Race & Ethnicity Test 1

What is colonialism?

a system in which a powerful country takes control of another territory and its people, often to gain land, resources, wealth, or political power. results in the devastation of people, the land & resources.

What is true about more than 90 percent of America’s indigenous peoples between 1600 to 1900?

From 1600-1900 more than 90% of Indigenous people died due to settlers. This was through warfare, disease, food supply shortages & slavery.

Explain what is so important about Bacon’s Rebellion and the establishment of racial slavery.

Bacon’s Rebellion was so important because it led to the class divide between white indentured servants & African Americans. It made wealthy property owners fear the power of the two races together; therefore, they gave white servants more nights which led to racial slavery (servitude for life).

What do people often inaccurately assume is true about young children’s understanding of race? Why is this inaccurate? What does data show?

People often assume young children start with no racial bias and are colorblind. It is also assumed that they acquire beliefs about race through their parents. This is false because data shows kids as young as 6 months can show a racial bias and their beliefs can result from very slight attitudes or societal normality’s.

What is one suggestion that Winkler gave for how adults should engage children on the topic of race?

Winkler recommends when addressing race parents should not dismiss kids to not talk about it, they should open the discussion and give them the honest truth & facts.

U.S. Census (what is it? how does it support the idea of race as social?)

The census is a number count of the people in the US every 10 years. It records race & ethnicity although these categories have continued to change each census, proving that race is NOT biological.

Laws (Give examples of laws & how they offer support for race as social concept)

Law against interracial sex & marriage, citizenship & immigration and slavery all contribute to race as a social construct as they frame the freedoms of racial groups in order to enforce these laws although they continue to change.

Racial prerequisite cases (Describe what these cases were and some of the details from them that help us see how race is socially constructed)

These cases where trials in which a person was attempting to prove their race, normally white to gain citizenship. Otazawa’s case in particular is an example of one of these cases as he was denied. Thind’s case was also a prime example showing the inconsistent evidence used in these trials.

What is colorblind ideology? What do scholars argue is problematic about it?

Colorblind ideology is the belief that race has no effect in today’s world. This is problematic as although things like segregation and slavery is illegal, these effects from these events still persist.

The last essay addresses the myth: “Black people could make it if they just worked hard.” Based on reading this essay, how would you respond to someone if they said this to you?

This is a false belief as black people are often not equip with the same advantages, inheritance & connections whites often begin with.

Why is it impossible to use biological characteristics to sort people into consistent races?

It is impossible because genetically we are one of the most similar species. Therefore, the line between races is very easily blurred.

Who has benefited from the belief that we can sort people according to race & that there are natural or biologically based differences between racial groups?

The ones who wanted there to be a difference they gained the hierarchical difference between the different racial groups.

Should doctors and other health professionals take biological race into account when diagnosing and treating illness? Why? Can you think of a situation where thinking about race as biological might be misleading or have a negative effect? How would considering social race be different?

Doctors should not take into account biological race because biological race does not exist therefore, they are diagnosing off of false evidence. Diagnosing this way can lead to misdiagnosis and mistreatment, meanwhile considering it as a social race allow the doctors to understand the social impacts such as stress that can impact a patients health.

What was the Bell Curve? Explain the argument and what was wrong with it?

This was a book by Richard J Herrnstein that associated IQ scores with education, employment, income & poverty it also argued that intelligence had a genetic component. This was wrong because it treated as IQ as causation when it is correlation. It is also false that race is a straightforward biological category that maintain the same IQ.

Many people think of Tiger Woods as Black. What is true about his identity?

Tiger Woods is a mix of multiple races, not only Black, but he is also part black. He identities with the race he made up when he was younger.

“Racial taxonomies are bound to their specific social and historical contexts.” What does this mean and give an example.

Races are created through social and historical constructs that vary across time, region & place. For example, race within the U.S. and Brazil is vastly different therefore it differs over time & across borders.

What does the term ethnicity have to do with US history related to immigration? Explain.

Waves of immigration from Europe created different “ethnic” groups. Boundaries on these immigration rates based on ethnicity shaped history, separating people as not just “white”.

Why are there so many famous Black NBA players, according to Essay 3?

Opportunity structure: what sports are available at public schools (basketball, football)

Occupational structure: resources allocation in US due to jobs people hold in labor market, private sports such as golf, tennis, rowing.

What is the historical relationship between racism and capitalism? What historical events shed light on this question?

Slavery was cheap labor shaping ideas of race & capitalism. Plantation economy making money with free labor justified through racism. Bacon’s Rebellion = people of same class rebelled, pinned white’s vs blacks.

While it may be true that many human societies across time have enslaved one another, what was unique about chattel slavery that took shape in the 1700s in the New World?

In the New World slaves were seen as property from birth to death.

How do we know that race is socially constructed?

It is not biological; it’s created through laws & political systems.

“Race is the product of racism; racism is not the product of race.” What does this mean?

Race comes from the hateful ideal, racism maintaining power through racism creates race.

What are the “wages of whiteness?”

The psychological benefit white people get through their skin color (white privilege)

“Making race a biological concept served an important ideological function in revolutionary America.” What was that function and how do we see manifestations of this today? What current events came to mind as you were doing this reading?

Race as a biological concept validated slavery and racism.

Explain what intersectionality means.

Intersectionality is the complex combinations of all of the types of diversity. It’s the understanding of how domination impacts people who don’t fit in one box.

How did Tressie McMillian Cottom make her decision about choosing an obstetrics office?

She made her decision based on the fact that the office was on the nice white side of town. Therefore, it MUST be good.

What happens to her in the hospital? What does the nurse say to her?

When she gets to the hospital her condition of tumors and a premature baby were discovered. Due to her condition, she lost the baby. The nurse told her there was nothing they could do because she waited so long to go to the hospital.

What does she argue about how Black women are viewed in arenas like healthcare?

She argues that Black women, within healthcare are viewed as incompetent therefore they often get dismissed in medical situations.

What is the individualistic fallacy and what does it miss?

The belief that racism is based on a person’s individual beliefs and opinions misses institutionalized system.

What does someone who operates under the legalistic fallacy assume is the solution to racism? How does this relate to segregation?

They believe that a law that prohibits racism is what stops it. This relates to segregation because although it illegal, racism still occurs.

The ahistorical fallacy suggests that history does not matter to understanding racism today. What is misguided about this way of thinking?

This is misguided because we learn from history. It is the backbone of everything that stands today; therefore we NEED it to understand racism as a whole.

What is the difference between the institutional racism and interpersonal racism?

Industrial racism is within the law & politics. Interpersonal racism is within personal relationships.

Explain what Beverly Tatum means when she talks about racial domination being like polluted air. How does this connect to the idea of symbolic violence.

She means that having racial domination is bad for society, similar to how polluted air is bad for humans, therefore can feed into symbolic violence.

Individualist fallacy

the belief that racism is only the collection of beliefs about a group

Legalistic fallacy

de jure & de facto, assumes that abolishing racist laws automatically leads to the abolition of racism in everyday life

Tokenistic fallacy

 assumes that the presence of people of color in influential positions is evidence of the complete eradication of racial obstacles.

Ahistorical fallacy

 renders history impotent

Fixed fallacy

those who assume that racism is fixed

Racial Domination

the arrangement of racial life in such a way that its ordinary, everyday workings serve to benefit certain racial groups at the expense of others

Institutional Racism

systematic white domination of people of color, embedded and operating across legal systems, political bodies, cultural life, and other social collectives.

Organization Racism

subset of institutional racism carried out in corporations, workplaces, and other organizations where people come together to work or worship

Interpersonal Racism

 racial domination manifested in everyday interactions and practices.

Symbolic Violence

people of color internalize prejudice aimed at their own racial group, unintentionally contributing to the reproduction of racial domination

Intersectionality

the overlapping systems of advantages and disadvantages that affect people differently positioned in society. Includes a picture of your complex identity and a thorough understanding of the ways in which intertwined modes of domination rely on one another for survival. 

I Was Pregnant and in Crisis

Tressie Cottom shares her story of how she was denied medical care due to her skin color and was assumed to be “incompetent” by the doctors and nurses providing her care. She states that after being denied this care she ended up having 2 tumors and the loss of her baby. She continues to elaborate on the assumed incompetence of her just because of her skin color. 

Caste System

a social and symbolic hierarchical system of classification and separation that organizes people into rigid groups characterized by inner-group marriage, heredity, lifestyle, and occupation.

Race in biological sense

 refers to intraspecies variation measured by some unspecified amount of phenotypic and genotypic divergence

Race in social sense

refers to its everyday use as a form of group identification, including how people identify themselves and how they are identified by others

Symbolic category

the realm of ideas, meaning-making, and language as opposed to the realm of nature and biology

Phenotype

person’s physical appearance and constitution including skeletal structure, height, hair texture, eye color, and skin tone.

Ancestry

 family lineage, tribal, regional, or national affiliations

Racial categories

are time-specific

Naturalization

signifies a metamorphosis of sorts, where something created by humans is mistaken as something dictated by nature

Ethnicity

 a shared lifestyle informed by cultural, historical, religious, and natural affiliations, a symbolic category

Nationality

is equated with citizenship, membership in a specific politically delineated territory controlled by a government, a symbolic category

Immigration and Nationality Act

reorganized US naturalization law and forbade denying citizenship on the basis of race. This demonstrates how our legal system helps to construct race.

Social imagination

the ability to understand everyday life not through personal circumstances, but through the broader historical forces that structure and direct it

Critical reflexivity

can perceive how their choices, and the choices of others are constrained and enabled by social structures and processes.

Ascribed statuses

social positions that others impose on individuals irrespective of the individuals wishes.

Exonyms

terms for a group created by an outside dominant group

Endonyms

 terms for a group created by the group members themselves.

Indigenous:

a term that is more inclusive of peoples that are native to their respective, ancestral homelands irrespective of a particular place or culture

Race

a political system that governs people by sorting them into social groupings based on invented biological demarcations

Biological race

 population of organisms that can be distinguished from other populations in the same species based on differences in inherited traits

Bacon’s Rebellion

• Led by Nathaniel Bacon, 500 black and white men, united against the Indians, marched into the colonial capital, Jamestown, and burned it to the ground. 

• After Bacon died, the rebellion ended and Berkeley hung 23 of the rebels

 Virginia racial law

not only treated enslaved Africans worse, but gave propertyless whites special rights over slaves. Outlawed interracial sex in 1662. Interracial marriage was illegal in 1691, laws such as these remained in force until 1967.

Emancipation Proclamation

although this changed segregation, it did not grant true freedom to black citizens or change the racial definition of citizenship

Race separated humans into two groups:

those who were born to be lifelong servants and those who were born to be their masters

Naturalization Act

first definition of American citizenship, restricted eligibility to free white immigrants. Until 1952 being either white or a person of African descent was a prerequisite of becoming a citizen.

Chinese Immigration Act of 1882

barring entry to Chinese workers for ten years, including their families of immigrants already in the country. Similar laws have extended to Japan, India, and the Philippines

Immigration Act of 1917

prohibited immigration from a stretch beyond China to include much of eastern Asia, the Pacific Islands, and India.

Oriental Exclusion Act of 1924

halt to all immigration from Asia, including Japan.

Color blindness prescriptive:

Color blindness prescriptive:

Color blindness descriptive

(post-racialism) the belief that race no longer determines individuals’ life chances in contemporary US society.

UnFair Campaign

2012 nonprofit in Minnesota had a very controversial campaign and resulted in a facebook group to combat the organization. The facebook group is a prime example of how color blindness assumes that we already live in a society where racial equality prevails, which is incorrect.

1619 Project

August 2019 marked the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. To reframe the country's history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans. Resulted in the 1776 Commission, rehashed American history to children in schools by Donald Trump. Biden then dissolved this on his first full day in office.

Racial project

simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines

Abolition democracy:

democratization processes that undo the inherent hierarchies in wealth and opportunity this country built along racial lines. It means changing the very structure of our socioeconomic system so its conditions are increasingly conducive to communal health, safety, healing, and ethical integrity.

Racial Socialization

when parents of children of color help their children learn which societal messages to “filter out” & “promote”

Spain History

• Began as an pluralistic society, multiple races, religions and ethnic groups

• Ferdinand & Isabella required everyone to be one religion & one culture: Catholic. 

• Spanish Inquisition: the interrogation of the Catholic Church to affirm religious wholesomeness of newly converted families. 

• This resulted in an interest in religious purity that morphed into blood purity.

• Being Spanish or Portuguese = Being Catholic & White

Europe History

• Political change from medieval workshops to a capitalist factory. 

• Money became important = new trading routes & economic partnerships

• Tales of non-Europeans, lead to “the Other” Europe being congealed into a shared identity = the West from the Rest

• Intellectual revolutions in science, economics, political theory, philosophy, religion, & art

New World

• Columbus discovered America in 1492.

• This was important because originally any of the hemispheric Americas were under Spanish and Portuguese colonial rule. 

• It belonged to Indigenous people for tens of thousands of years before Europeans settlers even knew that it existed.

Racialization in 3 steps.

1. Indigenous people (who all had different governments, economies, languages & religions) were all lumped together under a single rubric: Indian. This is known as homogenization. 

2. Polarization: splitting Whites & Indians (good & bad)

3. Dehumanization

European colonization & initiation of the trans-Atlantic slave trade restructure the world’s lands, resources, and people in service to Europe’s accumulation of wealth and dominance. This was achieved through:

1. Indigenous people were dispossessed of their lands

2. Millions of Africans were stolen and trafficked to toil as enslaved laborer

3. Groups that were not phenotypically White, ethnically European, and religiously Christians were systematically lumped into racial categories and stripped of their identities as individuals. 

4. Entire legal, political, economic, and social systems had to be reconfigured to support the new system of global capitalism.

Racial Capitalism is a system based on

White supremacy (an ideology purporting that people racialized as White are inherently superior to all other human groups.

Middle Passage

the voyage from the west coast of Africa to America across the broad waters of the Atlantic, lasted 2-3 months (although could take twice as long at times)

Overcrowding on these ships left little room for food & water, resulting in many dying of malnutrition and dehydration. Many others died from dysentery, smallpox, and other diseases. Some committed suicide and some died at the hands of the crew.

Eli Whitney

 invented the cotton gin in 1793, creating a dynamic change in slavery and making cotton the leading cash crop.

Slave codes

denied slaves citizenship and governed even the most intimate spheres of their lives. 

• Not allowed to carry arms, trade goods, learn to read or write, possess land, leave their master’s property, or venture out at night. 

• They could not marry or socialize with free black people, they couldn’t even marry themselves. 

• It was illegal for them to testify in court.

Underground Railroad

helped thousands reach freedom in large part because of its brave and brilliant leaders.

Frederick Douglass

 taught himself to read and white, escaped slavery with his wife and went on to become one of the most influential African Americans to this day

Emancipation Proclamation

freed all enslaved African Americans in the Confederacy.

Thirteenth Amendment:

: abolished slavery.

Reconstruction:

when the nation put itself back together, reincorporating the Southern States & reinventing American citizenry.

Fifteenth Amendment

Allowed the right to vote.

Jim Crow Laws

variants of the salve codes that restricted the rights of newly freed African Americans. 

• Segregated everything

Age of Discovery

Europeans were defining themselves as a collective group against the strange people of the East (therefore people from China, Japan, & other Asian countries came ot the US as “othered”)

Examples of the anti-Chinese movement

extra taxes that fell most heavily on Chinese workers, they were not allowed to testify against White people in court, and they also experienced Jim Crow segregation.

Page Law

barred all Chinese women from immigrating to American shores

Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

ALL Chinese immigrants were not allowed to enter the US

Between 1901 & 1915

13 million immigrants from Austria, Hungary, Italy & Russia came to America.