The White Scourge, By Neil Foley

Unfortunately, there are two sides to every coin. The poor whites of the South may have built a community among themselves, but unlike the communities built in Freak the Mighty and the lady insurrectionists and black women, they did not reach out to help other prejudiced groups. The South’s poor whites were not as disadvantaged as the previously mentioned groups, for they were fed their privileges by the rich white Southern man. Rather

The book written by Joel Spring was based on the constant derogation and the oppression of the people that were not considered “white”. The constant segregation between races caused many fights for equal rights among Native Americans, African American, Asian and Hispanic people. The conflict was never easy because the United States demonstrated an ethnocentric attitude, which caused the idea of deculturalization for many of the incoming immigrant races. The book demonstrates accuracy in many of the historical struggles between education, language, culture lands, and equal rights for a voice among the people in the United States.

In “The Victims” by Sharon Olds it describes a divorce through the eyes of the parents’ children. The first section is shown through past tense as the speaker is a child and the last section is shown in present tense with the speaker already being an adult trying to make sense of past events. The word “it” in the first two lines carries a tremendous weight, hinting at the ever so present abuse and mistreatment, but remaining non-specific. The first part generates a negative tone toward the father who is referred to as malicious by the mother who “took it” from him “in silence” until she eventually “kicked him out.” Through the entirety of the poem the children are taught to hate their father. Who taught them? Their mother showed them that their father was a villain and were taught to have no sympathy for him but “to hate you and take it” and so they did so. Although the poem never directly states what the father did to receive the family’s hated, the speaker gives examples as to why he is hated.

In the Wages of Whiteness (an edition revision) by David Roediger, an American labor historian, he examines the growth and social construction of race during the 1800s and its relations to white workers. Roediger states by labeling race based on its skin color and social status, white folks were“...seen as ‘naturally’ white, and Black workers become ‘intruders’ who are strongly suspected of being ‘loafers’ as well” (Roediger 19). The production of race formed once white workers accepted their class positions by accepting their identities as ‘not slaves’ and as ‘not Blacks’. In this case, there was a necessity for white workers to have its own sense of class and gender identity to determine who has power and who does not.

With the end of the Mexican war, the United States seized a tremendous amount of land from Mexico, about one third of the country, half a million square miles to be exact. The hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Indians who continued to live there became strangers in their own homes. This take over of land and the spirit of manifest destiny intensified the political conflict of slavery. Taking over this land intensified racism as some viewed this as signifying the superiority of the “Anglo-Saxon race.” This new idea proved to be detrimental to race relations in these new territories. When these territories still belonged to Mexico, slavery was illegal and Mexicans, Indians and blacks were all equal. When the territory of Texas, once a part

The Devil in the White City a novel written by Erick Larson, a book that consisted of a national wonder in the Chicago World Columbian Exposition of 1893 or better known as the Chicago world fair, as well with the fair-goer predating murders committed by the famous serial killer Dr.H.H.Holmes. Larson uses contrast between Chief architect of the Chicago World Fair Daniel Hudson Burnham and serial killer H.H.Holmes. Larson then brings out juxtaposition between the White City and the Black City (World fair vs. Chicago). Larson uses detailed imagery on the visual of the fair.

In the first chapter, "The Old South in the Southwest", tells the history of power in Texas. One’s race determined if they could own property or not. Thus, ownership of property determined your power. By doing this, white Texans got separated from the salves who were Mexican and African American. In chapter two, "The Little Brown Man in Gringo Land", Mexicans began to outnumber African American sharecroppers and tenants. The immigration of Mexicans helped whiteness because of the cheap import, which made poor whites even poorer. The needs for laborers continued, which caused the Mexicans to get put back on the agriculture work. The immigration and presence of more Mexicans simply hurt them in the long run. This is because as the population grew, the power of the higher up whites did too. "The Whiteness of Cotton", Chapter three, provides graphs showing how unbalanced the Texas farm owner numbers were, based on race. In 1940, of the 210,182 total owners, 190,067 were white and only 20,115 were black. In chapter six, “Whiteness of Manhood”, brought specifically women into the picture and focused on how they were treated compared to

“Black Skin, White Masks,” by Frantz Fanon is a book that explains the psychology of racism. Fanon studied medicine in France. He specialized in psychiatry. The novel looks at the minds of blacks under white rule, and the effects race has on French society. Throughout the book Fanon discusses his experience with racism in 1950’s France. He discusses many concepts like language barriers, race, dependency complexes, and other controversies between blacks and whites. The book talks of events that were dated in the 1950’s, but these concepts can help us to understand racism in America today.

Despite the influence of Marxist theory on his own historical development, Roediger informs the reader that material and class considerations are not sufficient to explain race and racism. While historians such as Barbara Fields or Oliver Cromwell Cox emphasized the naturalization of whiteness and top-down racism, they have ignored the agency of the white working class males themselves. Instead, Roediger draws upon modern labor history and upon the work of W.E. Du Bois’ theory of the “wages of whiteness,” to assert that whiteness formed as a tragic response to industrialization and the concomitant anxieties of the white working class.

David R. Roediger displays the history of how the theory of “whiteness” has evolved throughout the years in America in his book, The Wages of Whiteness. According to Roediger, “whiteness” is much a constructed identity as “blackness” or any other. He argues that this idea of “whiteness” has absolutely nothing to do with the advantage of the economy, but that it is a psychological racial stereotype that was created by white men themselves. He claims that it is definitely true that racism should be set in class and economic contexts, also stating that “this book will argue that working class formation and the systematic development of a sense of whiteness, went hand in hand for the U.S white working class.” Roediger basically lays out the fact that “working class ‘whiteness’ and “white supremacy” are ideological and psychological creations of the white working class itself.

Imagine living in a city where hundreds of people go missing in just 6 months. Then, we find out that on person is suspected of killing over 200 people. This serial killer, is Herman Webster Mudgett, common alias H. H. Holmes. It happened at the Chicago World’s Fair when the head architect, Daniel Hudson Burnham, attracted so many people to Chicago, missing people went unnoticed. Although through historical records, letters, and documents, we know Burnham and his intentions, were good. In Erik Larson’s, The Devil in the White City, Holmes and Burnham are polar opposite brought together by the Chicago World's Fair. Holmes represents evil while Burnham represents good. However, they do have two things in common, their negative perspective about women and their want for riches.

The next section of the chapter is “The American Architecture of Racism: Nature and Dynamics.” This section is a discussion about how racism is embedded in the capitalism of the United States. Kieh states that racism is a tool used by the higher class to keep the lower class divided (p.59). He says, “Through racial segmentation, the racial divide makes it easier for the American bourgeoisie to ‘divide and rule’ both white and non-white members of the subaltern classes” (p.60). Racism also has a part in politics. This has transformed from the “era of old racism,” when black people did not have citizenship (p.60), to “new racism” where racism still exists, even though black people are legally equal to white people (p.61). Racism has a hold on the United States, mostly because of the way black people have been portrayed since the abolition of slavery.

Some of the ways that Whites that did not participated in slavery still benefited from the advantages as noted in our textbook, “Blacks in the military were restricted to jobs such as janitor, clerk, cafeteria and laborers, even when they were qualified for higher jobs. Blacks were educated separately thus receiving marginal education to Whites which the difference in education created a gap in earnings and employment” (Bell, 2012, p. 112,118). As depicted in our textbook,” Whites benefited by the arrival of Blacks into the South by aiding the Europeans immigrants and their decedents in their rise up of their social class structure” (Bell, 2012, p. 226). In other words Whites were having social issues among the different types of White’s immigrants

This is shown by how in the feudal system the nobles, who were extremely wealthy in the form of land, ruled over serfs who worked on the nobles’ land. This isolates it in the wealth section and will likely result in its opposal of race being used to choose how power is distributed. They will find Mexico’s hierarchy particularly distasteful because it was largely organized based on the color of people's skin color and origin. The darker one’s skin was, the lower on the hierarchy they were and as a result it was ordered as follows: Whites born in Spain (Peninsulares), Whites born in Mexico (Creoles), mixed Whites and Indian (Mestizaje), mixed Whites and African, mixed African and Indian, and pure African or Indian. After the revolution, Conservatives/Creoles maintained power and continued the colonial social structure and while according to law all races were equal, white male creoles still were considered superior. A possible result of this reliance on race when structuring a hierarchy could result in a clash of beliefs with wealth-based

The solid power of discrimination in modern Mexico stems from the construction of Mexican society during the Spanish colonization in the 1500’s. One of the most powerful weapons concealed by the European during the Conquest was hegemony. Hegemony is “a basic principle of social control, in which a ruling class dominates others ideologically, with a minimum of physical force, by making its dominance seem natural and inevitable” (Chasteen, 2001). Thus, by using hegemony, the Spaniard convinced the native peoples of America to accept their place below the Spaniards and forced them to see the conquerors as superior beings worthy of obedience. By establishing their superiority, the Spaniards were able to control and dominate the indigenous people, forcing the Spanish culture, religion, and language onto the population. As a result, indigenous people started to distance themselves from their roots and their own people, creating a damaging prejudice and bigotry that has been passed down through generations in Mexican families. Indigenous people turned against each other. They mixed with the Spaniards – creating new castes, dividing the people and providing them with power and social status based on the lightness of their skin. This feeling exists even today, white skinned people are seen as more honest and trustworthy, thus deserving privileges and power; while the darker skinned people are seen as a resemblance of the indigenous people indicating inferiority and implying a need to