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RACELECTURENOTES.docxRACE LECTURE NOTES
hi books uh so we are going to cover our next unit which we'll be spending a few weeks
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on which is what is race and ethnicity we'll be looking at this these concepts
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over the next three weeks paying particular attention to race and ethnicity this week um the formation of
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race and gender as social and historical concepts the following week and then lastly we'll be getting into systemic
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racism the final week okay um you'll see a lot of this material across these
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three weeks and we'll revisit it although um this will always be accessible to you on canvas
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um and this is live uh i'm sorry live transcribed so my
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notes will always be there uh please take notes um don't feel you have to copy all this information slides down
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those are going to be posted on canvas for you and any other information um regarding the lectures will be uh
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available to you okay so um
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so i wanted to come to this question of what is race um we've been debating this in u.s
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society and as academics or within the scholarly community for about the past
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200 years right and since the nation's founding race was always implicated in our national origin um particularly as
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we defined who was and wasn't a citizen um if you'll recall
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um the first individuals to gain voting rights were property owning white
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men which was a very narrow class race in gender
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group and category right so cisgender heterosexual elite males because people
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who were able to own property in the colonial americas had to have a significant amount of money
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with that we have seen the concepts of race and ethnicity change over time
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to be more inclusive and exclusive and so we'll chronicle that a little bit
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over these weeks as we really take a deep dive into this what i will say is
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um much of what we know about race or the evolution of race has a lot to do
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with citizenship and with capitalism and what we'll see especially when we get to
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our last week on what is racism is that the folks who are
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racially discriminated against are usually the ones that are mostly implicated in low-wage
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economies and or have been exploited for economic purposes
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so as usual we'll have a lecture layout so what we'll cover is race we're going to
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talk about demographics and break down this idea of colorism okay um with our
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conversation around colorism i want to get into this idea of dominant group versus subordinate group how we see
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these two differently and why it's important to understand that there are two different um dynamics and that's
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gonna really inform or help you think about how race is not a race and racism is not
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just about this knit human difference or this idea that there's a select group of people
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that are out there uh bad mouthing um bipark communities rather that there is
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a unique way in which we see individuals and in seeing them
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uh we uh follow certain cultural cues and markers
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to um associate other individuals with difference okay and
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remember that most human beings are fundamentally or i shouldn't say most human beings all
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human beings are fundamentally the same right we have all the same organs we have all the same processes um we have
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these unique pheno or we have some unique phenotypical differences but that
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doesn't necessarily mean that we are fundamentally different by physicality intellect so on and so forth we've
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actually done a lot to make this right um we're going to talk about the origins of race thinking
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the evolution of race and then uh i have it in there but i removed it we're not going to cover race making we'll cover
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race making when we get into racial formations i'm sorry so our key terms for this lecture are
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race social construct and dominate and subordinate groups
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so first let's talk about race and ethnicity in terms of what these are
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and what's out there right so race and ethnicity are both socially constructed what does that mean and who
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creates these um when we think about ideas of race
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right we have to consider that there are these different ways in which we try to
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associate different communities by culture or by skin color okay if you see
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in a lot of the data um we will have individuals associated
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with region i.e oops i.e asian right black which is a skin color although
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most of these folks trace their you know and central illinois back to africa or
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they're african-american or hispanic which was a newer term developed in the 1970s to encompass
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folks of spanish-speaking ancestry i.e they came from spain right
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one thing that we have to consider is that who creates these right because we fundamentally all have our
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individuality uh and our differences are not so distinct that would um
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create a desire or create or necessitate creating these knit categories of
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difference right we've come up with these concepts of people
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and then fundamentally apply them right and one thing what we want to think about too in terms of where society is
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is the balance of these individuals right demographically or proportionally so um right now there is a
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white majority in the united states meaning that there are more white people in the u.s than any other ethnic or
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racial group okay so in terms of 2018 data although we are going to have a new um census coming out pretty soon a new
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census data that will augment some of these numbers but it shouldn't be that much white folks make up about 60 of the u.s population
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hispanic folks make up about 18 um african-americans make up 12
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asians that make up about five percent or six percent right a multi-racial and then all other right um we are going to
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see this shift um ideally within the next um 20 to 30
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years some census demographers have said that we'll see the end of the white majority
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by uh 2042 some put it closer to 2050. uh by 2060 though within within the next or
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within the next 30 years and or by the middle of this century we
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will see a fundamental shift in the in the um racial demographics
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um and we can see this borne out mostly here in the under 18 population right so
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right now there are more youth of color than there are white uh children of color right and
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that's largely because of immigration we've seen much more immigration in the past few years we're also seeing a lot
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more multi-racial coupling and because of that um
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that we are now seeing a situation where there are going to be more
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um children of color than whites right um we are also seeing the increase of the
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white older generation which means all of those historically white communities are aging and they're going to be a part
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of that older group right which is also born out in the state out here on the left in terms of um k-12 children so
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what we want to know is that there is a minority uh or there are racial and ethnic
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minorities in the united states just surely in terms of the demographic numbers the bigger piece of that is
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going to be whether or not or beyond just those numbers we also
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want to be considerate of the fact that these individuals are also um
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and economically disadvantaged okay so when we get into the racism lecture in a
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couple of weeks we're going to actually see how that plays out in terms of how these minority groups are not actually
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receiving equal treatment compared to whites right so they're not actually equal in the us and nor are they
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actually uh treated equal right so
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to understand race we want to think about it on this idea of um a social categorization based upon
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phenotypical differences and even if you haven't taken anatomy and physiology or biology or haven't done so in a number
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of years phenotype just means the way that our genes express our outward
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um physical attributes right lighter hair darker hair brown eyes blue eyes um
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white skin brown skin black skin eye shape color texture all of that
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stuff right so that is our baseline for how race is um seen and one
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thing i want to really note is that we fundamentally see race or we
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fundamentally understand race through perception right or through the visual
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we don't have any hard data that suggests that there is real um anatomical differences between each
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group there are very tall very short very round very thin very light very
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dark white people uh and and people of color for that matter
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matter what we do need to understand is that these um categories have been used to
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establish um a hierarchical social order right and it
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is based upon colorism so what i've provided you here on the left is a breakdown okay so
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anglo-european as being white so you know um anglo-saxon descendants uh who
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are here in the united states and or most much of the folks in europe as being some form of white
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asian and asian-american as being yellow uh chicano and latino or chicanex and latinx as brown
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um american indigenous as red and african american uh or african as black okay
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so what you can see here on the right hand side is um some data or some i'm sorry some
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excerpts from textbooks where we see how um different individuals are categorized
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by their name and then obviously by their race so at the top right there's
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what we've seen as the four races of man in uh late um 19th century and early 20th century
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textbooks actually you know included these and really tried to establish this
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idea that there were the four races of man right so what we can see here is
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you know obviously caucasian or white negro you know obviously always is black mongolian um as being some kind of asian
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and then american indian right down here the races of man we can see red yellow
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white brown and black right and so black obviously being african brown being some
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kind of polynesian yellow being asian and red being native american right and
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then similarly here mongolian malay negro and american one thing i want to
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say across all these and this is one of the reasons why i want to really stress that um the way that we understand race
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is very fluid um unstable and unpredictable is that um clearly in these in these
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three different examples um we can see different depictions of individuals
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whether it be the four or the five races of man the other thing to really know across
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these is that if you look at the depiction of white individuals versus all other groups the white individuals
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are always much more prim and proper so this gentleman's wearing a tie in a suit where these folks are wearing much more
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cultural garb similarly here and here um and that's positioning
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whites above them or trying to make them seem much more civilized comparatively okay so again race is a social construct
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right or something that uh that exists not in objective reality but as a result of human interaction right it exists
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because humans agree that it exists okay
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and when we get into forms of racism in the in the latter weeks
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we're gonna see how there is a concerted effort by scientists to really
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establish this um but what we'll see it anchored to is um systems of exploitation and
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economic exploitation specifically
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okay so there are two different groups or two different ways to really understand
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um race-based groupings or these ideas of race and it's within this dominant
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group versus subordinate group framework okay race in the united states understand
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within this idea of normalization and foreignness right and so whether we're thinking about
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skin colors as different cultural differences or anything else what we've done is we've organized society into a
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dominant group in a subordinated group so as or so the dominant group is the group
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that possesses usually more wealth power and prestige in a society this group is seen as normal a community
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possessing cultural and physical characteristics that are that are accepted invisible and challengeable in
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the standard by which we judge all other groups so what does that mean
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we all speak english and you are expected to speak english in the united states we get an ethnicity we'll talk a
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little bit about culture and language but what i want to emphasize with them is that we don't challenge that when
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individuals from other countries that don't speak english come here right we automatically associate them with being
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different right now there are a thousand and one different languages spoken all
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over the world and that should actually be considered normal not foreign right so we should understand that there is
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linguistic difference and that should just be a part of the normal understanding of human civilizations in human society
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however in much of the west there is a predominant association
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of one group having a standard by which we live by right americanness english-speakingness
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christianity-ness whatever that looks like and then castigating and or casting all over individuals as different right
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so um you may have heard this commonly write this idea of speak american right so speak english but if we think about
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it english in the united states is very diverse right um whether we're thinking about southern california central
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california northern or the northwestern states the midwest the south the
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southeast the northeast all of those different regions have different dialects
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of english and a lot of that has been augmented because of cultural interactions however we still try to
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create this idea that americanness is one thing right that it is a part of one
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type of person and person lookingness i.e white and then also english speaking for this right
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in the converse of that we have what's called the subordinate group right and that's a group of people who are in a
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minority um usually demographically right and uh because of their distinct
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physical cultural and um uh physical and cultural characteristics they are oppressed dominated uh subjugated or
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suppressed if you notice in the readings for this week from john iceland
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and from howard zinn um there was a lot of conversation about trying to create
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uh the assumption that indigenous people and african people were inferior and that
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was what was used to justify conquest and slavery that is again a social
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process there's nothing to subsume that those individuals were actually inferior and as you may have noticed in the
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howard's inn reading he mentions uh regularly that a lot of the early colonists
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talked about the advanced um society that the indigenous americans
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had um the reality was they just weren't driven for the same goals right they weren't about
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making money or expanding empire they actually just created the sense of homeostasis or normalcy with um with the
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you know land that they lived on right um with the
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subordinated group i want to stress a couple different things with that and this goes into the sec this fourth
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point here this group is seen as abnormal okay and we really want to understand the
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difference here or or we want to focus on this idea that we've created this normal versus um abnormal paradigm right
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so when we think about english and this is normal right so we're always teaching english in school we'll always teach
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well all of our forms will always be in english all of our signs will always be in english um
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so on and so forth and i know i'm focusing on one thing very particular but it's important for us to understand right because
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when we're thinking about language when we're thinking about eye color when we think about skin color all of those things it's crea those things are
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creating a dynamic difference and so um for example when we uh exotify someone
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right so um dark skin is being exotic or dark skinned having a
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much more sexual appeal or also being despised right um early
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uh understandings of darkness which we'll get into in a minute um
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were considered dirty right and there was a big push to um attempt to uh sell products on the
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idea that you could wash away dark skin um in much of africa asia
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uh and particularly south asia there are um a huge product market for skin
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lightening products and if you come from um particularly south asian descent there's a big emphasis on trying to
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distance yourself from dark skinnedness right this or what we call this idea of pigmentocracy
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associating power and privilege to those with light skin another thing that we want to be really
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clear on is that a lot of what we see within the subordinated group and the reason why we can really understand it
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as being subordinated is that much of the characteristics of people of color
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are seen as infectious and we'll talk about this more when we get into ethnicity next time but what i want to
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be very clear on with this is that there were laws in the united states and we'll talk about this when we get to um
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institutional racism that prevented um people of color from marrying whites
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right in in a very hypocritical fashion and what i mean by
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that is um white individuals had used um rape and sex as a mechanism for
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war and um to break slaves okay uh so whether they were used a lot utilizing
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it in wars with indigenous people uh as a mechanism for breeding out and or for
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you know subjugating women um or uh in the in the case of um slaves or
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in chateau slavery which we'll talk about when we get into the unit on slavery uh or more i should say um
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it was very common for white individuals or white slave owners to have sexual relations with their
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slaves um either as um their own kind of taboo fetishes and or to break um uh you know
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kind of stubborn slaves right and so um in those cases that the
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white individual always utilize or would um i guess take liberty with um forced uh relations
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on uh bipod um women uh however if um you know men of color
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wanted to get into romantic relationships and or have um you know normal marital relations
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with the white woman that was always seen as bad and there was concerted campaigns um to prevent that right we
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had what were called anti-miscegenation laws in the united states there's a really famous case called loving versus virginia that they made into a movie
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called loving that talks about this in detail and a lot of that was centered around this idea of preventing
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the spread of dark skinnedness of foreignness in the united states and elsewhere
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so realistically what we can see within this framework is this kind of dynamic right that america is number one and if
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we go back to this idea of america conceptualism it follows the same kind of narrative
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that is america is number one and then we have these kind of very narrow association
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of other regions and other individuals right that you know a lot of our uh workers come
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from mexico coffee comes from south america zoo animals come from africa all
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of our call centers are in india there's only kangaroos down in australia most of china makes our stuff
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japan makes our tvs and cameras we think of europeans as weak um
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uh we bomb the middle east and all of russia is communist okay so that's very important because
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although there are a lot of socialist values that um are very um
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similar both here in the americas and in much of the european russian region and there's
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a lot of totalitarianism that we've done both historically and currently here in america as in other countries we don't
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really see it as such right and it's because the dominant group is always seen as normal right these subordinated
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groups or the other groups are made to seem other um and there's a lot of intellectual and political work to do so
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which we'll get into so here what i've provided you with is some advertisements to really show how
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we've thought about race and this differentness over time right so
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this one on the top left is actually a ad for soap from france in the turn of
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the 20th century and you can clearly see this um very um backwards looking um
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tribalized individual whose dark skin um you know connoting africa or maybe
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some um caribbean island region and he's using soap to basically wash the black
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off of his skin right to make himself white um these were very uh common in the us
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what were called minstrel shows and we would have white individuals uh put on
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um blackface and other kinds of um
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camouflage for lack of a better term makeup to make themselves one seem black and then also seem um disheveled right
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so on the left you see this very clean nice cut white man right and then as he
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becomes the minstrel he's got disheveled hair very dark you know over oh um kind
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of uh comically black skin and these big lips that he's uh done with makeup right so he looks much more disheveled so
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civilized versus shoveled again we see this kind of tribalized individual
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here with this ad for puerto rican rum
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sorry
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sorry my computer's being buggy um
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okay here we can see an advertisement for rum and even the rum or even the slogan in
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the rum is really made to seem much more exotic right so puerto rican rum
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try these delicious cool drinks made with
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uh there's an association or they they um uh overplay these words essentially to
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um ethnicize and or racialize the way in which this person speaks trying to make it seem as if this puerto rican person
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does not speak you know proper english um here uh we can see this advertisement
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for a book again this um kind of um gallant uh white soldier fighting the
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you know very backwards um um savage savage
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um african native or aboriginal native um uh this one i thought was really
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interesting about tobacco so and the legend of sitting bull and trying to
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comicalize um sitting bull uh and so if you see here on the bottom
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it says why why doth the noble savage rage and his wife and child feel so sad they find
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alas a common fault that their tobacco is bad right so this idea that
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um because they're smoking this backwards tobacco it is making them um angry and
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their uh families you know bad right here we can see this
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um uh racialization of asians right me washi all cleaning so this idea of again
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trying to comicalize satirizing other asian individuals and making it seem as if you know they're
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comported to this idea you know with um using soap and this again is an advertisement for this type of sopine
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uh and then this other one i thought was really interesting which was a hair an advertisement for a hairbrush
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and it says dr scott's electric hairbrush will not save an indian's scalp from his enemies but
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will preserve yours from gender of baldness falling hair cures headache and
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uh neural asia right price one dollar uh sold in new york right and so the same idea
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of um othering right uh a bypoc individual and actually in this case right to sell something and in all these
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cases right these are advertisements playing on this idea of human difference
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making um dark skinnedness and cultural difference seem backwards other abnormal
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different and more so want to again normalize whiteness right especially in these two cases down here at the bottom
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but also obviously make all these other things weird or abnormalize them
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so we can think of race in a couple different ways in the western world um there have been two chief arguments one
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is coming from indigenous communities and one is coming from um
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uh african-american thinkers and remember we talked a little bit about this um last time when we were talking about the
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origins of ethnic studies so one way of thinking is with columbus right so columbus's arrival in the new
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world um in 1492 set the precedence for the dehumanization of indigenous measure
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americans right and obviously was the kind of breaking point for or the beginning of um what would
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uh eventually be the transcontinental slave trade um his explorations in the new world and finding an area that was
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very aggravable or very farmable created the pretext for um trying to bring
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cheap labor into work and again this is um emphasized a lot in both the iceland and particularly in the zinn reading
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where he talks at length about how um you know the the amount of profit that
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could be derived from farming lands in the americas um necessitated this
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um big push to create a system of slavery where you could um you know just garner huge amounts of
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profit from from agriculture so this um cute kind of video will explain a little
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bit more about how we can think about columbus within this context of race thinking
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christopher columbus the heroic explorer who discovered america and proved the
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earth was round actually columbus was an incompetent buffoon who never even set
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foot in america [Music] we all know columbus wasn't perfect
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that's an understatement the real story of columbus is even worse and weirder than you think all aboard the magic band
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first of all columbus couldn't have discovered that the earth was round because in his time it was already
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common knowledge the globe's for sale the perfectly ordinary globes for sale
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oh what then why did it take until 1492 for anyone to sail the ocean blue simple
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back then they didn't know the americas existed so navigators thought there was no way a ship could make it all the way
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from europe to asia [Music] so columbus set sail because he was
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brave nope he set sail because he was a doofus who was terrible at man
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instead of trusting the experts columbus believed the earth was thousands of miles smaller than it actually was fools
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all of them my mouth says the earth is teeny tiny and shaped like a pear and at the top it
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has a succulent nipple he actually believed that yes i actually believe
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this i can sail from europe to india in a matter of days that's extremely wrong
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it took years for columbus to convince the king and queen his plan didn't suck but competition in the spice trade was
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getting intense so ferdinand and isabella were desperate to find a new way to get their fix the earth is tiny
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and also a pair give me money please this man is an idiot i don't care
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fine give this more on the bare minimum 90 dumb men and three dumb sheeps if you die who cares right and that's when
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columbus showed them all and became a hero but you know what happens to mouthy students they get extra credit i turn
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them into iguanas say hi edward
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now children that's the ninja the pinta and the santa maria the ship's columbus sail to discover america
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i'm really sorry miss dazzle but columbus never set foot in america of all the modern day countries columbus
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made it to like cuba haiti and the dominican republic none of them were in the united states
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okay fine then uh columbus discovered haiti in the dominican republic sure he did if you don't count the quarter
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million taino people that live there already uh occupied someone lives here right i
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know this part he thought he made it to india this is india and these people are
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indians i will be rich in spices and gold what a silly mistake yes if by silly you
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mean brutal and by a mistake you mean one of several the taino treated
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columbus and his crew with the utmost hospitality hug we need reinforcements
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columbus repaid their kindness by returning with 17 ships and 1200 men so
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he could enslave the taino and steal their gold it was only one problem they didn't have any you gold now oh i want
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to help but what is gold this infuriated columbus and soon he and his crew began
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to slaughter them this is very inappropriate for me to see
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columbus's regime was so senselessly brutal that by 1542 the tiger population
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on the island had fallen to 200. i i can't believe it i had no clue that
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columbus was this cruel but after this he must have gone on to do great things
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nope this was literally all he did he didn't discover america and he didn't
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prove the earth was round he just bounced around the caribbean slaughtered a bunch of innocent people and died
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thinking he had made it to india hashtag no regrets
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holy crow then why do we learn about this guy in school oh great question for centuries
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columbus was a historical footnote but that changed in 1828 when washington
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irving the author of the legend of sleepy hollow and other tall tales wrote the first english language biography of
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columbus columbus was a murderous failure that ain't gonna sell copies
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let's say he was a brave genius who proved the earth was round and discovered america
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seems believable and irving's myth caught on big time when some new americans were searching for a hero
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throughout the 19th century a surge of italians immigrated to america where they were persecuted and treated like
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they didn't belong ah this is new york city we hate pizza and we'll always hate
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pizza to help prove italians were a part of the american story italian americans
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latched onto irving's version of columbus and promoted it like crazy hey
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we know a guy that knows a guy that discovered america and is italian
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i guess italians are great this guy deserves his own holiday and that's the
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true story of how an incompetent and vicious nobody became the national hero we celebrate today
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so a couple things to note right with what um the video shows this is that one
35:08
uh again here we can see the uh um interaction between the west or the
35:15
dominant group and a subordinate group i used to be indians excuse me and in that interaction
35:22
right um columbus and you know obviously powers of the from the west um decided that it
35:28
was um much easier to just wipe these individuals out or and or enslave them rather than treat them with um humility
35:36
and respect and one thing i want to always know when we are having these conversations especially about race
35:41
making and race difference is that um there is a huge degree of violence that
35:47
happens and that violence boards out in horrific ways i.e
35:52
enslavement uh rape torture death and brutality uh and um in the columbus case
36:01
one of the ways in which we can think about this in terms of race and why we want to always think about this within the ideas of race thinking is that to
36:09
kill another individual right it takes a um extreme level of thinking most of the
36:15
time we reserve capital punishment or this idea of you know putting someone to death for a crime because they are a
36:21
criminal right and um michelle foucault if you take um some more advanced sociology classes we'll talk about this
36:27
at length um here's a book out called punish um and what i want um us to consider is that um
36:35
we don't usually want to incur you know pain on other individuals
36:41
the only reason why we will often do so is if we feel wrong and or we are scared right and in this case what we've
36:48
seen with columbus is that columbus associated um these individuals with a kind of
36:55
backwardsness right and this was also stressed a lot again in the readings from this week and that
37:01
in creating that kind of false narrative um he allowed or enabled this widespread
37:08
massacre so again you know we're seeing um the interaction with the rest with a
37:14
different with a different group of people he's associating them with kingdom difference and then um
37:20
because of their uh assumed inferiority right they're killed with impunity right
37:27
so next we're gonna see how this works with um
37:32
slavery and i'll come back to the slides we can talk about again break it down
37:37
new york times published the print edition of the 1619 project the name
37:42
marks this month's 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved people
37:48
brought from africa to the then virginia colony the time says the project aims to
37:53
reframe the country's history understanding 1619 is our true founding and placing the consequences of slavery
38:00
and the contributions of black americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are the project
38:07
is led by new york times magazine reporter nicole hannah jones who is the author of the opening essay she joins me now you have been working on this for a
38:14
number of years but you put this together very quickly first of all why why this topic why this issue
38:21
well you don't have very many opportunities to ever celebrate the 400th anniversary of anything and it
38:27
seemed to me that this was a great opportunity to really as you said in your opening
38:33
reframe the way that we have thought about an institution that has impacted um almost everything in modern american
38:39
society but that we're taught very little about that we're often taught is marginal to the american story and we
38:45
wanted to do something different we wanted to use the platform other times to force us to confront the reality of
38:52
what slavery has meant for our development as a nation and this isn't just about sort of the kind of textbook
38:57
ideas of what happened to slaves you're you've got essays in here about health care about geography about sugar about
39:04
music all of these different ripple effects that happen throughout the economy um one and really life here
39:11
you say uh in a sentence you said you know we would not be the united states were it not for slavery this is kind of
39:17
one of the original fibers that made this country absolutely the conceit of the magazine is that
39:24
one of the things we hear all the time is well that was in the past why do you have to keep talking about the past well one i think the past is clearly
39:30
instructive for the people for how uh how we are right now but also the conceit of the magazine is that you can
39:36
look at all of these modern phenomenon that you think are unrelated to slavery at all and we were going to show you how
39:43
they are and so we have a story in there about traffic patterns we have a story about why we're the only western industrial country
39:49
without universal health care about why americans consume so much sugar about capitalism about democracy we're really
39:55
trying to change the way that americans are thinking that this was just a problem of the past that we've
40:00
resolved and show that it isn't what many people don't know and i um point
40:05
this out in my essay is that one of the reasons we even decide to become a nation in the first place is over the issue of slavery and have we not have
40:12
slavery we might be canada that one of the reasons that the founders wanted to break off from britain is they were afraid that britain
40:18
was going to begin regulating slavery and maybe even moving towards abolishment and we were making so much
40:24
money off of slavery that the founders wanted to be able to continue it we're not taught that when we're taught
40:29
about our origin stories and not knowing that then um really does not allow us to
40:35
grapple with the nation that we really are and not just the nation that we're taught in kind of american mythology and
40:41
that that money ends up fueling so much more of what made this country of course
40:47
it's not incidental that 10 of the first 12 presidents of the united states were slave owners this is where at that time
40:54
this kind of very burgeoning nation was getting so much of its wealth and its power it's what allowed uh this kind of
41:01
ragged group of colonists to believe that they could defeat the most powerful empire in the world at that time and it
41:06
went everywhere it was north and south we talk about the industrial revolution where do americans believe that the
41:12
cotton that was being spun in those textile company or textile mills coming from coming from enslaved people who are
41:18
growing that cotton in the south the rum industry which was really rum was the currency of the slave trade that run was
41:24
being processed and sold in the united states the banking industry that rises in new york city is rising largely to
41:32
provide the mortgages and insurance policies and to finance the slave trade the shipbuilders our northern
41:38
shipbuilders the people who are sending voyages to africa to bring enslaved people here are all in the north so this
41:44
was a truly national enterprise but we prefer to think that it was just from backwards southern earth because that is
41:51
the way that we can kind of deal with our fundamental paradox at our beginning that we were a nation built on both the
41:56
inalienable rights of man and also a nation built on bondage yeah if you even talk about wall street's name comes from
42:03
something that most of us don't recognize absolutely so wall street is called wall street because it was on that wall that enslaved people were
42:09
bought and sold that's been completely erased from our national memory and completely erased from the way that we
42:14
think about the north at the time of the civil war new york city's mayor actually threatened to
42:21
secede from the union with the south because so much money was being made off of slave produced cotton that was being
42:27
exported out of new york city um it is that erasure i think that has prevented
42:32
us from really grappling with our history and so much a modern society
42:37
that we see that is still related to that you know one of the essays in here uh about health care which is
42:43
fascinating is that some of the myths that started then are still perpetuated today in modern healthcare and that
42:49
there are still gross misunderstandings of uh that could actually have very serious health consequences absolutely
42:56
so uh linda villarosa has this compelling essay that talks about how during slavery um and slavers were using
43:03
enslaved people to do these medical experiments but also we were using medical technology to justify slavery by
43:11
saying enslaved people don't feel pain the way or people of african descent don't feel pain the way that white
43:16
people do um that they have thicker skin and so you can beat them or torture them and it's not
43:23
going to hurt as bad well these are all justifications for slavery but if you look at modern medical science and our
43:28
understanding they're still using these calculations that say for instance lung capacity was one of
43:34
the things that linda writes about that black people have worse lung capacity and the reason that slaver said that was
43:40
they said that working in the fields and doing this hard labor was good for black people because it helped them increase
43:45
their lung capacity well what linda points out is today um doctors and
43:51
medical science are still accounting for what they think is a is a lessened lung capacity of black
43:56
americans and it's simply not true but we've never purged ourselves of that false science that was used to justify
44:03
racism you you talk about how basically the the black american or there's the black experience has been inconvenient
44:09
to the narrative of this nation in all of these different categories that um it's been
44:15
something that we have struggled to deal with but oftentimes just not dealt with it as a result that it was thorny
44:22
absolutely so when you think about the story of who we are that we are the we are this
44:28
um country built on individual rights we are the country where if you are coming from a place where you are not free you
44:34
can come to our shores and you can get freedom well then you have black people and every time you look at black
44:39
americans you have to be reminded that there was one fifth of our population who had no rights no liberties no
44:46
freedom whatsoever we are the constant reminder of really the lie at our origins that
44:52
while thomas jefferson was writing the declaration of independence his enslaved brother-in-law were there to serve uh
44:59
him and make sure that he's comfortable so i think this is explains a lot the
45:04
continued perception that black people are a problem the black people are as
45:09
abraham lincoln said a troublesome presence in american democracy because every time you see us you have to be
45:15
reminded of our original sin and no one wants to be reminded of sin we're ashamed of sin
45:21
so as i think nicole hender jones pointless uh states right is this idea that um you
45:27
know u.s is kind of based upon this idea of slavery and i think what we can
45:32
really um distill from this whether we're looking at it in the context of
45:38
um columbus or 1619 in the first slave ships
45:44
we're seeing this point where the um ideological assumption that dark-skinned
45:52
people are different and the threat or dark spin people are
45:57
inferior and exploitable emerge right and so this begins this idea of
46:03
race-based thinking where we can start to really differentiate um people along
46:09
skin color uh so we want to be cognizant that um
46:15
much of this comes out of the colonization period or colonialism and slavery so race is born out of that and
46:22
colonialism is not a uh a
46:28
uh what is it it's not a innocent um practice right uh the british french and
46:34
portuguese uh and dutch empires for that matter went around the world um and took
46:39
people's land took people's stuff and took people um so it wasn't
46:45
just this historical happiness happenstance that the british empire emerged it actually was a deliberate
46:50
plan to take over these lands and um you know steal people uh for still people on
46:57
property for the purposes of gaining gold right um likewise with slavery
47:02
which you know um is in many ways born out of colonialism uh slavery was this process particularly
47:10
within the european context of trying to amass a huge amount of wealth to sustain
47:15
these empires um despite uh what's called despite um
47:22
or in spite of profit right and uh what i think is really um pointing about
47:28
what howard zinn mentions in his text um is that slavery of the of the pre-colonial area
47:35
it did exist right so slavery is not a unique phenomenon right we we have seen this in other areas but the type of
47:43
european slavery um and what would be you know eventually
47:48
the american slavery was far different in that
47:53
we saw a turning point where um individuals were not given any respect
47:59
and not allowed to um perform um their normal culturalisms
48:05
language stress religion so on and so forth we saw this really deliberate
48:11
destruction of human identity and humanity within them right through
48:17
all of the things related to the slave trade and colonialism
48:22
and that um as a result uh we were able to
48:28
create this huge amount of profit because we were just cycling people in and out but also just devastating
48:33
effects on um these individuals right and so when we think about this we have to understand
48:38
where does this come from and and how do we justify right so how do you justify taking over someone's land or
48:44
enslavement right this idea of what's called racial paternalism and i'm not going to focus on this as a key term but
48:50
i do want you to know this because it is important to this um conversation into this unit um but this idea of um
48:59
the white man's burden right this idea that you know we have to save these individuals and you saw
49:05
nicole hannah jones mention this in terms of the lung capacity argument therefore justifying slavery that you
49:11
know working these folks hard in the field was good for their health you know because it increased their lung capacity
49:17
right so a biological argument and much of the
49:22
church um both in you know italy with the pope um and throughout the west um
49:28
through a variety of judeo-christian sects had actually justified slavery and
49:35
conquest that they needed to take this land for god or they needed to spread the word of god
49:41
and as a result they took a more moralistic framework um so in a nutshell it's painting
49:46
colonized people and or enslaved people as evil or biologically and psychologically inferior and therefore
49:53
in need of rescuing and civilizing by the colonizer right or eradication to
49:58
maintain you know racial purity or social order um and even with enslavement we still see
50:04
this idea of the rescue right we're going to rescue these people from the backwards of africa and we're going to
50:10
civilize them and put them to work right and it actually did this right so it took um individuals who had um you know
50:17
thousands of years of history of ceremony dress and culture and converted
50:23
them into a narrow kind of framework and remember i mentioned this a lot with the carl
50:28
allen sherman indian schools um here in california but you know common across the united states where we took children
50:36
and literally beat the indian out of them right because we thought that they were back we thought that they were inferior and needed to make them
50:42
quote-unquote americans and actually the rise of the boarding school movement we get into indigenous history later in the
50:48
semester came out of this idea that as we had been fighting indian wars
50:54
throughout the u.s um for you know close to 100 or so years um we realized that
50:59
it was no longer tenable to keep fighting all out wars with indigenous people on their land right remember
51:06
indians this is their home turf we live on occupied indigenous land it was
51:12
easier for us to steal children and um you know
51:17
make them into americans and then send them back and basically um infect them
51:22
you know with our kinds of thinking so
51:28
we want to understand that race is a european colonial construct um you know that it has this kind of intellectual
51:33
origin again it's related a lot to migration and citizenship so it gets to be a citizen doesn't when you interact
51:40
with individuals of other cultures it uh uh
51:45
creates this opportunity to maybe think about difference in a way that is inferiorizing or subordinating
51:53
or dehumanizing rent it was pioneered by christian leaders and cartographers and scientifically
51:58
justified by evolutionary biologists it is not one or the other the church is just as implicated as science and
52:03
science it's just as implicated as the church okay so um we had individuals at
52:09
the time working hand in hand basically trying to moralize and scientize or or you know
52:15
biologize this idea of human difference right i'm going to show you two kinds of different examples here
52:21
one is on the left so this is from carl linnaeus's famous texas sema naturea where he
52:28
describes human taxonomy so if you've taken again a biology in the biology course in the
52:35
past uh you may have heard of the you know binomial latin nomenclature system uh we
52:42
actually had this for human beings and so what i want to show here on the left is the four categories of men remember
52:47
those four races of man that we talked about at the beginning of this lecture and um how we describe them and so um
52:54
the first one is homo american script or indigenous american you'll notice first that reddish is coming up here right so
53:01
a color choleric obstinate contented and regulated these are social
53:06
characteristics these are not physical characteristics they're not saying they have shorter legs or brown eyes or this
53:13
type of circulatory or whatever system they're basically a different color skin and
53:18
they have these different social characteristics now um i don't know about you but um social
53:24
characteristics are extremely subjective right so one person's angry person is another
53:30
person's normal person one person's loud person is another person's normal speaking person so on and so forth right
53:37
so let's compare this to homo europa's which is white right so homo europius europeans as lo and behold white right
53:44
so red indians white europeans fickle sanguine blue-eyed right gentleman
53:50
governed by laws homo asiaticus right indigenous pan-asian cultural medicine group as sallow or yellow
53:57
grave dignified abaricious and ruled by opinion not by logic but by opinion right
54:03
and then homo afro as black phagomatic cunning lazy lustful and governed by greece okay so
54:09
um what i want to stress on all of these three categories right is that um the
54:14
first marker is always a color the last uh category or the last signifiers are all social and that's very key because
54:22
we can't really find a true reason to understand these folks as different
54:28
other than you know there are these subtle cultural differences but that doesn't necessarily mean that one is
54:33
better than the other it just means that um these individuals have different social dynamics which occur right they
54:40
have they happen all the time there's different social events experience out of california versus the east coast versus europe versus asia so on and so
54:46
forth right that doesn't mean that anybody's different but again a conservative ever by carl as the father of human
54:52
of modern taxonomy and human taxonomy saying this on the right here we can see this the spanish caste system okay so
55:00
the gaster system was a system imposed by the spanish crown in conjunction with the papacy to establish a hierarchical
55:07
order of individuals by birthright and political right so from one down to 16 here on the bottom
55:15
you can see not only individuals right so who these are and then their children
55:20
so if you were a spaniard and you had a child with an indigenous woman you would have a
55:26
mestizo right if you were a or a mixed person mestizo means mix right if you
55:32
were a mestizo person and you had a child with an espanola or a spaniard you
55:38
would have a gas diesel right and what the church did and i know this isn't explained in the text now i encourage
55:44
you to do a little bit more reading on this is they literally created this entire system of not only
55:50
um birthing right so like you could understand a person's um mixing or
55:57
mixture by their breed uh and but then again they literally um
56:02
created these political rights associated with them right and this governed much of what we know as latin
56:08
america uh up until you know um many of the countries seceded from spain and portugal and uh the
56:16
mid to late eighteen hundreds this video is going to explain a little bit about what carlinius did but i wanna be very
56:22
clear that again whether you're looking at um christianity in the crown or science they're working hand in hand at
56:28
this time to create this idea about race and race difference
56:34
[Music]
56:41
carl linnaeus was born in the southern swedish province of smarland in 1707 and
56:46
is considered to be one of the most influential scientists of his time his life's work was to develop and
56:52
refine a way to group life on earth or to classify it so straightforward was his system it is
56:59
still used by scientists and understood by people across the world today his father neil singh mars and linnaeus was
57:05
both an avid gardener and a lutheran pastor and cal showed a deep love of plants and a fascination with their
57:11
names from a very early age while studying medicine at both the universities of lond and the university
57:16
of uppsala in sweden he devoted a large amount of his time into the study of plants and in 1732 he
57:23
mounted a botanical expedition to lapland over five months he traveled some three
57:28
thousand miles collecting biological specimens and taking notes in 1734 he mounted another expedition to
57:35
central sweden in 1735 linnaeus moved to the netherlands and it was in that same year that he published his most
57:41
well-known work the sistema natrea or the system of nature
57:47
in it he outlined a new system for the naming of all living things returning to sweden in 1738 he practiced medicine
57:54
specializing in the treatment of syphilis and lectured in stockholm before being awarded a professorship at
58:00
uppsala university in 1741. throughout his life linnaeus showed an interest in nature and the systems which
58:06
govern it he wrote not just about classification but also about ecology how organisms
58:13
interact with their environment he explored food chains and even defined the concept of race dividing humans into
58:20
four groups americanus asiaticus africanus
58:26
and europeanness forced to retire from teaching in 1774 by a stroke nanea suffered a further
58:32
stroke and eventually died in 1778. linnaeus was driven by a lust for all
58:39
nature and the desire to understand and classify it his legacy remains and is used by the many dedicated scientists
58:46
today who are driven by that same desire
58:53
so carl linnaeus c a r l carl linnaeus l i n n a e u s
59:04
colinates as you heard there is known for a few things a few things first he
59:09
formalized the modern system of naming organisms using both their genus
59:17
u g-e-n-u-s and species name and that system we know today as binomial
59:23
nomenclature binomial nomenclature binomial i meaning truth and nomio
59:28
meaning name so two names to characterize and classify plants and
59:34
animals so what does that look like that's how we got homo sapiens two names
59:40
one genus one species that's how we got homo erectus two names to categorize and
59:46
classify these are examples of binomial nomenclature so that's one thing the
59:52
second thing brother carl vinayas is known for in 1735 he published as you
59:57
heard there the book systema
1:00:08
or the system of nature and in that book carl linnaeus classified thousands of
1:00:14
species of animals and plants and what he also did was he described human
1:00:21
beings just as he described any other plant or animal and he did this by
1:00:26
examining several monkeys and noting the similarities between the monkeys and man
1:00:32
and carl annas pointed out that both species basically have the same anatomy
1:00:37
except for speech he found no other differences between monkeys and man so
1:00:43
in his book systema natura he placed man and monkeys under the same category and
1:00:49
he called this category anthropomorpha anthropomorpha meaning man like
1:00:56
man like and eventually in later editions of systema natura we mankind
1:01:03
were classified as primates instead of anthropomorphic and humans were given
1:01:09
the full binomial of homo sapiens so that's how we got there now here's where
1:01:15
it gets really interesting brothers and sisters in the first edition of system
1:01:20
unnaturate and that would be the 1735 publishing of the book carlinaeus as you
1:01:26
heard in that piece subdivided the human species into four varieties based on
1:01:32
continent and skin color now this is 1735 some 282 years ago carl linnaeus of swedish
1:01:41
birth a european man subdivided the human species into four varieties number
1:01:47
one europaeus albus europais albus also known as white european number two
1:01:56
americanus rubescence americanus rubestus also known as the red american
1:02:03
and when i hear that being from washington dc i automatically think of the washington redskins americanus
1:02:10
rubescence the red american number three asiaticus fuscus asiaticus fuscus also
1:02:18
known as the brown asian which was subsequently changed in the 10th edition of the book which was
1:02:25
published in 1758 asiaticus couscous was changed to asiaticus the reedus also
1:02:32
known as the yellow asian so that's how we got there and number four africanus
1:02:38
niger africanus niger also known as the black african
1:02:44
africanus niger n-i-g-e-r niger now we know today that
1:02:49
niger is a country in west africa some people say niger and the history of that country dates way back into what is
1:02:56
known as pre-history so the first so again right we have a
1:03:02
well-known scientist creating an entire organizing system where he's
1:03:07
regionalizing and colorizing individuals and creating again those those
1:03:12
um subtle differences by um by social characteristic to assume that
1:03:19
there's this entire difference of humanity or sub-humanities within this
1:03:24
larger frame right so
1:03:30
what that what did i give rise to this idea of again these individuals being different and
1:03:36
then our exploitation and enslavement now i've added um
1:03:42
latinos in here and what i want to stress and we'll talk a little bit about this with ethnicity um next time and
1:03:49
then later in the semester is that um the red indian the black african and the
1:03:55
yellow asian were the original three other races of man defined by
1:04:01
white men right so white men defining these individuals as different these other communities did not see them as
1:04:08
see themselves as such where we want to understand brownness comes in is this mixture or this mestizo between
1:04:15
indigenous people particularly in latin america and um
1:04:21
um in spain right or europe right which gave rise to brown skinned people now again there are brown skin agents there
1:04:29
are brown skin africans and there are brown skin native americans um as there
1:04:34
are um darker skinned um whites but again we've created this larger
1:04:40
system right which again makes it unstable this idea of race we've comported it into these four colors
1:04:47
right right white sorry white black yellow and red and then added a
1:04:53
fourth one in because white and black and white and red mixed and as a result right um we created
1:05:00
these entire um systems of subjugation based upon these ideas
1:05:07
where we can really see how race evolves over time is in the way in which um it has been codified and i wanted to show
1:05:14
this um uh link to vox where you can see how
1:05:19
census data provides that race is a social construct and extremely unstable so let's just watch it for a second and
1:05:25
we can kind of parse this out right so in 1790 a black or an african person was only considered or counted as a slave or
1:05:31
a free person in 1960 american indian and alaskan natives are considered to be
1:05:38
eskimo or american indian right uh asian in 1890 was only counted as
1:05:43
chinese or japanese obviously there's a lot more ethnic groups than that we only counted american indian and
1:05:49
alaska natives in 19 uh 10 is 80 uh i'm sorry as indian 1930s hispanic or latino
1:05:55
was only mexican uh in 1850 you if you were black or of
1:06:01
african descent you would be or a black or african-american you could be black mulatto black slave or mulatto
1:06:07
slave all right uh white was a free white male or free white female right in 1790
1:06:15
um 1960 there was no hispanic or latino that was added in later in 1890 you
1:06:21
could be black mulatto quadrone or octal meaning that if you were black or you
1:06:27
had a uh two black parents or a black and white parent which gave rise to mulatto like a
1:06:34
mestizo um if you were further removed from that you could be a quadrant or an octo mean that you had a um a
1:06:42
uh grandparent or a great-grandparent that was black right which would also deny your political rights right
1:06:49
uh native hawaiian or other pacific islander in 2000 has all of these different um pieces right in 1940 um
1:06:57
asian counted for all these folks chinese japanese filipino korean and or hindu
1:07:03
right and then hispanically in 2000 um accounts for all these right mexican mexican americans
1:07:08
right and so the reason why i show this again is to stress how
1:07:14
evolving and unstable race is and when we get into ethnicity next time we're going to actually see how ethnicity is
1:07:20
implicated in this and so when we talk about racial formations and gender formations next week we'll think about
1:07:26
one that again race uh was not always a part of the american experience that actually was a social construct and um
1:07:34
was uh it's been constantly being created and recreated over time okay so with that we're done for today
1:07:40
um we've covered a couple different things right race what it is and how it relates to color dominant versus
1:07:46
subordinate groups and the history of race where it comes from and how it has changed key terms uh race social
1:07:53
construct dominant group subordinate group and i'm sorry i'll take that out race making we're only we're going to
1:07:59
talk about race making next time with that i look forward to seeing our discussion boards about this
1:08:04
a little bit later and if you have questions feel free to email
1:08:19
you
