal opportunity' to marry a decent proportion of Caucasoids - who currently miscegenate freely with all races/ethnicities except the unhappy Negro.
What can be said of this engaging thesis before 'equal opportunity' enthusiasts take their next step forward to oblige childless White suburban women to take Black lodgers and turn them swiftly into husbands? There are in fact three remarkable omissions from Patterson's story.
First, the attribution of Blacks' problems to White enslavement and the "lynching cult" neglects that Africa had its own pattern of Black-on-Black slavery, inter-tribal violence and brutal tyranny long before White sailors ever showed up to buy the slaves readily supplied by Black potentates and princelings. The notorious Zulu king Chaka was witnessed despatching 60 twelve-year-old boys before breakfast and massacring 500 women for witchcraft. Patterson fails to establish his causal thesis that the White man's slave trading can be blamed for anything very much.
How, then, do there occur the appalling relations between the Black sexes? Astonishingly, Patterson shows little sign of having heard of Africa -- let alone of personally visiting or studying the Dark Continent. On West Africa's Gold Coast, he could easily have learned that women mistrust Black men and that men reciprocate exactly in the pattern of America's slave-holding South and the inner-city ghettoes of Kingston and London today. Just as in Virginia of 1800, hardly any Black woman in West Africa will trust her man for a day.
As its last omission, Rituals of Blood entirely ignores the levels of crime, bastardy, welfare dependency and inter-sex suspicion among Whites having the same levels of IQ as Blacks. Despite The Bell Curve having copiously documented the causal role of low IQ in social pathology, the names of Charles Murray, Richard Herrnstein, Arthur Jensen and Phil Rushton are simply not thought worth a mention by a Harvard sociologist - indeed, intelligence and IQ also remain unmentioned. Such a high level of wilful ignorance is astonishing. Patterson should recall Mark Twain's observation that a man who won't read books can claim no serious superiority over a man who can't read them.
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