More Politics and Race (pols306) Midterming. Part 2.

Posted On 2021-04-20

Good God, did I proofread this thing at all? So many typos. Think I got a B on this midterm, I’m not entirely surprised why. Usually I’ll do a quick read of each paragraph before moving on to the next one, but some of these exams were done at the very (very) last minute. Had I started almost any of these just an hour sooner than I actually did, each would have probably been miles better… This is part 2 of 2, pages 7 thru 12.

Also seriously, the number of midnight due dates that were cleared by a single minute or two was pretty shameful.

3. Shaw et al. (2019) argue that the road to political incorporation for minority groups in American politics has been difficult in large part due to various policies of the American government that developed and perpetuated a White/Anglo advantage. Choose four of the policies (no court cases) they use as examples and explain the significance of each for minority social, political, and/or economic exclusion

After the Mexican-American War, large portions of land between the United States and the Pacific Ocean were owned by Mexicans. These people had been granted citizenship and property rights that would be “inviolably respected” by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo  (Shaw et al. 2019, pg. 131), but those rights were protected on a very selective basis by incoming white governors. Family holdings that could be backed by contemporary legal papers were often seized, and property taxes were frequently greater than what subsistence farming could cover. As wealth began to grow, the Mexican-American claim to that wealth was diminished in deed. Politically, the wealthier elite population would intermarry and produce offspring that would identify as White, further reducing communal influence. By the arrival of the 20th century industrial booms, Mexicans had come to be marginalized as an impoverished agrarian society.

The Page Act of 1875 was a piece of immigration legislation that paved the way for the building of a legal wall between the United States and (eventually) all Asian nations (Shaw et al. 2019, pg. 171). The seed for the process was a response to an influx of cheap Chinese laborers coming in through California. From a concern that these impoverished workers could be manipulated as intelligence agents, the law prevented the immigration of any Asian without their consent- a standard ambiguous enough to be applied as necessary.

The law would come to be supported by the more overtly-named Chinese Exclusion Act, but the intent and effect of both were of a piece (Shaw et al. 2019, pg. 173). By World War 1, the standard that had come to apply was that if someone would be unable to naturalize as a citizen, they would be barred from immigration. This interpretation effectively blocked Asians from establishing any extended communities in the country, and neutralized their political identity before it could form. Meanwhile, the law exempted the Western hemisphere- labor would remain available, but with no complications greater than the White-Black dynamic already in place.

In 1887, the US government sought to speed the assimilation of native populations with the passage of the General Allotment Act, or the Dawes Act (Shaw et al. 2019, pg. 60). The legislation allowed for native reservation lands to be parceled up for individual property use. Residences mixed whites and natives, and children were provided with a formal education. These were all outcomes that resonated among the paternalist white electorate, while helping to equalize a variable the government had long been unable to balance.

Ultimately, the purpose of the Act was to dismantle the connections between natives and their lands that were standing in the way of development. The success of the Act hobbled the native community’s ability to propagate its culture in a single generation. Children were indoctrinated into Western culture through boarding houses, natives were forced to live side-by-side with the very people who were the reason they had to live side-by-side with anyone, and what was left of their sovereign national holdings was reduced by two-thirds in the process (Shaw et al. 2019, pg. 60). Absent any path to citizenship and suffrage, native nations were all but erased as a barrier to White access.

Mired in the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt offered white Americans a New Deal. To other Americans he provided access to a better deal than was previously available, provided certain prerequisite conditions could be met. This is to say that improvements in living would become broadly available, but at the same time systemic inequities would become enshrined in official record. The influence of Confederate Southern Democrats would continue to steer national civil rights policy towards prioritizing White opportunities.

Perhaps most substantially among these differences was the refusal of the new Federal Housing Administration to finance the purchase of Black homes in White neighborhoods (Shaw et al. 2019, pg. 211). This forced clustering of races would come to substantially limit Black influence for decades. By limiting home sales, Black families were denied the equity that would support the growth of communal wealth and legislative influence. Kept by federal decree within existing Black communities, electoral districts could effectively contain dissenting voices while providing geographic credibility. While the New Deal was a key set of laws that helped the nation out of the Depression, it helped some more than others.

4. Brodkin (1998) argues that Jews “became” white folks. Explain what she means by this. What are the implications for racial, ethnic, and religious diversity in America?  For American democracy? Explain.

As urban societies in the late 1800s and early 1900s began to settle and stratify, stereotypes would eventually be codified into the growing library of scientific thought on the primacy of the different races. Early founding documents did not distinguish between Italian or Norwegian Whites, but the persistent economic differences clearly suggested that some Whites just weren’t measuring up. The application of a newly-devised “intelligence test” (Brodkin, 1998, pg. 276) would validate the perception that people from some regions possessed greater facility for achievement than others; that some Caucasians were in fact objectively superior to others. As the White race came to be accurately categorized, it became possible to see them as the ethnically diverse community they actually were. This in turn allowed for those less-favorable characteristics (personal habits, economic history) to be understood as less-favorable peoples. Less-“White” peoples.

This was the America of Brodkin’s parents, one in which her people were officially “less than” others of comparable appearance. She credits World War 2 for the set of transitions that enabled her to grow up as conscious of racism, but not as one of its more persistent victims. As a near-White people who’d suffered great losses in the war, Jews and other eastern Europeans represented cultures that White America could welcome back into the fold as beleaguered brothers. They could demonstrate a racial sensitivity beyond that of the brutish Reich, and return to more overt applications of bias. The GI Bill would further reinforce this ethic re-integration in its exclusion of Black applicants (Brodkin, 1998, pg. 278, Shaw et al. 2019, pg. 211). An early form of affirmative action that helped prop up former “lesser” Whites in favor of clear non-Whites, many Jewish families suddenly had access to family households in new middle-class neighborhoods. They had become “White”.

That becoming into Whiteness is illustrative of some logical fallacies in American democracy, as is the fall that preceded it. The science of anti-Semitism is as spurious as any other racial distinction, an intelligence test devised and applied with only limited fealty to scientific method. The restoration of the Jew however was not a function of science but preference. Scientific validation of racial illusions would not come until decades later. Thus we have a proof that science has been misapplied to the disadvantage of people and a proof that scientific truth can be overcome by a prevailing racial preference, both on top of the more contemporary genetic proof that we’re not quite so different after all.

The tale of Karen Brodkin’s ‘How Did Jews Become White Folks’ is one of choice. The choices of Whites to racialize themselves to support the racialization of others, the choices made in legislating to those preferences, and the choice made by the Jewish Americans to persist and see their fortunes become as attainable as anyone else’s. The White society is as susceptible to compassion as it is “science”, which is a lesson that becomes instructive in the present. With genetic science having eliminated the credibility of early science, the persistence of racial distinctions and their legislative outcomes comes down to a reality of people – of White people – who see what they choose.