Sociology Exam 1

Essentialism

Essentialism

-The belief that most categories of difference (such as gender and race) are rooted in biology

Constructionism

-The belief that social identities are not biologically "real"

-Does not deny biological differences

-Society creates, or constructs these differences

Political Rights

-Rights that are supposed to ensure that you have access to the political process, which shapes ones country, state, and inevitably, ones sense of self

-Right to vote, free speech, the press, right to hold office, own property

Social Rights

-What society owes us as citizens of a particular nation or state

-Right to an education, a right to a general safety net (welfare and social security)

What are contradictions?

-The Constitution says we have rights to this stuff, but do we actually because the people who wrote it had money and privilege.

Du Boisian and the I's of Inequality

1. Ideological

2. Institutional

3. Interpersonal

4. Internalized

Ideological

Any oppressive system as its core idea that one group is somehow better than another, and in some measure has the right to control the other group. (This is done through words and institutions)

Institutional

The idea that one group is better than another group and has the right to control/monitor/constrain the other is historically formed and gets embedded in the institutions of society- the laws, the legal system and police practice, the education system and schools, hiring policies, housing development, political power

Interpersonal

The idea that one group is better than another and has the right to control the other which gets structured into institutions gives permission and reinforcement for individual members of the dominant group to personally disrespect to mistreat individuals in the oppressed group

Internalized

Oppressed people internalize the ideology of inferiority, they see it reflected in institutions, they expire next disrespect interpersonally from members of the dominant group, and they often come to internalize the negative messages about themselves.

Intersectional

Additional I, sexuality, racial identity, gender, nationality, disability

What about reverse racism?

A simple Defintion of racism=prejudice+Power.

-White people can only be racists, others would be racially prejudice

What is race? Biological Definition

A sub population within a single species of plant or animal, which is distinguished from other sub populations in the same species

What is race? Social Definition

Meanings attached to certain people as defined by a particular society or culture, usually by law, custom, and or practice

Plessy v. Ferguson

-A court case in 1896

-1/8 African American

-Challenged Jim Crow laws

-Boarding a train car for whites only

-Went to Supreme Court (lost)

Susie Guillory Phipps

According to a genealogists Susie had 3/32 her great great great great grandmothers was an enslaved African women. She thought she was white.

Passing

A social phenomenon rather than a biological one, reflecting the nations unique understanding of what makes a person "black"

Race as a World View

Du Boisian lens: historical emphasis on the processes of status attainment. Reciprocal relationship between ideas and material reality

Why Europe?

-Europe was created around the 16th century

-“Old World”

-Colonization

-Europe had weapons and ships (they ability to kill a lot of people very quick)

English Slavery

-More rigid

-Irish "slaves" (but not really slaves)

-Leonardo Liggio: It was the English expierence with the Irish that was the root of English racial attitudes

The "New World"

-1492

-Oedro Alonzo Nino

-Piolet of the Santa Maria

Africans in the "New World"

-Jamestown 1619 (The first group came in 1619)

-Virginia 1661 (The first enslavement laws happened here- Virginia was the first state to have laws about enslavement)

Bacon Rebellion 1676

First legalized racial categories: white, black, Indian. Nathaniel Bacon- Irish person who helped organized the servant class and bond laborers to revolt against the government -Burned Jamestown to the ground -Planters were frightened because working class men and women were the majority

How is this Du Boisian?

Although colonists reconfigured physical diversities in their population, until the end of the 27th century they had not got imposed social meanings on them.

-Slavery became not just an economic institution, but also a social insertion that conferred legal, physiological and material privileges to people defined as “white”

Article: Whiteness as Property

Native Americans, Blacks, and Property

-Different systems of oppression

-Black labor

-American Indian land

Black Womens Bodies and the Law

-Virginia law before bacons rebellion (late 1600s): "Children got by an Englishman upon a women shall be bond or free according to the condition of the mother"

Virginia Law After Bacons Rebellion (Late 1600s)

"Children got by a white man upon a women shall be bond or free according to the condition of the mother"

Law Freedom and Race

White=Free

Black=Enslaved

-Whiteness became a shield from slavery

Article: How people became white

Why were definitions of whiteness coming under legal security?

Immigration

-Most of the white people in the US were British and Irish

-Irish were not considered white at first even though they looked like the British

Why were these definitions important?

People were still subjected to segregation (Asian, Italian, and Greek went to the black schools)

-If you were white you get certain jobs and home loans (many legal advantages)

Virginia

The first state to legalize slavery

-State laws were the fist one to determine who was considered white

United States v Bhagwan Thind (1923) One year later

-This case contradicted the way race science was used in Ozawa. Despite race science categorizations, Thind was not considered white by the courts because this idea did not match up with...

-"It may be true that the blond Scandinavian and the brown Hindu have a common ancestor in dim reaches of antiquity, but the average man..."

Thind Decision

While Asian Indians were technically Caucasian and not Mongolian, not all Caucasians were white

Article: Reproduction in Bondage

What is the current social order based on?

Two inseparable ingredients:

1. The dehumanization of Africans on the basis of race

2. The control of womens sexuality and reproduction

According to Robert's what was the primary reason for rape during slavery?

Rape was used as a system of control over black women and black men because black men had to witness their daughters and wife get rapped and they could do nothing about it

How did slave women resists their subordinate status?

Refused to have children, running away, fighting back, faking illnesses

How is the dominant notion of reproductive liberty flawed?

The idea that reproductive liberty has been shaped by white feminism. For black women the issue is to have children. Laws for black women were in place to make them not have children.

What connections can we see from this reading with the ones that came before? (Harris)

Race determined whether you could be property or own property

Article: Scientific Racism and the Invention of the Homosexual Body

What does Somerville mean by the "invention" of homo and heterosexuality?

-People didn't refer to people as gay, lesbian, homosexual. If you were not able to have a kid having sec it was seen as bad. Historically this hasn't changed.

-The "invention" of homo and heterosexuality depended on corresponding ideas about black bodies

Somerville Comparisons

Compares the mapping of "homo" and "heterosexual" bodies with that of "black" and "white" bodies

What's the difference between mono gene and polygyny theories of racial origin?

Everything they used to demonize black people they started doing to demonize gays and lesbians

Mono gene

The prevailing theory in the 18th century suffered that so called races were members of the same species and had...

Polygyny

Suggested that different races were actually different species, or sub species, with distinct biology and geographical origins. This was particularly "American school" of thought that corresponded with the political and cultural debates around slavery in the United States

Womens Bodies

-Were seems as the site of racial and sexual controversy

-Are compared to me sin general were seen as deviant; like people of African descents bodies were seen as deviant compared to Europeans

The "Hottentot Venus" Saartju Baartman

She was put on display for science reasons

What were the supposed connections between African American women and lesbians?

Both had expectional large thasoursus

How was this used to construct notions of race and gender?

They were both seen as deviant

How did the autor make connections between racialized sexuality and the Plessy v Ferguson case?

It wasn't that Plessy was black it was the fear of his sexuality (not just racial anxieties but sexual anxieties) very intersexual. Can't tal about one without talking about how it impacted the other

W.E.B. Du Bois

Born February 23, 1868

Died August 27, 1963

-Born 3 years after the civil war and died right in the middle of the civil rights movement (he saw a lot of change in that time period)

-Sociologists, historian, civil rights leader, co founded NAACP and editor

-Born in Great Barrington, MA (in Massachusetts every town could decide if they were allowed to have slaves) Where he is from they were not allowed to have slaves. He had money, went to school with white children, had a good life)

-When he left his community and went to Harvard he started to expierence racism. Many of his professors stopped working with him so he went to Germany

Pan-AFrican Congress (PAC)

-A series of eight meetings held

-1st in 1919 in Paris, France

-Intended to address the issues facing Africa as a result of European colonization of most of the continent

American School of Sociology

-Organziing all of these people to fight for internal justice in the US he starts his own vision of sociology. Starts the first American school of sociology in Atlanta

The Atlanta Sociology Laboratory

Atlanta University (1895-1924)

-Du Bois was chairperson from 1897-1910 and still worked with ASL well after

-The Atlanta sociolocal laboroaty was the first university department to exercise method and theory triangulation which is seen as key in modern society

-Morris wrote this book about how we had ignored Du Bois

The Souls of Black Folk: Article

What is double consciousness?

Your reception of yourself. Most sociology was very macro. In order to survive I must know what the white person next to me is thinking. Seeing yourself though a black lense but also a white lense

Where do we start the story?

Where we start the story is very important because it changes the conclusion

Reconstruction

Late 1860s early 1870s

What did Reconstruction do?

Progress with tights of people in the Consitution of 1868

-Incorporating black people into more everyday life

What did it accomplish?

It was bringing more black people into politics (in a general sense) helped back people realize what their rights were and now to access those rights

How do we conceive of Lincoln during this time?

Lincoln said that black people were not equal to white people. For him, ending slavery was only for winning the war. He only did it for strategic reasons. The Emancipation Proclomation only freed slaves in the South. Slaves in the north were not freed until the Consitution was changed.

Reconstruction

Between 1865-1977, Congress granted African American men the status and rights of citizenship, including the right. To vote as guaranteed by the 14th and 15th amendments to the U.S Constitution.

-Approximately 2,000 African Americans held public office, from the local level all the way up to the U.S Senate

-In all, 16 African Americans were elected and served in the U.S Congress during Reconstruction; more than 600 more were elected to the state legislatures, and hundreds more were elected to local officers across the South

Civil War Amendements/ Three Reconstruction Era Amendements

-13th Amendment (1865) which outlawed slavery

-14th Amendment (1868) which was the Citizen Clause that overruled the 1857 Dred vs Scott vs Sanford decision, which stated Blacks could not be citizens of the U.S

-15th Amendment (1870) which granted Black men the right to vote

Organizing Blacks after Emancipation

During enslavement black people had to sit in white Churches (First insulation where blacks had full control- churches, controlled their pastor and what sermons they would recieve, learned how to control their own institutions)

The Freedman's Bureau

It did a little bit of everything

-Black peoples rights, it was an attempt to establish a government guardianships and insure economic and civil rights

Race and Roots through Appalachia Article (taking place in Harlan county)

Subjectivity

According to Brown this is a book about the emergence and transformation of African American subjectivity.

What does she mean by this and how does this relate to a Du Boisian understanding of sociology?

Double consciousness and being aware of the double consciousness (double conciseness if going to shift becuase soicety is going to shift)

What was the Great Migration and why was it important for a) the nation b) race relations and c) sociology study

1916-1917 migrated to the north becuase they didn't like how they were being treated in the south. Agricultural base starts to change. Large number of black people mocing to large community's with little black people. Race relations are not longer just focused on the south.

According to Brown, what does "reading" photographs tell us about subjectivity and racial markers?

Tells us how in this time people took these occasions and showered the power and control in the white community. The white community is not ashamed to be photographed even though a murder is occurring. The immunity whites got a murder scene.

How did African Americans end up in Appalachia and Harlan County specifically? Where else did the coal mines recruit for labor?

They got there by taking trains. In Harlan County specially there was a coal mine in Alabama and the person who owned one also owned one in Harlan County. Growing the signs amoungtst white people and white people and black people in Harlan.n

Why is this migration happening?

-To avoid violence

-Better economics

-Saftey (left because of fear but when they got there they found violence)

Europe's created around the 16th century

-One world

-Colonization

Important: Europeans were much more advanced with weapons and ships

Plessy v. Ferguson

Planned- he announced he was back to go to court

Affirmative action

Blackness as a form of propety white

Slavery

It became not just economic, but also a psychological and social system

Passing

Economic value of being white

Pregnancy

-Slaved women got pregnant during November December and January because the babies would not get the attention they needed when they were born in the summer

-Healthy pregnancies were extremely rare

-Slaves had many more miscarriages than white women

-Some slaves refused sexual relations

-Death was not a good way to get out of slavery

-Jumping over a broom to get married (both man and women brought a broom)

Immigration

-Different types of immigrants had to fight for the rights to be white (white advantages)

-It did not happen all at once example: if you were Greek in New York you're white but not in Nebraska

Thind Decision

While Asian Indians were technically Caucasian and not Norgoian, not all Caucasian's are white

Du Bois Point

How does Robert's account of images of black women relate to a Du Bosian analysis or race, class, and gender.

Great Migration

-Emancipation, amendment, setting in primarily white

-Agriculture itself changed and expands because black people moved North/West

-South can no longer have all the agriculture