Sociology 4949: Reading Guide

Takaki, chapter 1. Where did the title of the book come from, and what does Takaki see as unique in his treatment of the history of major race and ethnic groups in the United States? How does he support his contention that establishment scholars have treated the ethnic history of America too narrowly?

Takaki, chapter 2. How does Takaki use Shakespeare's play in this chapter? How does he compare and contrast English treatment of the indigenous people in Ireland, Virginia, and New England? How does he explain the differences in attitudes toward Indians in New England and Virginia? What kind of Indian policy is advocated by the young Virgina politician Thomas Jefferson?

Takaki, chapter 3. Why does slavery develop in Virginia and not the New England (the Massachusetts Bay Colony)? Why is there a shift landowners' dependence on indentured servants, mostly white, to dependence on black slaves? What was the Bacon rebellion, and why were its white participants eventually treated so differently from its black participants? Who are "the giddy mutlitude?" What was Jefferson's attitude toward slavery?

Takaki, chapter 4. What was the background to President Andrew Jackson's policies of Indian removal beyond the Mississippi? How did his policies accord with federal law and with court decisions? How was the allotment strategy applied to the situations of the Choctaws? How were the Cherokees made to agree to give up their lands by treaty? What happened to Indians who had been guaranteed long-term sanctuary in these lands beyond the Mississippi?

Takaki, chapter 9. How and why have American policies toward Indians fluctuated so dramatically over the years, especially in relation to the issue of culture ("why can't they be like us?")? What are the basic sources of conflict between Inidian nations and white American society? Why have American Indian cultures been so resistant to assimilation

Rodriguez/Guzman. How is race defined in Puerto Rico compared with the mainland United States? How does this difference manifest itself in the response by New York Puerto Ricans to census questions about race? What are some of the reasons for the differences?

Omi/Winant: How was it that differences among groups in the colonial United States came to be racialized? When did the idea of "white" appear in the American colonies, and how did it become part of the strategy of European immigrant groups in the late 19th and early 20th century to differentiate themselves from black and Asian workers? What is the rule of hypo-descent, and how does it figure in the racialization process? Why do the authors reject both the idea of race as an essence and of race as mere illusion? What is their alternative?

Takaki, chapter 5. What was the attitude toward and treatment of free blacks in the North in the nineteenth century? How about the treatment of slaves in the South, where they constituted 35% of the total population on the eve of the Civil War? Where did the Sambo stereotype come from and what function did it serve for white Southerners? Be aware of the contrasting stories of Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany. After the civil war, why did the freed ex-slaves receive no land and what were the consequences?

Takaki, chapter 6. What were the conditions of Irish life in the mid-19th century that led a greater proportion of the Irish to emigrate to America than any other European country? What was the relative role of the potato famine? commercialization of agriculture? English colonial policy? What kind of jobs did the Irish find as they arrived in America? Why did the Irish initially compare their status to that of black and later reject that identification and take a leading role in events like the 1863 anti-black riot in New york City? Why were so many Irish girls and women drawn into domestic service once they arrived in the United States? How did the second generation of Irish (those born in the U.S.) improve their position? What was the Irish role in the creation of a unionized white working class?

Takaki, chapter 11. What were the forces driving the emigration of Jews from eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century? What were some of the restrictions on their lives within the shtlel? What were the main sources of anti-Semitism both in Europe and the United States? What kinds of work were open to Jews arriving in the United States in the early 20th century, and more generally, what kind of reception did they get in the big cities of the east coast, especially New York City? What was the role of women in the Jewish immigrant community?

Waldinger: What has been the predominant sociological view of how immigrant groups would be assimilated into American society (as summed up by Milton Gordon)? What is Waldinger's alternative view of how assimilation takes place? How did the groups treated by Waldinger (Irish, Jews, Blacks, and Koreans) compete for upward mobility in New York City, and at what points did their struggle for upward mobility bring them into conflict with one another? What are the parallels between Waldinger's analysis of Korean-Black conflicts and the treatment of the same issue in "LA is Burning?

Blumer, "Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position." How does Blumer differentiate his view of prejudice from the view that studies prejudice primarily at the level of individuals. What are the four types of feelings that are typically part of race prejudice in the dominant group. How are these prejudices created, and why are they resistant to first-hand contact with the subordinate group?

Schuman et al, "The Compexity of Race Relations." What are the ways in which American race relations have changed for the better since the 1940s and 1950s? In what ways have our norms about the treatment of minorities changed? How do the authors account for the fact that many Americans don't support government action to help integrate neighborhoods, whether it involves the movement of blacks into a white neighborhood, Japanese-Americans into a white neighborhood, or Jews into a Christian neighborhood? More generally, what do these researchers find about the willingness of the white majority to see government action to improve the condition of minority groups? And how do they explain the prevailing norms?

Takaki, chapter seven, " Foreigners in their Land: Manifest Destiny in the Southwest." How did what is now California become part of Mexico, and what kind of social system confronted the first significant numbers of American foreigners to arrive there? How about what is now Texas? How did slavery become an issue, and what finally led to war between the United States and Mexico? How did American soldiers comport themselves during that war and what was the outcome? Notice the elements of what we would later call ethnic cleansing, in terms not only of killing but of rape and intimidation (see Ulysses Grant's letter, p.175). How did Anglos come to dominate the political decision-making places in places like California and Texas, even though Mexicans were also granted suffrage? And what did that mean in terms of land ownership, taxes, and the development of a racially stratified labor force? Finally how did a tradition of labor protest develop and who were the mutualistas?

Kozol, "Savage Inequalities." What are the most "savage inequalities" that differentiate conditions at schools like New York City's PS 261 and PS 79 in the North Bronx, compared with PS 24 in Riverdale? How does it happen that the minority of Black and Hispanic children who attend PS 24 end up in the EMR (educable mentally retarded) and TMR (trainable mentally retarded) classes? What does Kozol seem to think of the principal's explanation that most of these kids are neurologically damaged? What about the racial makeup in PS 24's gifted track? Besides the better facilities and teachers, what other advantages do the kids attending PS 24 tend to have? How does a report by the Community Service Society characterize the schools that tend to get the least resources in the NYC school system?

Feagin, "The Continuing Significance of Race: Antiblack Discrimination in Public Places." What is the research basis for this article? What does Feagin make of the charge by some white observers that middle-class blacks tend to be overly paranoid about white discrimination, that it's just a matter of a few isolated incidents? What are the two fundamental strategies middle class black Americans use in the face of discriimination, and how do they choose between the two strategies? What about turning to the police for assistance in these situations?

Takaki, chapter eight, "Searching for Gold Mountain." Why were most of the 19th century immigrants from China men, and the relatively few women often brought over as prostitutes? What consequences did that have for the kind of life created in the early Chinatowns in the U.S.? What kind of work was open to Chinese immigrants, and why were they at such a disadvantage when it came to organizing unions or pursuing their rights in American courts? When and why were the Chinese eventually excluded altogether from immigration?

Takaki, chapter 10, "Pacific Crossings." Why did Japanese immigration to Hawaii and the United States include so much higher a proportion of women than Chinese immigration had included, and what were the consequences of this difference? How did employers in Hawaii try to use diversity of the work force to divide workers and prevent higher wages and unionization? How did "pidgin English" develop and what role did it play in developing a national Hawaiian identity? Why was there so much more anti-Japanese sentiment in California than in Hawaii, and why did so many Japanese on the west coast of the United States become farmers? How did it happen that Japanese were eventually prohibited from owning land, obtaining citizenship, and eventually even from immigrating?

Epiritu, "Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities." What is panethnicity and what were the barriers to panethnicity among Asian immigrants in the United States prior to the mid-20th century? Where and why did a strong Asian American panethnic movement develop, and what were the changes that allowed the movement to be successful?

Takaki, chapter 12, "El Norte: the Borderland of Chicano America" What were the push and pull factors that led to a rapid growth in the Mexican population of the Southwest from 1900-1930? What kind of jobs were these immigrants finding, and why did they make so little headway with unionization? What parallels do you see between Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the Southwest and African Americans in the south, in terms of racial etiquette, segregated schools, and the like? What is the evidence that Mexicans were perceived as a race (and an inferior one at that) during these years? What was the nature and scope of the "repatriation" in the 1930s? How was Mexican culture preserved in the barrios, and what was assistencia?

Cole, "The Color of Punishment." How have minorities, and especially blacks, been affected by the War on Crimes, including disparities between the treatment of crack and cocaine, along with three strikes (or even two strikes) laws? How do black/white ifferentials in arrest and imprisonment for drug offenses compare with the government's own estimates of black/white disparities in illegal rug use? Why does the author think "Three Strikes" laws have been so popular with the general public and with politicians (Democrats and Republicans alike)? How did the country respond when an illegal drug, marijuana, began to be widely used by middle and upper middle class white youth?

Massey, "Residential Segregation and Neighborhood Conditions in U.S. Metropolitan Areas." " In the first half of this article, which I have removed from the reading list, Massey painstakingly documents that in the period from 1900 to 1960, as blacks moved out of the South, they experienced an increasingly high degree of segregation, and that after a peak in the 1960s, there's been minor improvement in some areas but other areas have actually gotten worse. Hispanics also experienced segregation during this period, but always at a milder level and things have improved in the last twenty years, except that in some cities with very high levels of Hispanic population (Brownsville, Texas, for example) the isolation index is high simply because the vast majority of the population is Hispanic. Similarly, they document trends in segregation affecting Asian Americans and Asian immigrants, and again although some cities have enclaves that are heavily Asian, "the largest and most segregated Asian communities in the United States are much less isolated than the most integrated black communities." Massey refers to earlier work he carried out with Nancy Denton, in which they established an index of hypersegregation, in which communities scoring high on at least four of five segregation dimensions were labeled as hypersegregated. Massey and Denton identified sixteen large metropolitan areas in which blacks experienced hypersegregation, and in more recent work (1994) identified six more. On the other hand, neither Hispanics nor Asians were hypersegregated in even a single metropolitan area. That brings us to the beginning of your reading assignment, starting with "Explaining the Persistence of Racial Segregation"(page 363) and continuing to the end of the article. How does Massey establish that it is not black preference to live primarily with other blacks, and how does he demonstrate white opposition to integrated housing? How do these preferences and prejudices interact to produce the pattern labeled hypersegregation? How are blacks excluded from white areas? What is the role of realtors and banks? How is ongoing discrimination documented? What is "steering" and what role does it play? Some Hispanics also experience a great deal of housing discrimination; what are their characteristics? What is the net effect, in terms of concentrated poverty, and what are the negative side-effects of living in areas of concentrated poverty? What does Massey think must be done to eliminate this pattern of hypersegregation and concentrated poverty?

DeSena, "Local Gatekeeping Practices and Residential Segregation." How does this micro study of one community show the ways in which Hispanic residents (mostly Puerto Rican) are kept out of the better white neighborhoods? What is the role of neighborhood women in the whole process, and how are landlords and homebuyers pressured and sanctioned if they fall out of line with local norms about racial exclusion? How does the racial exclusion theme play out in the local church and in local politics?

Takaki, chapter 13, "To the Promised Land: Blacks in the Urban North" What were the pushes and pulls that drove the "Great Migration" of blacks out of the rural South into the north, east, and west beginning in the early 20th century? What kind of jobs did they initially find, and when did they begin to move into factory work on a large scale? How and why did population density become so intense in black neighborhoods of cities like Chicago and New York? Who was Langston Hughes and what was his role in what became known as the Harlem Renaissance? How were blacks in urban areas affected by the Great Depression, and how did they come to play an important role in the CIO union organizing campaigns of the 1930s?

Takaki, chapter 14: "Through a Glass Darkly." How did World War II affect minority groups and race relations in the U.S? What was the impact of the war economy? Participation in the military? Why were the Chinese exclusion laws lifted? Why were Japanese Americans who lived on the West Coast put in internship camps, while the even larger number who lived in Hawaii were not? What was the thinking behind the planned March on Washington by black Americans, and why didn't it happen? What were the ways in which America moved to repudiate legalized racial discrimination in the period following World War II?

Neckerman/Kirchenman: "We'd Love to Hire them But...The Meaning of Race for employers." What was the Chicago Employer Study, and what did it show about the way in which employers recruit their initial job applicant pool? What about the interview process--why were inner city blacks disadvantaged here, and did the authors see it as reflecting any significant degree of prejudice? What did they see as the effects of skills testing?

Waters, "Ethnic and Racial Identities of Second-Generation Black Immigrants in New York City." First generation immigrants from the Caribbean, says Waters, have found it useful to distance themselves from American blacks. Their children tend to pursue or fall into three distinct strategies. Be able to distinguish these three strategies: a black American identity(42%), a strong ethnic identity as Jamaican or West Indian (30%), or an immigrant identity (28%). What are the the factors that incline the second generation to one or another of the strategies, and what are the likely consequences of each identity? What makes this whole system incline toward a self-fultfilling prophecy?

Wu: "The Changing Face of America: Intermarriage and the Mixed Race Movement." What has been the history of American attitudes toward mixed race marriages? How are those attitudes changing? How does Wu think the trends in intermarriage are likely to affect our overall systems of prejudice in the United States? What is the significance of his rather prolonged treatment of Tiger Woods and Keanau Reeves? What is the mixed race movement, why does the author seems skeptical of that movement, and what does he think could be a positive result?

Gallagher, "Color Blind Privilege: The Social and Political Functions of Erasing the Color Line in Post-Race America." What does Gallagher see as the dominant lens through which many white Americans understand contemporary race relations? What is the empirical (research) basis of his article? What are the factors that support many whites in what Gallagher calls "the new color blind ideology?" What does it do for whites to believe that race privilege has ended? Does Gallagher make an effective case that color blindness is not the opposite of racism but another form (as he quotes Leslie Carr to say)?

Gans, "The Possibility of a New Racial Hierarchy in the Twenty-First Century in the United States." What leads Gans to see the possibility that the United States' current multi-racial hierarchy might be replaced by a dual hierarchy emphasizing primarily the black/nonblack distinction, with a residual category for groups not yet placed as black or nonblack? What is the historical basis for this expectation, in terms of first the Irish and later the immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe? Where does he think Asians and Latinos are apt to be placed in this dual hierarchy? Why does he find it useful to speculate about alternate futures for the United States, given that he makes no real claims about prediction? And finally, what is his theory about the conditions under which a society is apt to dramatically reconstruct its racial categories (he lays this out explicitly in the "Conclusion."

Gallagher, "Ten Simple Things You can do to Improve Race Relations." NO STUDY GUIDE NEEDED.