Black, White, and Indian:Race and the Unmaking of an American, by Claudio Saunt

When reading the first chapter of the mis-education of the Negro book, the two most interesting items that I found was how it explained about blacks being hopeless, “to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless...". To me this first point meant how the teachings towards blacks is as if blacks were a curse and not meant to move forward because of their struggles and being black. The second point that interests me is the part when a student was in a Negro summer school with a white instructor who used such a textbook that states white people are superior to blacks. And the student said why and the instructor said he wanted the students to get that point of view.

As horrifying as it is to think about, comparisons can be made between the situations of current workers in third-world countries and the plight of the African slaves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In many of the current poverty-stricken places seen around the globe, sweatshops are developed in order to employ laborers. Sweatshops are described as places of abysmal working conditions with low pay and tedious hours. In the article, "Black People in a White People's Country," Gary Nash notes that the African slave trade was originally developed to "fill labor shortages in the economies of its European initiators and their commercial partners." This description is similar to the motive behind the employment of third-world sweatshop workers. Both systems, ancient and modern, include the need for more laborers and disregard the vital needs of their employees/slaves as long as the work is getting done. Workers are harmfully exploited in both

Traditionally history of the Americas and American population has been taught in a direction heading west from Europe to the California frontier. In Recovering History, Constructing Race, Martha Mencahca locates the origins of the history of the Americas in a floral pattern where migration from Asia, Europe, and Africa both voluntary and forced converge magnetically in Mexico then spreads out again to the north and northeast. By creating this patters she complicates the idea of race, history, and nationality. The term Mexican, which today refers to a specific nationality

Talking Black In America addresses how advanced, unique, and culturally important African American English is (Hutcheson and Cullinan, 2017).

A sentence from someone may mean one thing, but an action can have a million different meanings behind it so which one would you judge a person from? Many people experience fear and are scared to face them, so instead of standing up against it they just decide to be a new person. Their minds are manipulated to not face their anxiety and are frightened about what will happen to them. People think that being fearful of something and to overcome it is a difficult task. People often mistaken their strength to fight their fear and decide to give up. Both stories, “Quicksand” and “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” share the common theme of how they use fear as an excuse to escape to a new world, they become a different person and get rid of

Slavery was abolished after the Civil War, but the Negro race still was not accepted as equals into American society. To attain a better understanding of the events and struggles faced during this period, one must take a look at its' literature. James Weldon Johnson does an excellent job of vividly depicting an accurate portrait of the adversities faced before the Civil Rights Movement by the black community in his novel “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.” One does not only read this book, but instead one takes a journey alongside a burdened mulatto man as he struggles to claim one race as his own.

The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man depicts the narrator as a liminal character. Beginning with an oblivious knowledge of race as a child, and which racial group he belonged, to his well knowing of “white” and “black” and the ability to pass as both. On the account of liminality, the narrator is presenting himself as an outsider. Because he is both a “white” and “black” male, he does not fit in with either racial group. In the autobiography of an Ex-colored man, James Weldon Johnson uses double consciousness to show the narrators stance as a person that gives up his birthright for the “privilege of whiteness”.

The narrator of The Autobiography grows up his whole life thinking that he is white. It is not until one fateful day in school where a teacher indirectly tells him that he is black that he finds out. This revelation, which he himself describes as “a sword-thrust” (Johnson 13), suggests a transformation, a great change, a development in the Ex-Colored Man’s racial consciousness in the future. However, as M. Giulia Fabi says, “[The ECM’s] proclaimed loyalty to his ‘mother’s people’ is continuously undercut by his admiration for and identification with mainstream white America” (375). She also indicates how when contrasted with previous passers, “the Ex-Colored Man’s oft-noted cowardice,

Spirituality plays a very important role in African American culture. As we know, traditional healing practices and spirituality are closely related. This deep spirituality comes from their motherland African culture but was reinforce during the rough periods of slavery and enforced discrimination. Spirituality makes people of believing that only God is responsible for health, illness, and healing. Thus, spiritual beliefs provide comfort and are an effective way for remaining healthy, coping, and healing (Johnson, Elbert-Avila, Tulsky, 1992). Giger, Davidhizar, and Turner (1992) recalled that a number of African Americans still linking good health with luck or success and disease or illness with bad luck, fate,

In his essay, “As Black as We Wish to be,” author Thomas Chatterton Williams tries to paint a picture of a world where the sight of interracial families was still considered an oddity and shows how, over the decades, society has slowly became more acceptable towards the idea. He begins the essay briefly discussing the ignorance of people during the late 1980’s while also elaborating what hardships African Americans have dealt with over the past century. He explains that even with the progression of interracial families and equality of African Americans, a new problem has now risen for interracial children of the future. While either being multiracial, African American, or White, what do they decide to identify themselves as? This is the major question that arises throughout Williams’s argument. While Williams’s supports his argument with unreliable environmental evidence, as well with other statistical evidence. His argument is weakened by an abundance of facts, disorganization, and an excessive use of diluted information.

“The History of White People”, is a book written by Nell Irvin Painter. My first impression was very wrong. From the title, I expected a documentary type video about white culture; honestly, I expected the video to concentrate mostly on the historical time period when slavery existed. However, the video is Nell Irvin Painter reading from the beginning, and ends of her book. Rather than the video being about a certain historical time period, it is a literal adaptation of the title. The book is about how the “white race” came about; it discusses how certain ethnicities, and races came to be considered white, or Caucasian. I believe the book probably contains a lot more history, however she skipped over most of that and touched on the main points.

There is an extricable relationship between race, capitalism, and property and how it perpetuates the notion of whiteness through the exploitation of “others”. Property is a relationship of a person and an object; slaves were considered as objects. Race is constructed from white workers’ ideology of whiteness and labor wage. Racism has been long constructed through the production of race and its relations to property, and we can see it through the notion of capitalism and the idea of whiteness.

THESIS: Race differences in identity and social position were, and are, more important than class differences in American society.

Race and class can play powerful roles in people’s family experiences. Race is defined as a socially constructed category of individuals who share common inborn biological traits (Newman 2009). Class is defined as groups of people who share a similar position in society based on their wealth and income (Newman 2009). Social class and race shape family lives in many ways, which in return reproduces class and race inequalities. In Annette Lareau’s study of families, she uses real stories of real families to show important social patterns.

      Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man was published at a time when America was racially divided.  The novel presents the theme of the lack of black identity – a theme supported by the fact that the protagonist, Invisible Man, has no name.  The reader knows the names of Dr. Bledsoe, Ras-the-Exhorter, Brother Jack and others - but the reader does not know the name of the main character.  Ellison's leaves it to the reader to decide who he is and, on a larger scale, how white America perceives black America.