Cultural Diversity in Japan - Week 10 (6/18)

Strategic Essentialism

A political strategy where differences within a group are temporarily downplayed to achieve political goals.

Essentialism

The assumption that groups have defining features exclusive to all members of that category.

Lowe's Argument Against Strategic Essentialism

Suggests acknowledging class and gender differences among Asian Americans does not weaken the group but creates political opportunities.

Against Strategic Essentialism

Examines intercommunity differences instead of false oppositions like nationalism vs. assimilation.

W. E. B. Du Bois

American civil rights activist, leader, Pan-Africanist, sociologist, educator, historian, writer, editor, poet, and scholar, founder of the NAACP.

Double Consciousness

Looking at oneself through the eyes of others, feeling two-ness as an American and a Negro, two souls, and unreconciled strivings.

13th Amendment (1865)

Abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime.

Yuri Kochiyama and Malcom X

Alliance and friendship existed between these two activists.

Japanese Americans

Reparation to them is a precedent for reparations for descendants of enslaved African Americans.

Double-consciousness

A sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

The Negro

Born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world--a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world

The history of the American Negro

The longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.

The end of striving

To be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, and to husband and use his best powers.

In his songs and exhortations swelled one refrain

Liberty

Ideals among the Negro people are gradually coalescing, and finding a higher meaning in the unifying ideal of race

Work, culture, and liberty