Race and Ethnicity -Week 3 Readings and Overview

This week we will continue discussing the idea of race as a social, historical, and cultural construction

We'll also begin talk about the ways that race and immigration have always been linked

While the origins of modern race are in African enslavement and indigenous genocide, the justifications for racial inequality have evolved over time.

. Different forms of so-called scientific racism have been used to explain and entrenched racial inequality in the post-slavery era.

Wednesday

about the modern evolution of racial categories and how people are racialized into different categories.

Different forms of so-called scientific racism have been used to explain and entrenched racial inequality in the post-slavery era.

- most scientists and the vast majority of White people concurred that there were biological differences between racial groups and that White people were the superior racial group.

- As discussed in the previous chapter, these data on brain size supposedly provided “scientific” proof of White superiority.

-When nineteenth-century scientists compared the skulls of Black people to those of White people, they set out to use science to prove what they thought they already knew: that the White race was superior to all others.

-In the United States, intelligence testing—the attempt to quantify intellectual ability using scientific measures—became popular in the early twentieth century.from their inception until today, these tests have been used in attempts to demonstrate the alleged superiority of people whose ancestors come from Western Europe

-“How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” In this article, Jensen argues that Black people’s lower intelligence test scores are intractable because they are largely attributable to genetics. He further contends that supplemental educational programs such as Head Start do not affect general intelligence. -Jensen used a statistical method called “heritability” to argue that differences in intelligence are due to genetic differences between racial groups.-Just because there are differences between the average IQ scores of Black and White people does not mean that the differences must be genetic. Instead, they are far more likely to be due to environmental factors such as poor schooling, racial discrimination in schools, and a lack of resources in Black communities -Genes, Race and Human History, which argues in favor of biological and genetic differences between races. Wade further contends that these genetic differences can help us to understand why Black people are prone to committing violent crime and why Chinese people are better at math

-Eugenicists believed that not only intelligence but also alcoholism, laziness, crime, poverty, and other moral and cultural traits could be inherited. -These analyses, of course, ignore environmental factors such as nutrition and the quality of schooling that play a role in intelligence and that, like genes, are shared among family members. -Eugenicists used this pseudoscience to advocate sterilizing people they perceived as biologically unfit as a way of creating a superior breed of people. -During this period, many Americans believed the country’s population was in decline because of immigration and the high fertility of poor people

- In 1971, a judge ordered 15-year-old Linda Kay Sparkman be sterilized due to her alleged intellectual inferiority. Medical professionals told young Linda they planned to remove her appendix. Instead, without her consent, they cut and tied her fallopian tubes. -In August 1964, the North Carolina Eugenics Board met to decide if a 20-year-old Black woman should be sterilized. -She was a single mother with one child who lived at the segregated O’Berry Center for African American adults with intellectual disabilities in Goldsboro. According to the North Carolina Eugenics Board, Bertha had an IQ of 62 and exhibited “aggressive behavior and sexual promiscuity.” She had been orphaned as a child and had a limited education. Likely because of her “low IQ score,” the board determined she was not capable of rehabilitation. -Without her input, Bertha’s guardian signed the sterilization form.

It is no coincidence that sterilization rates for Black women rose as desegregation got underway. Until the 1950s, schools and hospitals in the U.S. were segregated by race, but integration threatened to break down Jim Crow apartheid. -The backlash involved the reassertion of white supremacist control and racial hierarchies specifically through the control of Black reproduction and future Black lives by sterilization. - This pattern reflected the ideas that Black women were not capable of being good parents and poverty should be managed with reproductive constraint. -All forced sterilization campaigns, regardless of their time or place, have one thing in common. They involve dehumanizing a particular subset of the population deemed less worthy of reproduction and family formation. They merge perceptions of disability with racism, xenophobia and sexism—resulting in the disproportionate sterilization of minority groups.

-He forcefully argued that Nordics were the most fit of the three and that measures should be taken to ensure their racial purity and survival- -Madison Grant’s ideas that Nordics were the “master race” and that it was incumbent upon the state to ban interracial marriages and sterilize inferior races found a large audience in Germany

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refers to the attempt to quantify intellectual ability using scientific measures.

Intelligence testing

We'll also begin talk about the ways that race and immigration have always been linked

-From its inception, immigration policy in the United States has been racially motivated.

-The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) was overtly racist in that it targeted one specific group on the basis of race and class: Chinese laborers. -The act specifically prohibited Chinese laborers from entering the United States while allowing Chinese merchants and teachers to enter. -At the time, most Chinese immigrants were laborers; they were integral to the completion of the Central Pacific Railroad. By 1882, the federal government had succumbed to pressure from White laborers to exclude Chinese immigrants, and Congress issued this racially exclusive immigration law. - The young Wong arrived in San Francisco at a moment when the city was at the vortex of a struggle between the federal government, which wanted to encourage free trade and migration, and California politicians who advocated for an end to Chinese immigration.White trade unionists on the Pacific Coast decried the arrival of Chinese who they portrayed as diseased, sneaky, and dangerous competitors. - pass the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, banning Chinese laborers from entering the country. -The act made the United States what she calls a “gatekeeping” nation—one that first racialized Chinese immigrants and then others as a permanently alien and inferior class that should be excluded.

-current immigration laws prioritize certain immigrants over others. - The legislation thus transformed the United States from a nation of immigrants to one that guarded its gates against foreigners it deemed undesirable

-Subsequently, the Immigration Act of 1917 expanded the Chinese Exclusion Act to deny entry to anyone coming from the “Asiatic Barred Zone,” which included India, Burma, the Malay States, Arabia, and Afghanistan - Between 1917 and 1952, the United States placed strict immigration limits on people from Asia while welcoming those from preferred European countries. The intent behind these laws was to “improve” the racial composition of the United States.

- the Johnson-Reed Act (or Immigration Act of 1924), was also overtly racist in that it was designed to increase the Nordic population in the United States and halt the growth of other groups. -These quotas dictated the number of immigrants who could enter the United States in any given year - By basing national-origin quotas exclusively on the European population at the time, the law made it clear that Africans, Asians, and Native Americans were not considered to be part of the nation -no restrictions were placed on Mexican immigration. -The Johnson-Reed Act ignored the presence of Asians and Africans in the United States and set a quota of 100 immigrants per year for immigrants from China, Japan, India, Ethiopia, Liberia, and South Africa. -. The most radical eugenicists advocated sterilization of people deemed inferior. Eugenicists were invited to testify before Congress during these debates, and in their testimonies, they made it clear that they believed Northern Europeans were superior to people from southern and eastern Europe. -pointed to the Army Mental Tests carried out by Robert Yerkes as evidence of the inferiority of Poles, Italians, Russians, and Black people.

-They voted to restrict the immigration of people they deemed undesirable immigrants and to promote the immigration of those whom they expected might improve the American stock - Immigration restrictions reflected a clear racial bias in determining who could enter the country.

-One of the first laws passed in the newly formed United States was the Naturalization Law of 1790, which granted citizenship to White people born in the United States and limited naturalization to immigrants who were “free White persons.”

-Whereas birthright citizenship refers to gaining citizenship in the country of one’s birth, naturalization describes the process whereby people become citizens of a country where they were not born. - it was not until the Civil Rights Act of 1866 that native-born Black people were granted citizenship. -The Fourteenth Amendment granted birthright citizenship to most Black and White people born in the United States—but only to Black and White people. Native Americans were not officially granted birthright citizenship until 1924. And it was not until the Nationality Act of 1940 that birthright citizenship became a reality for all people born in the United States. -Immigrants who were neither Black nor White would have to wait until 1952 before they could become U.S. citizens. Throughout the twentieth century, immigrants from China, Japan, Syria, and India applied for citizenship via naturalization and were denied on the basis that they were not White

Chinese immigrants were integral to the completion of the _____________.

Central Pacific Railroad

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was not repealed until what year?

1943

_______________describes the process whereby people become citizens of a country where they were not born.

Naturalization

modern evolution of racial categories and how people are racialized into different categorie

In 1790, the three categories available were "free white females and males," "all other free persons" and "slaves." By 1830, that last category had splintered into "slaves" and "free colored persons." By 1890, the census separately counted blacks — now all legally free — as "blacks," "mulattos," "quadroons," and "octoroons."

from the proliferation of new racial and ethnic identities (now the government counts Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Cubans and Guatemalans) through the revision of old ones ("Indians" have become "American Indians").

These changes, the Census Bureau points out, have been driven by cultural and economic shifts, by events like emancipation, immigration and the civil rights movement. And the bureau, to this today, is still in some cases looking for the right words to capture the complex question of identity.

Blacks, like whites, are the only other group continuously identified by the census since 1790, although the language used to refer to blacks has changed in ways the Census Bureau is surely not proud of today.

census data helped drive scientific theories of race that were used at the time to justify discrimination.

in other cases, a term appears, disappears and returns again, as with "Mexican." Mexicans were categorized as "white" until 1930

The "Chinese" were first counted in 1860, but only in California. By the 1870 census, the Chinese constituted the first major wave of non-European immigrants to the U.S. since the end of the slave trade. That year, according to the Census Bureau, "Chinese" became the first national origin category, beyond color and race.

Questions about Hispanic "origin or descent" were first added in 1970. The following decade, the Census started to differentiate between ethnicity ("Hispanic" or "not Hispanic") and race ("black" or "white"),

___________ refers to process whereby immigrants lose their ethnic distinctiveness and become part of the mainstream.

Assimilation

___________ refers to the process whereby people come to be recognized as part of a racial group.

Racialization

The 1887 Dawes Act forced Native Americans to give up their communal lands and-

to claim individual ownership of plots.

In the United States, not being racialized as White has historically come with ________.

burdens