LSJ 300 JAM 1

Phenotype

how our genes manifest physically or characteristically

• racial phenotypes were used to categorize people into racial groups to determine their legal and social status

• during slavery and segregation, Black people were subjugated using the color of their skin

• Connects to the one drop rule, in which a person having a “single drop of Black blood” would make them legally Black

  • Black blood and having a physically Black characteristic would make them less than and would be given racial meaning

Ethnicity

A shared identity based on ancestry, language or culture

• ethnic differences can be used to racialize groups when language, nationality, religion, or cultural practice are treated as indicators of racial difference

  • ex. perceptions of European immigrants changing over time - moved from super anti-immigrant to welcoming them over POC immigrants

  • connects to nativism - ethnicity is often used as a justification for anti-immigrant sentiment

  • we’re seeing it now with ICE and the rampant anti-immigration sentiment being sent around the US

The Other/Othering

the act of defining in-groups and out groups. it categorizes and classifies people to navigate the world. it also creates a self-identity by defining what people aren’t

• creates the “Other” which is someone who is “not us” and who doesn’t belong

• it’s a learned behavior and attitude, someone isn’t born as someone who just naturally Others

Continuously done throughout history, most notably through slavery, where Black people were Othered and subjugated to do free, brutal labor for white people. It can also been seen in treatment of Chinese people in the 1800s and 1900s, in which they were subject to severe anti-Chinese sentiment and established as less than white. Thorugh these processes of subjugation, minority groups are Othered by racialization. Racial meaning is attached to groups, which allows them to become Othered by the privileged population.

Indigeneity

the identity and status of Indigenous peoples which are rooted in their historical connections to particular lands, communities, cultures, and systems of governances. this conects to the concept of blood quantum, which used percentages of Indigenous blodo to effectively breed out indigeneity. It was meant to subjugate and justify further American colonization.

Throughout history, the US has looked to push out and destroy indigenous populations by saying that they are the rightful owners to the land, aligning with the concept of Terra Nulliu - that Indgenous land was previously unoccupied or “owned”

Blood Quantum

Laws that define whether someone qualifies as Indigenous based on fractions of Native ancestry. It was used to regulate Indigenous identity and tribal membership and could reduce the number of people recognized as Indigenous. It connects to the concept of racial classifications by classifying and pushing a diverse group of people into one classifications based on blood. - being Indigenous meant having a certain amount of blood, which reduced Indigenous meaning to simply being your blood, rather than being your identity.

Manifest Destiny

the belief that it was the right, duty, and inevitability of white settlers to expand their power and territory across North America. It was seen through the Trail of Tears and the Indian Removal Act which was justified through the idea of Manifest destiny. Racialization allowed white americans to feel superior and supposedly destined to control North America. also connects to the concpet of radicalization

Paternalism

regulating behavior, restricting freedoms, and making decisions for others without their consent “for their own good” or to “prevent harm”

• controlling resources, bannign cultural practices and forced assimilation

Federal boarding schools for Indigenous children were justified as a way to educate and civilize them, despite separating children from their families and attempting to eliminate Indigenous cultures.

it was forced assimilation, imposing the cultural practices of white americans on Indigenous communities

Terra Nullius (“The Lands of No One”)

“The Lands of No One" was used to justify the colonization of north america, stating that the land belonged to no one, despite native americans having lived and governed on the land for centuries. in order for Europeans to legitimize their colonial claim on the land, they used terra nullius to allow for that to happen. It aligns with the concept of manifest destiny: they genuinely thought it was their god given right to assert their claim over the land that was not theirs.

• colonizers attched racial meaning to indigenous groups, stating that they lacked systems of ownership and governance and allowed them to disregard their territory and ownership of the land.

Sovereignty

the right of a state to govern itself or another state, population, or political entity. this was seen when settler states came to the land and stated that they have sovereignty over Indigenous groups. the US has often disregarded Indigenous sovereignty by attempting to erase, minimize or destroy tribal communities and ways of life. Indigehous communities have often been seen as not being the rightful “owners” of the land, despite having been there first

Paper Genocide

Removing entire groups from historical records and government couting. When government systems imposed blood quantum requirements, for example, it reduced the number of peopel that could be recognized as indigenous. Paper genocides are often mobilized thorugh the census which ahve a long history of erasing or minimizing peoples’ identities into one term.

• also connects to the where counting really counts reading, in which he talks about how the Israeli government used a census to erase Palestinians from their homes. that is a clear form of a paper genocide

Census

A count of the entire population of a nation, state, or other community. It typically inclues demographic and econoic information. In the US, we do a decennial census which determines taxes and the number of representatives in the House. The government has the power to determine what is said in the census.

• thorughout history, the census has been mobilized to erase and push people into boxes. It refelcts the ideologies and political states of the time through separations. It works to Other communities, as seen during slavery, where enslaved people were viewed as sub-human by the census.

• It changes racial meanings and perceptions, alowing people to become racialized by the census which is then institutionalized.

Racial Classification

categorizing humans into distinct groups based on perceived or real physical and social traits. the US government has used racial classifications to determine legal status, as seen during slavery. It made distinctions between enslaved and free people as well as between white and nonwhite populations.

• racial classifications were codified by things like the census, which pushed people into racial classifications based on perceieved or real traits

• racial classifications were clear forms of racialization, allowing people to be put into boxes based on their racial identities

Black Codes

Laws which were enacted post-CIil War to restrict the freedoms and rights of formerly enslaved Black Americans. They created fixed color lines and racial hiearchy. One example was the 3/5 compromise, which was a federal ratio for counting people who lived in a state

• 3/5 of a Black population would be counted for taxation and HOR. - essentialy allowed for people to be seen as 3/5 human

Property

Anything that can be owned by a person or entity. During slavery, Black people were legally treated as property rather than as individuals with rights. It allowed Black people to be seen as property, allowing Blackness to be associated with being sub-human. Race became a justification for economic exploitation.

Slavery

Owning another human being to benefit from their labor. It’s a legal, social, economic, and political institution. It’s about social and racial hierarchies, the restriction of liberty, and subjugation. White people subjugated Black people during slavery, and allowed Blackness to be associated with being sub-human and brutal labor. Race became a justification for economic exploitation.

Fugitive Slave Acts

Federal laws allowing individuals and governments to capture and return maroons for a reward. Both slaves and free people of color were targeted with this, and people would charge anyone who helped a slave escape. Slave owners would actively look for their slaves by describing what they looked like, their names, and the reward for capturing them. Slaves were often looking for a better life, escaping to the North from the South

Reconstruction

The nation’s post-war attempt to repair itself and reincorporate the Confederacy, It attempted to address the inequities and legacies of slaveries. People didn’t know how to emancipate 4 million slaves. Reconstruction came with several laws, parties, and ideas. Some examples looked like the emancipation proclomation, the Ten Percent Plan, and the 13th, 14th, and the 15th Amendment, and the creation of the Freedman’s Bureau

13th Amendment

Banned slavery and involuntary servitute, except as a punishment for crime (a loophole still exists). But discriminatory criminal justice and labor systems still exist. It demonstrates how racial inequality could persist after slavery's formal abolition. Also, sharecropping continued, which was slavery by another name.

14th Amendment

Established birthright citizenship, guaranteed equal protection under the law and banned any state from depriving any person life liberty, or peroperty without due process. Currently under fire because the Trump administration has continously made attempts to get rid of birthright citizenship to prevent children of undocumented immigrants from gainig citizenship. ICE has also continuously attempted to deport citizens or legal residents. IT isn’t equal protection under the law, and it certaintly wasn’t post-slavery when Black people were continously pushed and put into sharecropping. Also overtruend Dred Scott which had previously denied Black americans citizenship.

15th Amendment

Prohibited state and federal governments from denying a citizen the right to vote on the basis or “race, color, or previous condition of servitude”

• Gave Black people a legal path to autonomy over political choices, economic opportunities, and education

• The influx of Black voters radically shifted the political landscape of the nation

but still limited due to pushback at polling stations - Black people still were unequal under the law, despite it being legally codified. showed how inherent racist ideology was in the US citziens.

Abolition

The practice of ending a system, pratice or institution. The abolition of slvery in America didn’t stop slavery, it jut shifted the name. It also spurred a labor gap, which caused indentured immigrant workers from India, China etc. The abolition of slavery raised may questions over what to do with Black people post-slavery and what that meant for the future of labor in the US.

Freedmen

a person defined in relation to their previous condition of inhumanity and servitude. There was a clear distinction between freedmen and a free man. A free man had full civil liberties and rights to citizenship, which freedman didn’t have. They were subject to Black codes and lack of liberties. Freedoms were expanded by things like the Freedman’s bureau, but they weres till imited.

One-Drop Rule

A single drop of “Black blood” makes some legally Black. It was intended to keep the white race “pure” and about maximization. By increasing the number of peopel who countd as Black, it increased the number of slaves. It differed from blood quantum in that that was about breeding out indigeneity and minimization. They were both about racial purity and Othering through legal rules, but they differed in how the two groups were perceived.Prop

Lost Cause of the Confederacy

Propoganda campaign designed to transform perceptions of the Civil War to justify and uplift the Confederate cause. It gave confederates a narative to cope with the psychic trauma of the war. Ideas spread by the Lost Cause becamse popular through monuments, literature, and organization that celebrated Confederate soldiers. these were spread and continue to be spread by the Lost Daughters of the Confederacy. They alleged that the civil war was about states’ rights not slavery, which shows how historical narratives can distort reality — they justified segregation and the brutatlity that the Black people went through.

Myth vs. History

The distinction between narratives which simplify, distort, or romanticize the past and historical accounts which are grounded in evidence. For example, The Lost Cause narrative presents slavery as secondary to the Civil War, whereas historical evidence establishes slavery as the central cause of secession.

• myths allow false countermemories to come forth and shape people’s beliefs and knowledge about an event. They can be incredibly harmful. For example, monuments about confederate soldiers are all over the US and have extremely negative connotations.

Myth allowed the South to not pay for their actions against Black americans.

Countermemory

honors, recontextualizes, or commemorates overlooked or erased histories, especially those of marginalized groups. Black historians, activists, and formerly enslaved people documented the realities of slavery and Reconstruction, challenging narratives that celebrated the Confederacy. Angela Downes’ article about the harms of the Lost Cause are an example of counter memory.

Sharecropping

“slavery by another name” Post-emancipation, hundreds of thousands of freedmen forced to enter exploitative contracts to survive

• Landlords not obligated to pay cash wages

• (re)produced conditions of dependency and subordination

• Poor white people and formed slaves now competing for same positions

upheld by the vagrancy act. It was intended to continue to keep Black people in slavery, despite the emancipation proclomation and the 13th amendment.

Formulas of Erasure

“formulas that tend to erase directly the fact of a revolution”Repeated methods or processes through which certain populations, identities, histories, or experiences are made invisible or excluded.

Truillot uses the Hatitian revolution as an example - of minimizing the impact of it and howing how it was the political agency of Black enslaved people. It happens at the source creation, which shows that history is shaped by whoever holds power

Formulas of Banalization

Trivilalizing historial facts to reduce the impact of historical events and frame them as insignificant. An example of this is the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, which was created to transform perceptions of the Civil War in order to uplift the Confederate cuase. You acknolwedge that the civil war happened, but change WHY it happened.

Free man or Freedmen’s Bureau

Someone given the civil liberties and rights to citizenship.

OR

Freedmen’s Bureau expanded opportunity for newly freed Black people, alloiwng them space to get married, employment, housing, social services, and etc.

Vagrancy

The condition of being unemployed, homeless, disorderly or idle. The vagrancy act would punish any of these people, typically Black people - some of whom were sex workers, fortune tellers, or gamblers. When arrested, vagrants were “hired out” to work for a fmily for free - typically sharecropping or forced to work for a chain gang.

• effectively slavery - Black people were punished for being vagrant, but they weren’t really given another option.

Reparations

a process of repairing, healing, and restoring a people injured in violation of their human rights. the compensated emancipation act freed slaces in DC and compensated the owners for their loss of labor

• clearly racist, compensating the abusers for losing their form of abuse, rather than those who suffered at the hands of the abusers

• also, after slavery, people weren’t fully given the opportunities to do well - they were mostly forced into sharecroping, which was effectively putting them back into slavery

Extralegal

operating outside the confines, regulations, or authority of the law. when the KKK were inciting violence or lynchings, there was no punishment or intervention from authorities - it was allowed. racial violence became normalized, rather than punished.

Lynching

Extralegal public executions, most often performed by mobs and done in the form of haning. This was most often done to Blck people in the name of racial purity to “protect” the helpless white woman. these were brutal and public, many of which occurred during Reconstruction drawn out of a hatred and disregard for Black people. they were romanticized and normalized violence, white supremacy, and racial hiearchies.

The Ku Klux Kla (KKK)

• White supremacist terrorist organization

• Goal: suppress the political and social power of Black people and Republican allies

• Murder, assault, property destruction, and sexual violence

• Faded in the early 1870s

inherently racist group which remerged in the early to mid 1900s

White Supremacy

ideological belief that white people are superior to all other races and therefore should maintain economic, political, and social power

• Concern among white elites about interracial class solidarity

• Poor white people and immigrants could gain privileges and protection participating in white supremacy

• Many poor white Southerners were anti-slavery because they believed Black people were stealing their jobs

• White working class compensated for their lack of power by framing others as inferior

The N*gro Question

A philosophical essay which spurred debates over the political, legal, economic, and social status of Black Americans after emancipations. People were unsure of how they were determined and whether they should receive citizenship, voting rights, access to education, and economic opportunities. Beliefs about Black people reflect the racist assumptions that Americans had - that they weren’t good enough to “participate in society”

Nativism

the beliefs, perceptions, and policies that favor native-born citizens over immigrants. Rooted in belief that native-born citizens are superior to immigrants

• In fear of:

  • Being replaced

  • Losing income

  • Violence

  • The unknown

Connects with anti-Catholic anti Irish and anti-German sentiment throughout the1800s and was then furthered by the influx in Asian immigration where nativism was similarly rampant. It involved othering based on race and ethnicity.

Xenophobia

fear, prejudice, or hatred of people from foreign countries. there were several anti-immigrant riots and events that occurred which were meant to push out and cause fear in them. There were restrictions on citizenship, such as the chinese exclusion act, and were born out of this fear that American citizens were going to be replaced.

Eugenics

pseudoscientific practice of usig selective breeding to “improve” the human race - form of scientific racism

• positive eugenics: reproductio of “superior”

• negative eugenics: prohibiting “bad”

  • there was genuinely forced sterlization of minority populations, including immigrants groups and interracial couples

• breeding out things people couldn’t control which was an inherently racist practice

Labor

Human work performed to produced goods and services. This was seen with the increase in Chinese immigration post abolition of slavery. Chinese people were brought over as indentured servants which then spurred anti Chinese sentiment throughout the country. It also mirrored slavery because they were brouht over described as aliens and marked with a painted letter to regard where thet ywere going - very dehumanizing

Assimilation

process with which individuals or groups adopt the cultural practices, language, values, or customs of a dominant society - aligns with when Indignous children weres ent to boarding schools and forced to erase their native identites and learn english and be away from their families. It was forced - involuntary, and was a way to erase the existence of indigenous people and erase their dientities in order to be accepted

Westward Expansion

the growth of the US from the Atlantic towards the Pacific Ocean. It existed thorugh continous land grabs which removed Native groups from their land. It ignored indigenous claims to the land and simply removed them without a care of where they could go.

The Chinese Question

mid-19th and 20th century debate over what to do with the growing Chinese immigrant populatiom. it caused growing sinophobia, which is hatred or prejudce towards China or Chinese people.

The Chinese Exclusion Act

A federal law that prohibited the immigration of CHinese people to the US - restricted immigration for 10 years. Reflected the rampant anti-CHinese sentiment which was occurring at the time. Extended throughout the better half of the century and established furutre anti-immigration laws

Aporophobia

fear, hatred or disgust toward people who are poor, lacking resources or “helpless” - social structural or legal discriminatiom against peopel who live in poverty

• becomes institutionalized - legally protected means of discrimination

• white elites saw white people whow ere impoverished or underemployed as white trash or the degenerate race

  • would compare them to Black Americans and say they were below them

Racial Passing

concealing one’s racial identity to be perceived as another, often to gain benefits, privileges, or safety. Mixed race applicatns could be approved if they were 75% in European in appearance - people would physically check their physical features to make sure they were “European” enough

Alien (in Civilizations, Religion, and/or Customs)

Someone perceived as foreign or fundamentally different from the dominant society because of their culture, religion, traditions, or customs - doesn’t necessarily mean someone without legal immigration status. Immigrants that came over during the mid to late 1800s were labled as aliens, and their regular ways of life were looked down upon.

Invasion Tropes

One example is the Yellow Peril, which was rooted in the belief that Asian immigrants would invae the US and disrupt Western values. These were sensationalized stories and untrue ideas about Chinese immigrants which were then institutionalized by anti-Chinese laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act

Counterfactual Storytelling

Narratives designed to instill fear in the public about what will happen if they don’t act

• it’s not against the facts, but more about fearmongering narrative if you don’t act

One example was the Yellow Peril, when anti-Chinese sentiment was rampant