ac39901926

Poll #2

Question #1

What Percentage of Americans Believe Arab-Americans Should Be Subject to Extra Security Checks in Major Airports?

Gallup Poll Says 58%

AC 399 Results

60-100% 36/51 71%

40-60% 7/51 14%

0-40% 8/51 15%

Question #2

What Percentage of Americans Believe that Arab-Americans Should Be Required to Carry Special Identification Cards

Gallup Poll Says 48%

AC 399 Results

60-100% 17/50 34%

40-60% 17/50 34%

0-40% 16/50 32%

What Would You Do?

Do Nothing 19 37%

Concerned 28 55%

No Response 4 8%

Of the 28 who expressed concern

Feel Nervous, But Do Nothing 9 18%

Pray or Hope 8 16%

Stare or Make Conversation 4 8%

Leave or Contact Authorities 5 10%

Don’t Know 2 3%

Outline I

Beverly Tatum and Racial Profiling

Writing the Narrative of American Slavery and Conquest

Whiteness and American Identity

What is Racial Profiling?

Using Perceived Membership in a Group as "Probable Cause"

Tatum’s Definition of Prejudice: "A Preconceived Judgment Based on Limited Information." (page 5)

Prejudice: The Ascribing of Characteristics to a Group Based on the Actions of a Few

Are Prejudice and Racism the Same Thing?

Ideological Definition of Racism: Belief in the Inferiority or Superiority of a Given Race

Definition that Ascribes Racism Solely to Dominant (i.e. Not Subordinate) Groups: Prejudice + Power = Racism. In other words, prejudice only rises to the level of racism if, and only if, the prejudicial person belongs to a dominant racial group. Tatum rejects this definition because, she argues, most whites do not experience themselves as being able to exercis power over people of color. In stead, she offers the following:

A System of Advantage Based on Race. By this definition, all whites in the U.S. who benefit from white privilege are, at a minimum, guilty of "passive" racism, while active racists are those who actively seek to preserve and extend the advantages of racism (by seeking to maintain an all-white neighborhood, the superiority of white facial features, etc.

Writing the Narrative of American Slavery and Conquest: Minor Blemishes or the Real Story of American History?

Outline II

Manifest Destiny

The Market Revolution

Cotton and Slavery

The Importance of the Western Frontier

Manifest Destiny

An Uninhabited Continent: Building an Agrarian Democracy on the American Frontier: Was Jefferson an grarian democratic or agrarian imperialist? He viewed North America as an empty continent that could allow widespread property-ownership, guaranteeing economic independence for white men and preventing intra-racial class conflict. He saw landownership and rural life as the basis for democracy. Of course, widespread landownership was based on expropriation of lands from Indians. But Jefferson believed in America’s manifest destiny-- as an ideal society, the nation had the right and responsibility to expand to fill uninhabited continent and to encourage other societies to mimic ours. This view justified the Louisiana purchase from France, the claim to thousands of square miles in the heart of the continent that were inhabited solely by Indian nations. He was thus planting the American way of life on a virgin continent.

Establishing Anglo-Saxon (White Man’s) Rule

What About Settled Indians? Viewed Indians as his "children." Jefferson’s belief in manifest destiny and superiority of Euro-American cultural practices led him to offer Indians choice of civilization (assimilation to Euro-American farming practices and American citizenship) or extermination. In order to survive, they must give up claim to sovergneity over their lands.

What About Slavery?: How could Jefferson and the other revolutionary planters of Virginia justify their maintenance of slavery even as they proclaimed liberty as a natural right? As a political theorist, Thomas Jefferson advocated gradual abolition of slavery, a gradual abolition it was necessary to protect planter investment. he opposed slavery because of its impact on masters, not out of concern for natural rights of slaves. He did not believe slaves were capable of American citizenship; they lacked necessary capacity for reason. He therefore argued that freed slaves should be removed from the country. More importantly Jefferson was a willing slaveholder, willing to make 10 year olds to work in a nail factory 12 hours per day. Jefferson actively managed the life and labor of his slaves. For example, he criticized overseers for overworking pregnant slaves, arguing that greater profits could be made from their healthy progeny than from their labor.

The Market Revolution

Cotton and Slavery:

Both slavery and racism were both well established by the time that Dutch slave ship arrived in Jamestown in 1617. Despite differences in timing, the development of plantation agriculture based on African slave labor in the British West Indies and on the North American mainland followed similar patterns, patterns which can also be found in the development of slavery in Portuguese, Spanish and French colonies in the Caribbean and South American as well.

Phillip Curtin, in a book entitled The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex, has traced the plantation system of agriculture production back to sugar plantations established in the Eastern Mediterranean by leaders of the Crusades in the 12th century. Many of the laborers on these plantations were slaves who had been taken as prisoners of wars by Christian armies in their wars against Muslims in Palestine and Spain. From the Eastern Mediterranean, sugar plantations slowly spread westward to Cyprus and Sicily, and then in the 15th century to the series of island chains off the West Coast of Africa, stretching from the Azores in the North to the Cape Verde Islands and Sao Tome in the South. It was on these islands, known collectively as the Atlantic Islands that the Portuguese first made extensive use of African slaves at the end of the 15th century. And then in the 1540's the Portuguese used these islands as jumping off point for their effort to introduce sugar plantations and African slavery to Brazil.

By the 19th century, plantation slavery had not only spread throughout the New World but had also returned across the Atlantic and been instituted on the Indian Ocean islands of Zanzibar, Reunion and Mauritius. Despite the widespread dispersion of plantation agricultures across centuries and hemispheres, Curtain argues that virtually all plantation societies shared certain characteristics: 1) they relied on forced labor, most often African slaves, 2) they were organized to export a single cash crop (sugar, tobacco, rice, indigo, cotton) to a distant, usually European, market, and 3) although they were organized as capitalist enterprises, their owners sought to control not only their work forces' labor, but every aspect of their lives. By the time plantation agriculture reached North America in the 17th century, most English planters were fully aware of how essential African slave labor had been to every profitable plantation economy in the Caribbean and South American. For example, Barbadian planters and slaves played a crucial role in the establishment of the Carolina colony. Aware that slavery had proved profitably for generations, planters in each colony did not have to re-invent the wheel of African slavery; they could simply adopt the practices and institutions of planters who had gone before them. Plantation slavery and its use of African slaves had been validated both by its economic profitability and the racial stereotypes it had helped to create.

Furthermore, as Takaki discusses, ideas of the racial inferiority of blacks were pervasive in England in the century before the colonization of North America. In the 16th century, English travel accounts frequently identified Africans with apes, and decried their supposed unbridled sexuality and unchristian behavior. Jordan uses this evidence of English racial prejudice to argue that the African residents of Virginia were always seen as a racially distinct and inferior group, whether or not they were actually treated as slaves for life or just indentured servants in the years before the colony passed its fist law codifying slavery in 1660. In fact, it was just this belief in the racial distinctiveness and inferiority of Africans that made their enslavement possible.

Still, as Takaki discusses, slavery did not become the dominant form of plantation labor in Virginia until more than half-a-century after the colony’s establishment. Before then, the majority of plantation workers-- both blacks and whites-- were indentured servants who were able to earn their freedom by working a set amount of years. Why the shift from indentured servants to slavery? Historians have answered this question in two ways. One view holds that tobacco farming did not become profitable enough for planters to afford additional cost of slaves until 1670’s. The second is that the planters saw African slavery as a means to prevent the alliance between poor whites and blacks that had threatened them during Bacon’s rebellion. Following the rebellion, Virginia legislature passes series of laws designed to limit contact between slaves and poor whites and emphasize the superior position of whites in the social hierarchy. Interracial marriage and sex banned; manumission of slaves banned unless the freed slave is removed from the colony; and whites given license to punish any black.

the 3/5th Clause: Preseved Southern Political Power by enabling slave owners to count 3/5 of their slaves for the 10-year census and thus for the purposes of doling out U.S. congressional seats to the states. Slaves, of course, were denied the franchise-- along all political and civil records.

the Dred Scott Decision: 1857 U.S. Supreme Court decision in which the court not only denied the claim of Dred Scott, a Missouri slave who tried to claim his freedom after he traveled with his master into Illinios, a free state, but also declared that the intent of the constitution was deny the full rights and privileges of U.S. citizenship to all African-Americans, whether they were born free or slave.

The Importance of Western Lands: As I have discussed, Jefferson believed that the key to the preservation of American democracy was the expanse of open land on the American continent. Only independent small farmers, he believed, would be able to resist efforts to corrupt American democracy. The fact that many of the west's so-called open lands were already occupied by non-European individuals seemed to concern neither him nor his supporters.

The Trail of Tears: As a result of these demands, even the Indian nations of the southeast U.S> who had agreed to established settled communities were eventually prushed off their land and dforced to march to the designated reservation lands in what now is Oklahoma. Many died enroute.