Exam 3: The White Racial Frame- a Social Force

In the nineteenth century, the leading French anatomist Paul Broca broke new ground in understanding how the brain works, yet he was also a leading racist thinker.

A fully developed concept of "race" as a pseudo-biological category was developed by Europeans and European Americans in the late 1600s and 1700s.

Compare and contrast reactions to citizen protests by the conservative wing of the white elite, the more liberal wing of the elite, and the center of the elite.

In the early seventeenth century English American colonists first used terms like "Christians" for themselves and "negroes" for Africans and African Americans.

Thomas Jefferson published the cases of Virginia's General Court for the years 1730 to 1772. ___________ involved legal matters of concern to slaveholders "such as testamentary disposition of slaves, creditors' rights in a debtor's slaves, warranty in the sale of slaves, life estates in and mortgages of slaves, dower in slaves, and entailed slaves."

The U.S. Constitution assertively recognized the slavery economy and implicitly incorporated strong white-supremacist ideas in such provisions, including the one that counted an African American as only three-fifths of a person.

Benjamin Franklin contended that black Americans were an inferior "race," a word he helped to make central to the racialized framing of his day.

In recent decades a few social and physical scientists at major universities, such as Arthur Jensen at the University of California and Richard Herrnstein at Harvard University, have continued to argue that racial-group differences in average scores on the so-called "IQ" (intelligence quotient) tests reveal genetic differences in intelligence between whites and certain Americans of color. Discuss their work.

Describe Social Darwinism.

In the decades from the 1970s to the present, numerous conservative, mostly white, judges have ruled that group-remedy programs for racial discrimination violate the U.S. Constitution, which they assert only recognizes the rights of individuals, not groups.

A fully developed concept of "race" as a pseudo-biological category was codified in the work of leading European and American intellectuals around the time of the American Revolution.

Before he became president, ____________ argued that the physical difference between racial groups was insuperable.

Describe the significance of the Moynihan report and its enduring impact in explaining "black problems" in cultural terms. In the process, explain the failure to deal in depth with the systemic racism that is much more central to explaining well the difficult economic and family conditions faced by these impoverished Americans.

Thomas Jefferson played a central role in the early development of racial rationalizations for the enslavement of black Americans.

By the late 1700s, hierarchical racial relations were increasingly explained in overtly bio-racial terms.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels long ago pointed out, "the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e. the class, which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force." Using Marx's and Engels's famous words as your starting point, describe the white racial frame.

In the twenty-first century fewer than two dozen corporations control much of the U.S. mainstream media.

Associated with a rosy view of U.S. society and the assertion of white innocence is a romanticizing of the racist past. Discuss how this romanticizing can be seen in the long tradition of Hollywood movies dealing with U.S. history, from the 1900s until the present.

Many people have long viewed Immanuel Kant, the leading philosopher of the West, as uncontaminated by racist thought. Explain why this view of Kant is inaccurate.

Describe the significance of the City of Richmond, Virginia v. J. A. Croson Co.