Soc 301 Race in America

In what ways did housing segregation help reinforce racial inequality in the middle of the twentieth century?

Blacks had lower wages than whites but higher average rent, making it difficult to accumulate wealth.

Historical accounts that gloss over the atrocity of slavery in the United States and focus on stories of hardworking immigrants, while downplaying anti-immigrant violence, are examples of _______ because they silence the voices of nonwhites.

Eurocentric curriculum

According to the textbook, what is one political consequence of being imprisoned?

In many states, felons lose the right to vote.

Which of the following best describes the legal strategy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP's) campaign to end school segregation?

It challenged that segregated schools were in fact not equal.

Which of the following factors contributed to the Great Migration?

Job shortages in the South due to a decline in the price of cotton; job vacancies in the North due to a decrease in European immigration

As the children of Jewish shopkeepers assimilated into whiteness and took leave of their families' shops in the inner city, what immigrant group has often stepped in to take their place, particularly in black ghettos?

Koreans

How did the white public justify the existence of lynch mobs?

Lynch mobs supposedly kept white women safe from black male rapists.

Why is interracial conflict between blacks and Koreans so high today?

Many poor blacks feel that Korean entrepreneurs have taken their jobs.

In what way does whiteness impact the field of anthropology?

Marginalized populations are treated as exotic objects of study

Beginning in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, politicians began focusing on crime as the main problem plaguing America, even though most Americans did not view it as a major problem. Why did they do this?

Politicians wanted to take the energy out of the Civil Rights Movement.

What makes some comedy fit into the racist aesthetic and other comedy fit into the antiracist aesthetic?

Racist comedy relies on stereotypes; antiracist comedy uses humor to break down stereotypes.

Which is a central reason that America's prison population multiplied so quickly?

Sentences for crimes grew much more severe over time.

While police have unjustly used deadly force against African Americans, the author cautions us from simply blaming "racist" police and demanding their resignation. Which argument do the authors use to support their position?

Simply attacking the police as racists ignores our complicity in a system that facilitates racially motivated violence.

Which of the following has been identified as a potential problem for the efficacy of affirmative action policies?

Sociologist William Julius Wilson argues that minority students from the most privileged families reap the lion's share of the benefits afforded by affirmative action.

What is one way that racism is embedded in the structure of schools, as described in the textbook?

Students are tracked such that whites and Asians have disproportionate access to the most intellectually stimulating classes.

Consider a stage performance where a group of black and white performers enact a scene with slaves and their masters. Which of the following characteristics would make this an example of "minstrelsy"?

The actors playing the roles of black characters are white.

What were the aims of U.S. government relocation programs targeted at Native Americans following World War II?

The government wanted to move Native Americans to urban centers to advance assimilation and tribal dissolution.

What was the impact of the University of California's ban on race-conscious admissions?

The percentage of black first-year students decreased by 50 percent in one year.

How did vagabond laws operate to control and confine nonwhites?

They transformed those who were poor into criminals, and sent them to jail or hard labor camps for begging.

Why might African American artists sometimes reject the blues played by white artists like Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones?

White artists' blues disconnects the music from the social conditions in which the original blues music was grounded

Which demographic group commits the majority of school shootings within the United States?

White males

While books that are often held up as classics in the U.S. educational system—such as Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn—are widely regarded as being universally applicable, books by nonwhites—such as Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings—are often considered

a particular, less universal perspective.

Sociologist Annette Lareau, author of Unequal Childhoods, argues that class differences in parenting

are mostly about language, attitudes, and behaviors.

Which of the following is an example of present-day minstrelsy?

auto-tuned YouTube videos of poor blacks speaking to news crews

In many U.S. classroom settings, students of color are often dubbed the "experts" on race, a practice that exemplifies

biases that ask students of color to speak for an entire population.

What is one way that progressive intellectual movements, such as feminism, are dominated by a white framework?

by attempting to speak for women of color

What was the primary objective of boarding schools for American Indians?

force them to assimilate into Anglo-American society and culture

What proportion of the crime drop in the 1990s would have occurred even without the prison boom?

nine-tenths

Which features of affirmative action do most Americans overestimate?

prevalence and power

Towns that hung signs reading "Whites Only within City Limits after Dark" were known as

sundown towns.

The symphony orchestra, as a cultural organization, is an example of

the institutionalization of artistic divisions between highbrow and lowbrow culture.

As a style of music, the blues evolved from spirituals in response to

the racial domination of African Americans by whites

Between 1925 and 1975, the prison population remained the same, fluctuating between 100,000 and 200,000 prisoners. By 2000, the prison population reached what number?

1,400,000

The history of northern cities, such as Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Gary, illustrate important changes in the racial composition of their neighborhoods. Current segregation measures in these cities reach ________ percent.

80 to 90

Civil rights advocates promoted "open housing" and an end to legalized housing discrimination. Which of the following pieces of legislation put this into law?

Civil Rights Act of 1968

What were the findings of audit studies conducted by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development about racial discrimination in housing?

High levels of housing discrimination are still experienced by blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans.

Consider these two scenarios: First, a corporate executive ignores environmental regulations and dumps chemicals near a city's water supply, which results in three deaths. The executive is fired but does not face a criminal trial. Second, a man robs a convenience store and, while trying to escape, he hits a car and kills three people. The man serves 20 years in jail. What do these differences tell us about criminalization processes?

How we define crime is connected to systems of power.

After George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin in 2012, the police did not arrest him because of the Stand Your Ground law. What was the supposed purpose of this law?

It gave people the right to defend themselves against someone they perceived as a threat.

Which of the following is true regarding the characteristics of the prison population in the United States?

Most women in state prisons are mothers.

Which of the following represents a symbolic cost of segregation?

Segregation creates the appearance that racial divisions are real, natural, and unchanging.

Which of the following is an example of how whiteness is normalized in the educational curriculum, as opposed to education through a multicultural perspective?

The experiences of Americans of European descent are central to our knowledge of American history.

A researcher is interested in testing why incarceration rates have gone up in her state and why there is such a racial disparity in the prison population, with African American and Latino men especially likely to be incarcerated. Using findings from past work, she should expect which factor to be a central explanation?

The increase in drug arrests that were more prevalent for blacks and Latinos.

According to sociologist Georg Simmel, what happens when lower classes begin to copy the fashions of the upper class?

The upper class abandons the style and finds something new.

What does Massey's spatial assimilation thesis say about ethnic enclaves?

They are used by new immigrants to get economically established and improve their English skills before moving to a place with a higher standard of living.

What is one way antiracist art responds to the racist aesthetic?

correcting distorted representations of nonwhites

What is narrowcasting?

creating television shows designed to target specific racial or ethnic groups

What is the sociological term that refers to the sum of one's knowledge about established and valued cultural activities and practices?

cultural capital

In an hour-long television drama about the "typical American high school," you observe that only one person of color appears on the screen. Noticing how this show fails to treat the experiences of people of color as central to the American experience is to

detect the white aesthetic in art.

Tiffany, who is white, often uses GIFs of NeNe Leakes (who is a black television personality from The Real Housewives of Atlanta) to portray over-the-top reactions when she is texting with her friends. This is an example of

digital blackface

What is one consequence of environmental racism?

disproportionately high rates of health problems such as cancer and lung disease

Which of the following life experiences has been linked to job loss, depression, residential instability, relocation to poorer, more violent neighborhoods, and is twice as likely to happen to women as men?

eviction

Research shows that students of color are more likely to experience _______ in college classrooms compared to their white peers.

harassment and feelings of being unwelcome

There are many different art forms in the aesthetic field. Which of these art forms offers the most powerful voice for racial justice today, according to the authors?

hip-hop

An art museum recently decreased the price of admission, instituted admission-free Sundays, and offered free art education classes at a nearby low-income public school. These efforts can help the museum to

increase attendance among the poor and working class

A graduate student is studying rates of crime in immigrant neighborhoods and is using Jane Jacob's concept of "eyes upon the street." Accordingly, he should focus on

informal social control in immigrant neighborhoods that keeps residents mindful of criminal activity.

The reason that stereotype threat can affect one's performance on tasks is that

it triggers the person's anxiety that they will do poorly and thus confirm a negative stereotype of their group.

What is one way the Federal Housing Administration contributed to the exclusion of nonwhites from the private housing market?

loan denial to nonwhites

Contrary to popular belief, social-scientific evidence has shown that immigrants

make America safer.

Between 1983 and 2001, the imprisonment rate in the United States drastically increased from 275 per 100,000 to 686 per 100,000 people. Blacks and Hispanics are only 25 percent of the total U.S. population, but account for 58 percent of all prisoners. These two facts are indicative of what sociological concept?

mass incarceration

In An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal argued that school segregation was furthered by which group's sense of status competition?

poor whites

In most U.S. public universities, the fact that Muslim students are required to attend classes during Ramadan is an example of

privileging the history, culture, and needs of certain groups over others.

Which of the following suggestions do the textbook authors provide as a potential way to encourage equity in secondary education?

provide incentives for highly-experienced teachers with the best qualifications to teach in disadvantaged schools

Norman Rockwell's paintings and country music songs that reminisce over the "good old days" are examples of what concept?

racial nostalgia

A banker that refused to give financially qualified buyers a mortgage because their desired home was in a nonwhite area marked as too risky for a loan was engaged in what discriminatory practice?

redlining

Familism is a variant of _______ having to do with one's attachment to, and reliance on, family-based relationships.

social capital

W.E.B. Du Bois sharply criticized Booker T. Washington's "Atlanta Compromise," arguing that it did not oppose white supremacy but instead perpetuated

symbolic violence.

The U.S. government program that ran from 1942 through 1964 to recruit Mexican nationals for agricultural work, sometimes referred to as "legalized slavery," was called

the Bracero program.

Allison, a young African American mother of three, wants to move out of her predominantly black neighborhood because, as she tells people, "it is safer to raise my children in the suburbs." Allison's notions about her neighborhood's safety are not supported by arrest rates for her current neighborhood versus the suburb where she desires to move, where violent crime is 30 percent more likely. Allison's reactions demonstrate

the fear of crime stemming from racial stereotypes does not just impact whites, as people in the stereotyped racial and ethnic groups can internalize the fears as well.

Treating whiteness as the universal default category is an example of

the white aesthetic

Confederate statues are an example of

the white aesthetic expressed through racial nostalgia.

An increase in double-eyelid surgeries by Asian Americans is an example of an outcome from the internalization of

the white aesthetic.

Your textbook mentions films like Django Unchained, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Help, and The Matrix. What common movie theme do these films present?

the white savior theme

In the early to mid-twentieth century, federal law encouraged racial segregation because

they feared that integrated neighborhoods would drive down property values.

A nonwhite community that was destroyed by city planners in order to make room for the construction of a highway is an example of how ________ affected housing opportunities in the mid-twentieth century.

urban renewal

A researcher notes that whites are wealthier on average than nonwhites, and that racial segregation might therefore be mainly caused by class inequality. To test this theory, the researcher should assess

whether racial segregation is lower among those with higher income.

A large number of whites moving from New York City into the whites-only suburb of Levittown on Long Island following World War II is an example of

white flight.

Which kind of crime grosses between $300 billion and $660 billion each year?

white-collar

In 2008, Bernie Madoff, a former Wall Street broker, committed an elaborate Ponzi scheme and was found guilty of making fraudulent investments totaling over $60 billion. What is this type of crime called?

white-collar crime

When comparing white-collar and violent street crime, we might conclude based on evidence in this chapter that

white-collar crimes potentially damage society as much or more than violent street crimes because they cost society billions of dollars per year and even result in more deaths and injuries.

Representations of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra as a white woman by neoclassical American and European sculptors are an example of

whites dominating images of beauty.