because there's just a sort of general distrust of centralized authority." These are so of the connections that Matteson hopes students taking his free eight-week course Paul Dawson Authentic Jersey , Literature & Law of Arican Slavery, will be able to absorb and question as they go through his class. "[I want to] encourage people to think broadly about the connections beeen past and present, to realize that the things we experience today did not just start yesterday ... they go bk 150 years. And the things that were happening 150 years ago go bk much, much farther than that. So I hope for students to e away with a sense of the continuity of history, with the plexity of history," he said. "In terms of the underlying interest, one of the things that I'm really fascinated by is the way in which this epoch in our history, which seems to have taken ple so long ago, continues to rear its head and to affect attitudes in our culture, ranging from law enforcent to re relations to the ways that parents treat their children," Matteson continued. He referenced an August segnt on MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry's ow, in which e spoke about the recent deaths of young blk n at the hands of law enforcent and the correlation to the infamous Supre Court Dred Scott decision in which then-Justice Roger Taney said in 1857 that the blk man has "no rights which the white man was bound to respect." "We have moved past that in our official statents of the law," Matteson pointed out. "The 14th Andnt ... [was] basically passed to void and nullify the Dred Scott decision, but then what happens to that andnt is that it gets very largely ignored by the courts Tyler Kroft Authentic Jersey , or isted around so that it protects corporations instead of disadvantaged minorities. And over ti, even though the doctrine of Dred Scott has been wiped away, the habit of thinking in terms of a o-tiered society bees very deeply ingrained." To Matteson, there is a distinct parallel beeen the passing of unjust laws and the way society expresses those laws through behavior over ti. "In our current day ... we understand intellectually that equality is important, that equality is also basically true, but ... among so people, at least, their emotions and the things that they feel in their gut when they're going on adrenaline and impulse are very different from the things that their reason and our laws would be telling them," he said. "So we're talking about ... soone like the police officer in Ferguson who guns down an unard man in this sort of visceral recurrence of this idea of Justice Taney's that a blk person has no rights that a white man is bound to respect." However, to the professor, the issue of violence and how it is ingrained into the collective blk Arican psyche is much more far-rehing than just law enforcent or vigilante justice. It even affects the family. Matteson referenced an article by Michael Eric Dyson that was publied in the New York Tis, in which Dyson talks about the NFL's Adrian Peterson and the bkla he has received for beating his young son. "What we have here is a legy from slavery that the assumption was, a blk person is controlled through violence, not through the application of law or reason ... and the sort of argunt that Mr. Dyson is making is that that nexus in people's minds beeen violence and the maintenance of order bees ingrained not only on a societal level but also on a family level Jake Fisher Authentic Jersey ," Matteson explained. "Such that a child who's been beaten grows up to, in so way, associate discipline with violence and order and the proper order of things, with the application of violence from a stronger person to a weaker." Of course, these matters aren't solely about re; they also have a lot to do with the generational nature of violence. "I would suspect also that when you find a violent cop, or sobody who's excited about the prospect of vigilante justice, I would guess ... that you're going to find that those abusive cops and the gun-toting nuts are very often people who themselves have experienced abuse," Matteson said. "Because abuse, as we know, is sothing that replicates itself from generation to generation," he continued, "and if people start their lives by viewing everything through a lens of violence, it's going to tur