Chapter 1
Race – a social construct
A group of people who share physical and cultural traits
“primarily sociocultural foundation”
imposed externally
no biological basis
also historical construction
how people understand and relate to each other
it is in the eye of the beholder
changes over time
defined by society
is a social construct defined by the standards of the time
1 – Marks a difference
Physical differences used as markers of races
Used as a hierarchy
Does not require intention – hate or belief – passive based on
previous history
2 – Used as basis for differential treatment
Race in the classical world (pre-history)
People were not grouped on race but on geography and birthplace, language
Slavery in the classical world
Greek and Roman era
Not based on race but on whether your group, tribe, etc was
conquered
Europeans and interactions with first nations of the American continents
Dismissed them as less than human beings – dehumanization
Killed adults educated and baptized children, then kids viewed as human of
Indian descent
Enslavement of Africa used same dehumanization
Slavery and the demand for slaves in the 13 colonies
In US was demand for labor and willingness to dehumanize
Slave Codes of the 1660’s
Two sources of labor
African slaves and European indentured servants
Control and tiered status
Divide and conquer
– Control rebellion and possibility that groups will ban together and
fight for rights
– Differences between African slaves and European to keep them from
organizing in revolt
– Banned intermarriage
– Housing slaves in main house
– Banned teaching slaves to read and write
– Different legal status for different groups
Racism – a system not an attitude toward a race group, has existed before all of us,
learning how the system operates allows you to make changes in your life
and society
– A system of policies practices or procedures or big systems that are
differential based on race
1 – the belief that races are populations whose physical differences are
linked to significant cultural and social differences within a hierarchy
2 – The practice of subordinating races believed to be inferior
Ethnicities – group identities based on notion of similar and shared history, culture
and kinship
Self identified
mallabel in terms of who belongs
Ideology – a set of principles and ideas that benefit the dominant group
Manumission – when an owner freed his slave – ie in wills
Hereditary slavery
Scientific racism
Botany led to classification of people
– European taxonomies (1600’s)
o Periodic table of elements
o Classifying organisms
o Movement to classify people from different parts of the world
Initially 4 groups: European, Far Eastern, Negro, Lapps (Lapland in n
scandanavia)
Physical characteristics of hair texture, skin color
1735 – all humans divided into 4 groups
connected skin color to cultural and moral traits ie indolence
Americanus: reddish, choleric, erect, obstinate, merry, free,
regulated by customs
Asiaticus: sa;;pw, melancholy, black hair, dark eyes, haughty, rules
by opinions
Africanus: black, phlegmatic, relaxed, women without shame. Crafty,
indolent, negligent, governed by caprice
Eurpaenus: white, sanguine, muscular, inventive. Governed by laws
Indian Removal Act
Passed in 1830
Excluding and including
Defining group as one race and excluding them from land
because of their “race”
70,000 removed
1/3 – tens of thousands died while being removed
the trail of tears
the reservation system largely established in OK
reserved large areas of land and by treaty assigning them to
different tribes
used to confine people of race groups
Cherokee Nation and South Carolina
Anthropometrics – tools used to measure physical classifications of races
Spencer – survival of the fittest explained decimation of native
Americans
Morton measure skull sizes
Broca more biased brain size testing – believed brain size=intelligence
but justified evidence to the contrary
Craniometry – the measurement of cranial capcaity
Scientific Racism of the 1900’s:
Arbitrary and meaningless measures
IQ testing
Bastardized Binet’s work
Goddard – “feeble mindeness – Ellis Island testing of immigrants with
no accommodation for language
Gould – intelligence is the innate ability to perform cognitive tasks
and those tasks are not able to be taught to people
Eugenics – IQ, alcoholism, laziness, crime, poverty, and other moral and
cultural trains are inherited – advocated selective breeding and
sterilization (1900-1930)
Madison Grant – believed this shit Book – The Passing of the Great
Race – Europeans divided into “Nordics”, Alpines”, “Mediterraneans”
Nordics are superior “master race” – control immigration into the US
Race – construct of colonialism, slavery, scientific racism as a rationalization
Caucasian – Caucasus mountains
– appears 64 time in SCOTUS ruling
o SCOTUS decided to use Caucasian as white with European
ancestry
Freedom and Slavery in the US
– 75% of founding fathers owned slaves
– The Constitution
o ½ the signatories were slave owners
o 25% inherited or would inherit after the signing
o The 3/5th compromise
▪ Counting votes for census
▪ Relegating slaves as not full people while still allowing
south to count slaves for funding purposes and protecting
north from funding deficit with south having more people
▪ Differential legal status for 3/5th of a person
o South depended on slavery for workforce
o North depended on manufacturing etc
– Slavery made illegal in 1865
o Broad period of 150 years where laws existed that kept slavery
alive in the Jim Crow area
▪ Rights and guarantees withheld from certain groups of
people
– Race in Latin America
o Spanish colonies
o History of racism in South American
▪ Slavery of Africans
▪ Lighter skin over darker skin
▪ Abuse of indigenous people and their lands
▪ Lack of representation in media and politics
– Skin Color and Superiority
o Racism in Five Different Countries
o Global issue
▪ China
• 92 % one ethnic group Han Chinese
• anti-black sentiment surged with African
scholarships
• Star Wars example of racism in media – they
eliminated black characters
▪ Argentina
• Negro – laborers and poor people
• Leader of country tweeted racist joke
o Sound familiar?
▪ Japan
• “Japanese only” signs
• Miss Japan criticized because ½ black and she
should be pure blood
• within their own Japanese ethnic groups
o Burakumin
▪ Stereotyped as criminals
▪ Difficulty finding employment
▪ Australia
• Aborigian people
o Killed by disease and massacre
o Force into labor
o 1975 act to protect but, be serious!
o 2% of population, 27% of incarcerated
• Asian Student population
• Curry bashing
o Beating and killing of Indian students
• Netherlands
o 2013 alert that skin color, age, ethnicity used
to justify “suspicion”
o Berber ethnic groups
▪ Head of police ethnic diversity said
they:
• “Find it easier to live in the
streets”
▪ Jane Elliott
• Brown eyed/blue eyed experiment
o
o Similar outcomes and
o
Chapter 2 –
SCIENTIFIC RACISM
• Scientific Racism
• biological essentialism and determination
• science and pseudo science use genetics and markers to identify races
• 1930’ and 40’s scientists believed darker skinned people did
not feel pain the same way lighter skinned people do
• Biological essentialism and determinism
• Belief that genetics are the cause of achievement and success
• Determined by pre-historic past
• Meaningful genetic or biological process cause
• Evolution
• Natural selection
• Fitness or success is determined by genes
• Social Darwinism
• System justification example
• If people are successful in their social world it is because things
about them make them better able to compete for resources
• Explain why some race groups are poor while others are
wealthy
• Explain unfair away by assigning it to inferior genes
• Measure race
• Measure IQ, achievement, reading ability to
• Inferior, superior, fit or not it
• People denied education etc based on “fitness”
• Scientific Racism
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMVzPCOut1w
• Crania Americana
• Morton
• Classified people by skull shape and where they are from
• Distorted illustrations of his collection of skulls
• Claimed that people with a certain skull shape have
smaller brains
• Claimed different consistency and shape and size
• Phrenologists referred to this book as an inexpensive summary
because it was so expensive
• African skulls barely illustrated but claimed the skulls were
small
• Salve holders used it
• Abolitionists used it to prove slaves could not organize
and seek revenge because they weren’t smart enough
• Justifications for racism
• Permission to dismiss and determine them not worthy of help
• Measuring “race”
• Skull shape, hair texture, etc/
• Intelligence testing
• People of European descent are smarter than anyone else
• Mostly assessed common knowledge from shared experiences
• Eugenics
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaH0Ws8RtSc
• In the US
• War on the Weak
• Intense growth of industry led to mass migration
• Unwilling and unable to make progressive social changes to
accommodate foreign migration as well as farmers migrating to
suburbs and urban areas
• Scientific management of humans
• Believed degeneracy was genetic and could be bred out of society by
eugenics (not allowing undesirables to reproduce)
• American Breeders Association
• Used census data, interviewed circus performers to legitimize
eugenics laws nationwide
• Legitimized segregation, forced sterilization of criminals,
immigration and marriage restrictions
• Popularized race hygiene and other horrific terms, clergy
preached about it, awards given at state fairs for the fittest
families with the purest genetics
• Indiana State Senate forced sterilization of those found “unfit”
followed by 11 other states
• 1924 3,000 “socially inadequate” people had been
forcibly sterilized
• Carrie Buck was first of over 8,000 socially inadequate
to be sterilized in Virginia based on the new law (on
October 19, 1927)
• Mother was “feeble minded”, she had a “feeble
minded” son as the result of a rape and she was
considered sexually promiscuous because she
had the child out of wedlock and because her
teacher said she sent flirtatious notes to school
boys. She was deemed feeble minded by a doctor
she had never met.
• Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (SCOTUS decision
in Buck v Bell) “society can prevent those who
are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind –
three generations of imbeciles are enough”
• Vivian – Carrie’s “feeble minded” daughter
received B’s on her 1st grade report card
• 33 states enacted laws under which over 60,000 citizens
underwent compulsory sterilizations
• Buck v Bell has STILL not been overruled
• Germany’s racial theories have its roots in the US eugenics
laws
• Refusing immigration on nationalization
• “The Germans are beating us at our own game”
• Germany started “euthanizing” feeble minded before
holocaust
• The US had talked about euthanizing before the war as
well
• Argued for eliminating inferior races
•
EXCLUSIONARY IMMIGRATION POLICIES
• The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)
• Passed by congress
• First time immigration was banned from specific countries
• 1917 expanded the ban to most Asian countries
• Excluded people from China
• Immigration Act of 1917
• Expansion to most Asian countries
• The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924
• Selective nature of immigration laws based on privilege based on race
• Limited immigration to those from Nordic countries
• Excluded people from Italy and others not considered Nordic
even though they were European
• Specific focus on increasing Nordic immigration
• Birthright Citizenship for Whites only
• Birthright citizenship denied to many
• People of African decent granted citizenship (1866)
• Naturalization of “Free White People”
• Naturalization process
• Denial based on race
HOW THE IRISH, ITALIANS, AND JEWS BECAME WHITE
• Naturalization Law of 1790
• Grants naturalization to “free white persons”
• European country and classification as “white
• Excluded
• Irish
• Italians
• Jewish Europeans
• Asylum seekers denied
• Irish Folk song
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXkgUqD4_EY
AFRICAN AND NATIVE AMERICANS
• African American struggles for freedom
• Liminal legal status (between slavery and civil rights)
• Slavery by Another Name
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjUF1ktxxIQ
• forced to labor against their will
• work could not proceed without African American workforce byt they
did not want to pay for it
• depth of poverty
• inability to access wealth mechanisms – American Dream
stolen!
• Slavery By Another Name – documentary
• Highlights Jim Crow south
• Liminal period
• Systematic denial of civil rights protections
• Lynchings without consequence
• Whites Only
•
• Native American land re-appropriation
• 1851 Indian Appropriations Act
• created reservation system
• 1871 Indian Appropriations Act
• U.S. no longer had to sign treaties with 1st nations to give or take land
away
• Made land re-appropriation easier
• Black Hills
• Allotment and Assimilation Period
• Systematic removal of people from land
• Forced education and removal of children
• Intensification of cultural destruction
• Forced native Americans to assimilate
• Goal to force Native Americans to forget their culture
and traditions and the past
• The Sherman Institute – off reservation boarding school
age 4-20 from across the country to Riverside (Now the
Sherman Indian School)
• Taught farming and housekeeping
• “Kill the Indian and save the man”
• many never saw home again
• illness and accidents killed many and they were
buried without returning body home
• In 1904 first graduating class were reminded in
newspaper that they had been born savages
• May 3 “Indian Flower Day” when graves are
cleaned and flowers put at graves
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vht4gSPJeE
• 1887 Dawes Act
• Forced turnover of communal land for tribes that were not
removed
• Concept of land ownership in many First Nation
communities was communal
• The land was taken, plots were created, people forced to
live on plots and the rest was sold for redevelopment
• 1934 Indian Reorganization Act
• Facilitation of self-governance, end of allotment
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBNdVYPhDg8
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW7oJcQ1BVc
CHAPTER 3 1920’s to current
– Racial Ideologies
o Prejudice
▪ Prejudge – pre+judice
▪ Describes a tendency in human cognition
• Use cues from environment and past experience and
ideas to guide current responses
• Pre-existing thoughts and beliefs about others
o Groups based on race, sex, etc
o Discrimination
▪ Behavior or treatment that are unfair or arbitrary
• Link between what you think and what you do
• Discrimination against males from childcare settings
o Racial ideology
▪ Ideas around race
• Organize people around groups
o Ingroup/outgroup
• The group with the power and control has positive
ideologies about themselves and negative about
others
• 1) Divide people into groups
• 2) Ideology serves a group
• Dominant groups create ideologies
o Ideology around friendliness –
▪ their groups is
▪ the other group is not
• Hierarchical system when dominant group has the
power
o Color-blind ideology
▪ Organize the world in ways other than race or ethnicity
▪ Not use race as a factor in grouping
▪ See individuals and characteristics not as the result of a
group but see individuals
▪ See it with more education
▪ See it in cities with lots of immigration
• Contact zones
– Acts of Racism (policies that are different based on race)
o Mexican + Mexican-American deportations
▪ Right before WWII
• 1900-1920 need for labor prior to great depression
o especially service and low income jobs
▪ After great depression, mass deportation
▪ 1920’s&30’s Use of community raids
• sent to cities and towns on the borders
▪ deportation of US citizens
• Mass scale
• Some minors deported with noncitizen parents
• Also adults born in US without documentation of US
birthright
▪ Rhetoric of exclusion
• Increase in new articles about excluding people who
are not from the US
• During economic downtimes there is an anti-
immigrant attitude
– Internment of Japanese + Japanese Americans
▪ World War II
▪ Pearl Harbor
▪ 120,000 people interned
• Kept for years – 3-4
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyDLr8Svoio
o American Concentration Camps
o Restructured fairgrounds and parking lots
into “housing” – they were animal stalls
o Government propaganda
▪ Called them evacuees, residents,
colonists but they were prisoners
o Eventually transferred to unused deserts or
swamplands
o Chain link fence guarded by armed soldiers
o Injustice of camps never acknowledged
o 2/3 were US citizens with no hearings held to
determine guilt or danger
▪ “What does citizenship mean?”
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcLXdGJFRkY
o Speak with a historian at Smithsonian
o Ujihara – engineer detained during WWII
watercolors
o Half of those detained were children
o Betty Tiaira
▪ Each person allowed one suitcase but
if kids were too little to carry their
own they didn’t get one
▪ Barracks
▪ No insulation
▪ Bare cots
▪ Spurred many Japanese Americans to
prove loyalty and become an even
better people
• Ultimately the US govt
apologzied
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcLXdGJFRkY
o Private property seized
o Paid reparation but it did not include enough
to buy back their property
▪ Heirlooms gone
o Family members serving and dying in
military as their family were imprisoned in
the camps
o Reagan issued apology
– Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
▪ 1932
▪ 400 low income African American men from Tuskegee
Alabama
▪ Infected with syphilis
• Denied treatment or deceived that they thought they
had treatment
• Were allowed to infect others so that the
researchers could observe primary and secondary
infection
• Scientific racism: Belief they have a different
immune system
▪ Purpose of study was to observe death and secondary
infections
▪ These men were low status and if they died it would not
attract attention
▪ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3tQ93fQf8U
• The Unknowns about the Tuskegee Syphilis Study
• Only reason anyone knew about it was because one
23 year old female reporter published it
• Black men’s lives didn’t matter
• Drs. wanted them to die so they could study their
bodies
• No way to know how many people were affected
• “Never quite standing up and yelling”
o Minotrities, LGBTQ – everyone needs
advocates!!
– The Civil Rights Movement
o 150 years Jim Crow area – set of laws that enforced
discrimination
▪ Segregation and legal mistreatment
▪ Enacting of Jim Crow laws
▪ Separate but equal
▪ Dissuade voting
• Poll taxes
• Literacy tests
▪ Forbidding intermarriage (through the 1960’s)
o Legally permissible discrimination
▪ Separate school districts
▪ Separate resources
▪ Different prison sentences based on race
