In this course, we will explore the struggles and triumph "inbetween peoples" after Reconstruction and before WWII.
Reading Roediger in light of Bederman allowed me to see where Jack Johnson’s story fit into American society as a whole. The Chinese men were among the first to enter into interracial marriages because strict laws prohibited mass immigration of Chinese women. These Chinese men had relationships with African Americans, Poles and other immigrants. [...]
America has long been described as a melting pot of various cultures and ethnicities. An integral part of the American identity is the idea that America is a country of immigrants. As the French writer Crevecoeur once described America, the country he adopted as his homeland, “Here individuals of all nations are melted [...]
Roediger and Ngai are investigating the changing nature of the process of racialization, or racial categorization, in American history. They prove that “race” in America during the 19th and 20th centuries was anything but concrete; rather, it was an ever-changing concept, sometimes it was based on (supposedly) scientific explanations, other times based on understandings that [...]
The 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 [...]
In 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 [...]
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 [...]
As 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 [...]