MY STUDY GUIDE

What two ways does environmental racism disadvantage nonwhite rural communities, particularly those on American Indian reservations?

(1) American Indians living on reservations, which are not subject to stringent environmental regulations, are exposed to some of the worst air and water pollution in the country. (2) Poor rural black communities, especially those located in the Deep South, also have been sacrificed to house the nation's waste (e.g., fertilizers, gasoline, paints and plastics).

Origins of the Ghetto

-"Great Migration" of blacks from South to North -Neighborhoods exclude blacks -first originated in medieval Europe as an area of the city where Jews were cordoned off from the rest of the population. -first formed when blacks migrated north during the early twentieth century

Ghetto

-A set of neighborhoods that are exclusively inhabited by members of one group, within which virtually all members of that group in that particular city live.

What factors divided populations prior to the 16th century?

-Religion or locality -"Civilized versus uncivilized

What were the Civil Rights Movement organizations and tactics involved?

-The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was the dominant black protest organization that preceded the modern Civil Rights Movement. -the black church would serve as the institutional hub of the movement. -the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)— served as the key organization of the civil rights struggle, organized many mass demonstrations, marches, boycotts, and rallies -•The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) tested a new ruling that outlawed segregation in interstate bus terminals.

How did scientists and philosophers contribute to the notion of race?

1) Typologies, such as those proposed by Johann Blumenbach, presented distinct racial groups as fixed and immutable. (2) They also attached behavioral traits to physical characteristics, claiming, for example, that Europeans were naturally ingenious while Africans were naturally lazy. (3) Most harmfully, racial classifications justified racial inequality by suggesting that such inequality was a natural ordering of the world.

Redlining

A discriminatory real estate practice in North America in which members of minority groups are prevented from obtaining money to purchase homes or property in predominantly white neighborhoods.

Gentrification

A process of converting an urban neighborhood from a predominantly low-income renter-occupied area to a predominantly middle-class owner-occupied area.

Gerrymandering

A set of processes by which elected politicians redraw and manipulate the borders of political districts to secure political advantage.

Slavery

A system wherein workers are the property of their masters and are not paid for their labor.

Urban Renewal

After World War II, many nonwhite neighborhoods in major cities were destroyed to make way for highways or luxury homes.

Discuss the impact of European conquest of North American populations (i.e., American Indians).

After the English settled on North America, the American Indian population plummeted, while the non-Indian population soared.

Sundown towns

All-white towns excluding non-whites via discriminatory local laws, intimidation, and violence

Nonwhite Affirmative Action

An umbrella term referring to a collection of policies and practices designed to address past wrongs, institutional racism, and sexism by offering people of color and women both employment and educational opportunities.

How is race connected to capitalism?

Blackness became associated with bondage, inferiority, and social death; whiteness with freedom, superiority, and life.

What was the significance of the Bacon's Rebellion?

But in the decades following the rebellion, the majority of free Americans began to view white servants as people who could be assimilated into American citizenry and black servants as slaves for life.

A settlement located near agricultural fields consisting of dilapidated shacks, low-costing housing, and inhabited primarily by U.S. citizens and migrant farm workers is an example of a:

Colonia

How did capitalism change the way that people interacted?

Cooperative relations were transformed into relations based on exploitation and profit, Products were developed, to make profits.

What is one thing that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed?

Discrimination on the basis of race in restaurants

What is one consequence of environmental racism?

Disproportionally high rates of health problems such as cancer and lung disease.

What two factors contribute to many black and Latino families facing the burden of rising housing costs?

Exclusion from both well-paying jobs and the mortgage market

What is one factor that might complicate the assumption that the percentage of Hispanic voters will grow in direct proportion to their population growth?

Hispanics may increasingly consider themselves white, which would increase the percentage of white voters.

What is the significance of the fact that the Women's Political Council had first conceived of the Montgomery Mus Boycott and had been planning it for months?

In popular historical accounts, the faces of the Civil Rights Movement typically belong to men

How did the dominant groups involved respond?

In the mid-1960s, most white liberals joined their conservative counterparts in "a retreat from racial justice in American thought and policy."

Coded language

Indirect allusions to physical appearance, class upbringing, or sexual attractiveness; code words that give voice to dormant racialized dispositions (such as "welfare queen," "urban unrest," "illegal immigrants," "Islamic terrorists" ).

Who are "white ethnics"?

Irish and Polish Americans

Gentrification is a continuous issue in many cities throughout the United States. Based on the findings in the clip from My Brooklyn, we would conclude which of the following about gentrification in these other cites?

It is not an inevitable process, but is driven by political factors and government policy...

In 1920s and 1930s, why did some recent immigrants, such as Germans and Irish, leave the slum and assimilate into the American mainstream but others, such as the Chinese, did not?

Laws and customs, based on the "racial uniform" did not allow the Chinese to live anywhere else.

What 1930s government policy was known as the Mexican Repatriation Program?

Mexican families, including U.S. citizens, were rounded up and sent via train to Mexico.

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.

Affirmative Action

Policy measures designed to confront racialized economic inequality

The New Deal

President Franklin D. Roosevelt initiated several programs dealing with welfare, work, and war designed to uplift Americans.

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

Individualistic Fallacy

Racism assumed to belong to the realm of ideas and attitudes; racism is only the collection of nasty thoughts a "racist individual" has about another group.

Which of the following represents a symbolic cost of segregation?

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

What do ethnicities share?

Shared = culture, Beliefs (morals, religion, knowledge), Behaviors 9traditions, cuisine, dress, language), place of origin, sense of history, Acquired and transmissible (learned, taught) •Somewhat flexible (e.g., ethnic switching), Endogamous, exogamous

Institutional Racism:

Systemic white domination of people of color, embedded and operating in corporations, universities, legal systems, political bodies, cultural life, and other social collectives.

Civil rights movement

That collection of organizations and people who carried out political acts aimed at abolishing racial segregation, nonwhite disenfranchisement, and racial economic exploitation.

How is race connected to colonialism?

The Indian was invented within the context of European colonization, as indigenous peoples of the Americas were lumped together under one rubric to be uprooted and exploited.

Political Representation

The activity of integrating citizen perspectives and concerns in the public policy making process. Very few nonwhites are elected at the national, state, and local levels, resulting in the underrepresentation of nonwhite perspectives and concerns

Legalistic Fallacy

The assumption that abolishing racist laws (racism in principle) automatically leads to the abolition of racism in everyday life (racism in practice).

Fixed Fallacy

The assumption that racism is fixed, that it is immutable, constant across time and space, and that it does not develop in any way, often defining racism only by its most heinous forms, such as racial violence.

Tokenistic Fallacy

The assumption that the presence of people of color in influential positions is evidence of the complete eradication of racial obstacles.

Ahistorical Fallacy

The bold claim that most United States history, including the legacies of slavery and colonialism, is inconsequential today.

What served as the institutional hub of the Civil Rights Movement?

The church

principle-implementation gap

The discrepancy between the acceptance of racial inclusion in principle and the rejection of any policy measures designed to carry this out.

Intersectionality

The overlapping system of advantages and disadvantages, wherein racism intersects with other forms of domination, such as those based on gender, class, sexuality, religion, nationhood, ability, and so forth.

Racial Polarization

The process whereby a population is divided along racial lines. A relationship between the racial identity of a voter and the way in which the voter votes. For example, the American electorate is racially polarized: the majority of whites tilt toward the Republican Party while the majority of nonwhites support the Democratic Party

What is the invention of the Asian American?

The term "Asian" is a European invention, a kind of racial shorthand that subsumes under a single homogenizing category the peoples of China, Japan, Korea, India, Nepal.....) and peoples with immensely different and sometimes conflicting cultures, languages, and histories.

Segmented Assimilation Theory

There is no monolithic "immigrant experience" or natural sequence through which those fresh off the boat assimilate to American society. Rather, immigrants are absorbed into different segments of the American landscape. Some assimilate into the upper classes, some into the lower classes. The body of thought that explores these processes

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.

What was the purpose of the grandfather "clauses"?

They extended the right to vote to those whose relatives were enfranchised before the end of the Civil War, namely whites.

Who benefits from environmental racism?

Those that have enough wealth to live away from polluting sites

Disenfranchisement

To deprive a group or an individual of certain privileges. Practices, which often mirror, in a softer and shrewder form, techniques deployed by southern whites during the mid-twentieth century to deter voters and revoke voting rights among racial minorities, such as voter ID laws.

What was the name of the policy that prohibited voter discrimination, outlawed literacy tests, and gave the federal government power to oversee voter registration?

Voting Rights Act of 1965

The American Indian Movement attempted to organize against federal "Indian Termination" policies. What was the effect of these policies?

When tribes lost federal recognition, they also lost federal aid and land rights.

How is race connected to slavery?

Whiteness and blackness were invented as antipodes(opposites) within the context of English, and later American, slavery.

Naturalization

a metamorphosis where something created by humans is mistaken as something dictated by nature

Bacon's Rebellion

an uprising broke out in Jamestown, bonded laborers of African, English, and Irish descent rose up against wealthy plantation owners, as well as against the colonial government that supported worker exploitation.

environmental racism

any environmental policy, practice, or directive that disproportionately disadvantages (intentionally or unintentionally) nonwhite communities (American Indians)

Wealth

assets that make money (stocks, bonds, savings accounts, real estate, businesses, farms, etc.)

Educational consequences of segregation?

educational inequality

Racial segregation

enclaves are a result of ethnic and racial discrimination in housing.

Spatial assimilation thesis

enclaves are a starting point on the way to economic and cultural assimilation.

Emotional consequences of segregation?

feelings of anger and worthlessness

Cesar Chavez, one of the most important Mexican American activists, led the 1965 Delano grape strike. What was the purpose of this action?

gaining better wages for grape workers

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

spatial mismatch

holds that jobs that employed large numbers of semiskilled black workers—manufacturing jobs—were moved in large numbers from the central city to the suburbs at the end of the twentieth century.

Intersectionality Examples

implies that we can't understand the lives of poor white single mothers or gay black men by examining only one dimension of their lives—class, gender, race, or sexuality; no, we must explore their lives in their full complexity, examining how these various dimensions come together and structure their existence.

Miscegenation

intermarriage and sexual intercourse between people with different skin tones

Racial domination

is the arrangement of racial life in such a way that its ordinary, everyday workings serve to benefit certain racial groups (in our society, predominantly whites) at the expense of others (in our society, predominantly nonwhites).

White Privilege

is the collection of unearned cultural, political, economic, and social advantages and privileges possessed by people of Anglo-European descent or by those who pass as such.

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

loan denial to nonwhites

What does the normalization of racial domination produce?

many cultural, political, economic, and social advantages and privileges for white people and withholds such advantages and privileges from nonwhite people.

Nationality

membership in a specific politically delineated territory controlled by a government.

Great Migration

millions of southern African Americans moving north in search of better opportunities

Material consequences of segregation?

minorities are far from high-paying jobs and good schools

Political consequences of segregation?

minorities are ignored by political representatives

Income

money obtained from work, retirement, or government aid

Examples of symbolic violence

nearly worldwide acceptance of European standards of beauty

Colonias

neighborhoods with low-cost housing (shacks) that lack social services, medicine, and potable water.

Colonialism

occurs when a foreign power invades a territory and establishes enduring systems of exploitation and domination over that territory's indigenous populations.

Sociological imagination

one's ability to understand everyday life not through personal circumstances, but through the broader historical forces that structure and direct it

Whiteness

racial domination normalized

Interpersonal Racism

racial domination that manifests in our dispositions, interactions, and practices

White Flight

refers to a migratory process that began in the 1950s, where many whites, fearing racial integration, sold their houses in the city and fled to the suburbs.

Advanced marginality

refers to the severe spatial and social segregation of the ghetto's residents, marked by their amputation from America's economic prosperity, national security, collective imagination and memory, and state services

Symbolic consequences of segregation?

segregation gives the appearance that racial divisions are natural

Ethnicity

shared lifestyle informed by cultural, historical, religious, and/or national affiliations

Ethnic community thesis

some individuals prefer to live among people who eat the same food, celebrate the same holidays, and speak the same language they do.

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

sundown towns

Similar to poor blacks living in urban ghettos, poor whites living in rural trailer parks often suffer from what?

the "blemish of place"

Facing high levels of environmental hazards, being isolated from economic opportunities, neglected by political leaders, and feeling stigmatized by a "blemish of place" are common exercise by residents of what two types of neighborhoods?

the ghetto and poor, rural white areas

Meritocracy

the notion that one succeeds only on the basis of her or his own abilities

Symbolic Violence

the process of people of color unknowingly accepting and supporting the terms of their own domination

glass ceiling

unspoken obstacles to advancement

Economic consequences of segregation?

wealth inequality

The G.I. Bill

which helped millions of veterans buy homes, go to college, and obtain unemployment insurance, was not equally available to veterans of color, forged the American middle class