Multicultural concepts Exam 1

The film clip discusses how white supremacists designed a targeted campaign to inspire white resentment and fear of black men by claiming that they were a danger to white women. Who would ultimately be one of the most well-known victims of this legacy of propaganda many years later?

Emmett Till Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old, whistled at a white woman in a country store on August 24, 1955. He would be dead two days later. White men broke into his relative's home, kidnapped Emmett, beat him, cut off his testicles, shot him, and tossed him into the Tallahatchie River. It has been said that Emmett Till's murder galvanized and energized many Americans, black and white, to participate in the Civil Rights Movement.

According to the film clip, in the postslavery era, when some newly freed slaves were beginning to gain some political power, white supremacists were determined to end black political power. Which of the following examples from the text most clearly signifies white supremacists' success in stifling the political power of black Americans at this time?

In 1960, fewer than 2 percent of Mississippi's black adults were registered to vote. At the time, whites also withheld from blacks the most basic right of American citizenship: the vote. Although black men won the right to vote with the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 and women won suffrage rights in 1920, black women and men remained disenfranchised.

Gentrification is a contentious issue in many cities throughout the United States, such as San Francisco and Washington, DC. Based on the findings in the clip from My Brooklyn, we would conclude which of the following about gentrification in these other cities?

It is not an inevitable process, but is driven by political factors and government policy The clip from My Brooklyn documents the role of past government policies in shaping gentrification in Brooklyn. It shows how certain programs prevented residents in neighborhoods with significant African American populations from getting loans, thus encouraging middle-class whites to flee those neighborhoods. African Americans were denied loans if they tried to move. This allowed whites to enter neighborhoods where home values would appreciate at a higher rate and thus were able to accumulate more wealth than blacks. It suggests that gentrification today is not an inevitable process, but must be understood in the context of past government policies and political forces.

According to the film clip, which of the following is true about Jim Crow laws in the American South?

Jim Crow laws emerged as a backlash to the increasing political power of some African American communities. Discriminatory Jim Crow laws were put into place by white supremacists as a backlash to the political gains of black Americans after blacks were granted freedom and the right to vote. Facilities that were once integrated became segregated

What are the origins of the term "redlining"?

Neighborhoods with 5 percent or more African Americans were colored red on a map and made ineligible for government-backed loans. As documented in the clip from My Brooklyn, the term redlining came from a government housing program during the Great Depression. One of the main government strategies to promote economic growth was to encourage people to buy homes and, for the first time, the federal government started guaranteeing mortgages. They examined areas that would be safe investments and assigned neighborhoods grades, which determined loan eligibility. While it would have been more reasonable to assign grades based on quality of housing stock or available jobs, grades were more consistently assigned based on racial and ethnic makeup of the neighborhood. Any neighborhood with 5 percent or more black population was automatically given a low score and they were colored red on a map (hence "redlining");

Without the ability to grow crops and provide for themselves, the Pima began to depend on aid from the U.S. government. What was one major result from this dependence?

Overall levels of health decreased With the loss of the water, the Pima were forced to rely on government commodity food, which resulted in a significant increase in poor health and specifically Type 2 diabetes.

In the early twentieth century, American nativists and many scientists argued that the new European immigrants were "lower races of Europe." Their poverty and lower social status was understood as inheritable and immutable. Which of the following examples from the text relates most closely to this understanding of race?

There is a common understanding that African American are superior athletes Are blacks naturally superior athletes? The question has been answered by biology, the only evidence that counts for this kind of question, and the answer is no. The racial composition of several professional sports teams can be explained only through historical and sociological analysis.

What role did many real estate agents play in "white flight"?

They exploited whites' fears of racial integration and encouraged them to sell their homes fast. "Blockbusting" agents, as they became known, learned to stir up whites' fear of integration. As a result, many panicking whites sold their homes to real estate agents at below-market rates. The agents, in turn, would sell that house to nonwhite families hungry for decent housing at above-market rates, thereby collecting a large profit. If nonwhite families could not secure a home loan, blockbusting agents often would step in, offering loans at inflated interest rates;

The fact that a person with both white ancestry and black ancestry will most likely be understood as __________ in the United States makes clear that we are still influenced by the legacies of the "one-drop rule."

black

White terrorism, as described in the film clip, along with literacy tests and "grandfather clauses," worked together to enforce

black disenfranchisement. Black disenfranchisement was safeguarded not only in law (literacy tests and "grandfather clauses") but also by white terrorism (threats, violence, lynching/murder)

Diverting the Gila River away from the Pima Indians in order to benefit white communities is best described as

economic racism American Indians never received compensation for being uprooted from their land, for being imprisoned on reservations, or for having their indigenous economies gobbled up by European settlers.

Based on the clip from My Brooklyn, white flight after the Great Depression was driven by which of the following?

government incentives encouraging whites to move to the suburbs Broadly speaking, whites reacted to the racial integration of their neighborhoods in two ways: by picking up and moving or by slugging it out with newcomers, that is, by fleeing or fighting. Fearing racial integration, many whites who had the means to do so sold their houses in the city and fled to the suburbs, a migratory process known as "white flight." White flight had begun in the 1950s, spurred on by suburbanization. Whites who could afford it followed factory jobs as the latter relocated from the city center to the suburbs and surrounding small towns. But white outward migration peaked in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, migration spurred on not by job loss, but by racial fear.

According to the film, the assignment of mixed race children to the race that is considered subordinate or inferior is called __________. For black Americans in the United States, this process was also known as __________.

hypodescent; the one-drop rule Since its inception, blackness always had been defined through the "one-drop rule," which renders "black" anyone with any amount, no matter how minuscule, of African blood.

Spanish colonizers of the Americas encouraged miscegenation, while the United States government outlawed the practice for many years. What is miscegenation?

intermarriage between people with different skin tones Miscegenation is intermarriage and sexual intercourse between people with different skin tones.

In the film clip from Race: The Power of an Illusion, Historian James Horton states, "You give me the power, I can make you any race I want you to be." In the history of race in the United States, who has played the largest role in dictating racial categories, as we understand them today?

judges For most of American history, courts determined race, and race determined nationality; thus, nationality can be understood only within the context of U.S. racial and ethnic conflict

The film clip from Race: The Power of an Illusion explains that when an influx of eastern and southern European immigrants arrived in the United States at the start of the twentieth century, they were generally considered __________. According to the text, the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 changed their classification to _________

not white; white The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 would fundamentally realign the country's racial taxonomy. Historian Mae Ngai writes, "The national origins system classified Europeans as nationalities and assigned quotas in a hierarchy of desirability . . . but at the same time the law deemed all Europeans to be part of a white race, distinct from those considered to be not white".

The film clip from Race: The Power of an Illusion shows that racial classifications are based in part on the way we look (skin color, eye shape and color, hair texture and color, etc.). Which of the following terms from the text refers to these physical differences?

phenotype A person's phenotype is her or his physical appearance and constitution, including skeletal structure, height, hair texture, eye color, and skin tone. The symbolic category of race organizes people into bounded groupings based on their phenotype, ancestry, or both. It is difficult to say which matters more, phenotype or ancestry, in determining racial membership in the United States. In some settings, ancestry trumps phenotype. in others, the opposite is the case.

The clip from My Brooklyn documents redlining in some neighborhoods but not others. What was the result of this process of redlining?

racial residential segregation Lenders refused to offer mortgages and home loans in nonwhite neighborhoods through a discriminatory practice known as "redlining." The word derives its name from lenders' practice of taking a city map and drawing in red ink a border around nonwhite neighborhoods, marking them as too risky for loans or subsidies. Redlining was most consistently assigned by the government based on racial and ethnic makeup of the neighborhood.

The text offers some recommendations for how to address poverty on Native American reservations. Based on those recommendations, what would be the most effective way to address the problems of the Pima Indians?

supporting tribal sovereignty by restoring the Gila River to its original state Some American Indian tribes are beginning to overcome poverty that has riddled reservations since their inception. Much work, however, remains to be done. In the final analysis, the economic problems in Indian country are perhaps best confronted by political solutions (and not the "quick fix" of Indian gaming, despite all the glitter and controversy). Sociologists Stephen Cornell and Joseph Kalt argue, "Economic development on Indian reservations is first and foremost a political problem. . . . The best way to overcome reservation poverty is to support tribal sovereignty." In the case of the Pima, the best way to support tribal sovereignty would be to return the water to the tribe, allowing them to continue in their tradition of farming;

In the film clip from Race: The Power of an Illusion, Sociologist Melvin Oliver argues that "the things that we identify as the racial markers mean nothing unless they are given social meaning and unless there is public policy and private action that act upon those characteristics." Which of the following examples from the text best illustrates his argument?

Arabs and Indian Americans have been classified as "white" at some points in time and "not white" at other points. Examining how the legal definitions of white and nonwhite have changed over the years demonstrates the unstable and fluid nature of racial categories. Legal cases that determined people's race in order to determine their eligibility for U.S. citizenship had poisonous symbolic consequences. Deemed worthy of citizenship, white people were understood as being upstanding, law abiding, moral, and intelligent. Conversely, nonwhite people, from whom citizenship was withheld, were thought of as base, criminal, untrustworthy, and of lesser intelligence.

According to the text and the clip, which of the following statements best describes the majority of American Indian Reservations in the United States, including the Pima tribe in Arizona?

By and large, American Indian reservations are plagued by dire poverty, joblessness, and poor living conditions. since their creation, American Indian reservations have been wracked by extreme rural poverty. The median household income for American Indians on reservations is roughly 66 percent of the U.S. average, and the poverty rate is almost twice the national average.

According to the film clip and text, how were people of both black and white heritage classified in the slavery era?

By and large, people of white and black descent were considered black.