Reading Essay

 •If race structures inequality, as Audrey Smedley, Michael Omi, and Howard Winant argue, then from the colonial period to the turn of the twentieth century, did the United States either resolve or reaffirm what Edmund Morgan called the American Paradox vis-à-vis not only African Americans, but also Native Americans and other nonwhites?  

Consider:  race vs. class; privilege; worldview; hierarchy; differential treatment; ideology; common sense; signifying difference; Herrenvolk democracy; Anglo-Saxonism; Manifest Destiny.