Journalist Shaun King speaks on the current lack of humanity in the U.S.

www.dailyuw.com - RSS Results in news,news/* of type article The HUB Ballroom was packed last night as the UW community came to listen to journalist and activist Shaun King speak on matters of police brutality, but an hour prior to the event, there weren’t nearly as many faces attending a vigil for a black Muslim-American boy who was found hanged in Lake Stevens this year. It was a juxtaposition noticed and commented on by many.
Prior to open questions, King riffed off of the theories produced by history-founder Leopold Van Ranke. The theory King discussed said that humanity does not become better over time in terms of moral character. While technological advancements do indeed get better over time, this can’t be a measurement of humanity. Rather, humanity should be measured by moments of war, turmoil, and killings by the state. With this measurement, humans cycle back and forth over time between being great and being awful to each other, not constantly improving. King argued that now, in 2017, we are at a low point in that cycle.“We are in a dip in the quality of our humanity,” King said. “The dip happens after the introduction of an innovation that disturbs a primary power structure.”King defined this innovation as a moment or instance that is historically unique. One of the examples of this disruption King referenced was the passage of the 13th Amendment. A dip in humanity occurred after it was passed, when those whose power was disrupted began a spree of extrajudicial killings and lynchings. At this point, the 13th Amendment made black bodies no longer a commodity or property, and so slaves became killable, a site of hatred for disrupting the power structure.King also referenced the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act as innovations that challenged the power structure. In response to the two laws, prisons soon became overpopulated with black and ...


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