Christina Kim
speaker
90 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Christina Kim’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
They're learned.
We create the meaning of smell. But the cultural constructs around what we decide smells good or bad can be weaponized.
Simply put, smells can have as much of a history as a black and white photo can.
This is Mark Smith.
He's a sensory historian at the University of South Carolina and author of the book, A Sensory History Manifesto.
Mark says that historical writings are full of descriptions of sounds, textures, tastes, and smells.
And those sensory descriptions can provide important details that are key to better understanding our history.
Yes, that Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court case that legalized separate but equal treatment. Segregation in the United States was founded in part on an argument based on racist perceptions of smell.
So to understand, we have to go back to Louisiana in 1890.
An educated, wealthy Black and Creole population is thriving.
Segregation was a key part of a larger system that would later be called Jim Crow. It was a wide-ranging effort to reverse the progress Black people had made since emancipation. To achieve that, a strict separation of life for Black and white people was enforced. Separate entrances, separate schools, and one of the most public spaces at that time, railroad cars.
a group of prominent Black leaders, the Citizens Committee, came together and organized to specifically challenge this segregation law on train cars. So the group decided the best way to do this is to create a setup to stage an act of disobedience that will allow them to bring a case to court to challenge the law and ultimately have it struck down. Think Rosa Parks.
So in order to do this, they needed someone that could blur the lines of segregation.
Homer Plessy. He was a shoemaker, an activist, born into a family of French-speaking Louisiana Creole people.
And it's because of this ambiguity that he was the perfect person to challenge the validity of segregation laws.
So Homer Plessy boards the whites-only car.
And a conductor who was in on Plessy's plan asks him if he was, quote, colored.
Everything went as planned. Homer Plessy was arrested and charged for violating the law. And the case went to criminal court in front of Judge John H. Ferguson.
I can smell it.
Homer Plessy was found guilty by the state, and his legal team appealed the case all the way to the Supreme Court. But the damage had already been done.
Showing 41–60 of 90 · page 3 of 5
← Previous
Next →