`` Only One `` White `` By James Clifford Essay

In his book White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (Revised and Updated 10th anniversary edition), Ian Haney López explores the legal construction of race, and in particular

In a country as racially diverse as the United States of America, it is certain that there is tension amongst those of different races. While most minorities have fought long and hard to earn acceptance and equality from others, Native Americans have not reached that level of unity yet. In fact, in “We Talk, You Listen ,” Vine Deloria Jr. argues that there is a movement toward minority inclusion, but it has come at an expense of dehumanizing racial groups like Native Americans. For instance, Deloria states that in war movies, Indians have only appeared under white men to send secret messages using a language that the enemy would not be able to understand, meaning that “it was the strangeness of Indians that made the visible, not their humanity”

The students “believe that whites [are] not quite human” they walk like angry wolves and terrify them (Maracle, 173). The white men have made themselves powerful. In One, two, three little Indians, the Whites do not help the Native Americans no

The 1960’s and 70’s were a turbulent time in the United States, as many minority groups took to the streets to voice their displeasure with policies that affected them. During this time period a large movement for civil rights, including Native American’s, would seek to find their voices, as largely urbanized groups sought ways in which they could reconnect with their tribe and their cultural history. In their book, Like A Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee, Paul Chaat Smith, and Robert Allen Warrior take an extensive look at the events leading up to the three of the largest civil rights movements carried out by Native Americans. Beginning with the takeover of Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay by Indians of All Tribes in 1969; the authors tell in a vivid fashion of the Bay Area activism and Clyde Warrior 's National Indian Youth Council, Vine Deloria Jr.’s leadership of the National Congress of Indians, the Trail of Broken Treaties and the Bureau of Indian Affairs takeover, the Wounded Knee Occupation and the rise of the American Indian Movement.

For this assignment, I interviewed Tony Easter, a member of the Native American Sac Fox tribe in Missouri. There are three federally recognized Sac fox tribes in the US, one located in Oklahoma, a combined one in Kansas and Nebraska, and one in Iowa. Tony belongs to a branch of the Oklahoma tribe, which unofficially broke from the Oklahoma tribe in the 1970’s following a dispute on the admittance of members through marriage or blood relation to the tribe.

Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color offers innovative insight into the concept of “race” and the evolution of “whiteness” throughout American history. Jacobson focuses his analysis on the instability of racial identification over time and how race has been created and perceived throughout different stages of history. He states in his introduction that “one of the tasks before the historian is to discover which racial categories are useful to whom at a given moment, and why” (p.9) and while he is successful in some respects, his analysis is somewhat incomplete in providing a full scope of the power relations that created, altered and maintained racial identities in the United States. While Jacobson offers a detailed

In his book Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice, Ian F. Haney Lopez studies the change that in racial politics brought about by the Chicano movement. He examines why Chicano activists embrace their identity as members of the Brown race, an action that is a rejection of previous generations ' attempts to gain civil rights by claiming to be White. He analyzes this racial transformation in the context of race as a socially constructed idea meant to preserve power dynamics.

‘Whiteness’ is a socially constructed category of race, where people who are not ‘white’ are racially designated while ‘whites’ escape designation as if their racial category is not historically and ideologically based (Puzan, 2003). Race is socially constructed (Dyer, 1997) and it is important to acknowledge this in order to address its impact. Unless whiteness is labelled and confronted, being ‘white’ is usually considered the ‘norm’ which acquires certain social privileges, while all other socially-constructed categories of ‘race’ are considered different or, as Puzan (2003) terms it, the ‘racialised Other’.

The identity of Alaskan Natives and Native Americans and the ability to delineate tribal affiliation has been a subject of argument for many years. The demands of federal programs determine the blood volume required to be Native. As federal programs increase and decrease so does the blood volume required to obtain these benefits. Blood quantum is the display of colonialism and is gradually eroding and eradicating the roots of indigenous people and sets a precedence that a person’s blood relates to their cultural orientation and identity. “American Indians and non-Indians have defined Indian identity through law, biology, and culture. All three overlap in specific ways, but more significantly, all have ties to outdated blood quantum

Many instances of life has terrible misunderstandings involving different ways of how we further see how everything should and should not be, and U.S. History is no exception to this phenomenon. The Indian reform movement of the late 1800s provides many examples of cultural misunderstandings and how unsuccessful the outcomes can be. As were seen in the actions and misguided beliefs of the white activists of that time, good intentions are often not good enough to create positive and effective change. The supremacist attitude that the reformers had towards the American Indian culture would only add to their experiences of injustice throughout the “development” of the New

Just like this century actually runs longer thematically than just 1800 to 1900, the story of the Indians extends backward before the first shots of the Civil War were fired and stretches forward past Reconstruction. Throughout this elongated era, different tribes had different experiences. Some, like the nations of the Iroquois, started their travails with warfare of white Americans as far back as choosing between the French and British during the French and Indian War. Others, like the Seminole, had fought many independent wars against America (or Spain or Britain) in their homelands long before they faced the Civil War. Still others, like the Cherokee, had attempted to assimilate into white culture, were forced off their lands, thought they were “safe” on guaranteed reservation lands, and then were forced again to participate when the Civil War bled westward into Indian Territory. The concepts of racism and “whiteness” that flowed like a river through themes of religion, progress, immigration, territory, slavery, and Reconstruction during the “long nineteenth century” also affected Native Americans; the “war of a thousand deserts” fought by the native tribes of the Southwest was both a unique experience and a shared experience as almost every tribe fought their own wars against whites and sometimes against other tribes

Reference to the European racial construct of the “one-drop” rule, which considered anyone with any trace of African origin to be Black, has been used by the federal government and Indian nations to negate the existence of any Native American blood in African Americans. The shared historical partnership and miscegenation between African Americans and Native Americans challenges the legal attempts to define the “purity” of Indians. Freedpeople, no strangers to fighting for recognition from Euro-Americans, continue to fight for recognition and their rightful place within the Seminole

In this book, Foley uses a vast amount of archived histories as well as verbal materials to portray the construction and re-construction of whiteness and the its connection of whiteness rising to power. Narrowing it down to focus on a specific area, which is the cotton culture in central Texas, Foley breaks down whiteness through a through analysis of race, class, gender. A fascinating aspect of this book is the differences mentioned towards whiteness and the various ethno-racial classes and their tense relations to develop a meaningful existence amongst one another.

On Monday, 30. February, Mark Charles gave a presentation on equality and racism and how white land owning man use their power to rule all over the world. Students and faculty who were at presentation showed dissatisfaction to Mark’s anger, passion and direction of his speech. Mark Charles is a speaker, writer, and consultant who was born in the Navajo Reservation. He is the son of an American woman of Dutch heritage and a Navajo man. His life is dedicated to understanding American culture, faith and differences among races. Charles seeks to understand American history in order to help solve problems that are devastate America. He is a member of many organizations which help Native American communities in their development. Charles also

A manifestation of this is visible in the Hudgins v. Wright case, wherein the colonizer, through legal institutions such as legislatures and judiciaries, determined one’s race, their racial character and the implications of their ascribed identity. Wooly hair, dark skin, and a flat nose would classify Hudgins as Black which translated into the overarching identity of a slave. In this instance, the ascription of race to a person is determined by natural phenomenon such as appearance and