In the first three chapters of Manliness and Civilization, Bederman details different uses of power and how they define or attack the evolution of white male civilization.
I was particularly interested in the section about the Chicago World’s Fair because Bederman presents a different opinion than what we discussed after reading The Devil in [...]
Archive for September, 2007
A Different View
Monday, September 10th, 2007The standard classification of white against non-white goes far beyond just black versus white. Roediger and Ngai discuss the different methods along with the different reasons of classifications. Even more interesting are the attitudes of immigrants towards their own classifications and where they believe they should rest on the [...]
Beginning with Roediger, I was struck by two observations: 1) how similarly racial laws, prejudices, and “scientific” knowledge resound with current debates about homosexuality and 2) how inextricably race and class were intertwined.
As for the first observance, I was shocked when Roediger commented that even northern settlement houses practiced Jim Crow (Roediger, 150). I remember [...]
Mae Ngai’s article explores the mostly unsuccessful attempts of the American government, specifically Joseph Hill and his Immigration Quota Board, to create a categorical form of reference with which Congress and Herbert Hoover could control the seemingly uncontrollable flux of immigrants which had begun in the late 19th century and had continued until the mid-1920’s. [...]
The manipulated categories of “whiteness” and “racial unassimilability”
Monday, September 10th, 2007In the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, despite the widespread confusion over the definitions of race and whiteness, it seems that at least one fact was generally agreed upon: Asians, Africans, and everyone else non-European were not—and could never be—fully American. Convinced that non-whites would forever be “perpetual foreigners” in America, white [...]
In his book Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past, David Roediger examines the unique process of Americanization for immigrants coming to the United States at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth. These immigrants, generally from Southern and Eastern Europe, had to define themselves as American through more [...]
Both the Roediger and Ngai articles prove the dynamic quality of the process of racial formation by demonstrating the ongoing construction of the definition of race in the United States. A particular emphasis is placed by both authors on how this constantly changing definition has affected immigration and the assimilation of cultures into the American [...]
Reading Roediger and Ngai made me realize how much race extended beyond black and white benchmarks. While I was aware that the Irish Diaspora that took place between 1845 and 1855 was not met favorably in the United States, I was not aware of the extent to which place of origin and slight variations [...]
Roediger ans Mgai
Monday, September 10th, 2007As Roediger warned at the foretold early in his article “Inbetween Peoples”, American history does not follow any single concrete definition of race. I was surprised to learn through Roediger and Mgai’s articles that 19th and 20th century racism extended far beyond just black and white. Race alone was the ultimate determining factor [...]
Race, nationality and personal identity are flexible labels, taking different meanings at different moments in history. Mae Ngai’s article on the development of quotas in the wake of the Immigration Act of 1924 demonstrates the inherent difficulty of assigning labels to different individuals and groups. The legislators and census takers of this era [...]