Racial Caste: The Jim Crow Era

1. Racial Caste: The Jim Crow Era ETHN 100 Week 7 Session 1

2. Last Time • Listened to a brief lecture on African Americans and the emergence of slavery in the United States. • Engaged in a brief workshop on developing your thesis for WA2.

3. Today • Analyze video clips to explore the “social construction” of race. • Explore the structural-cultural lineage of slavery and the Jim Crow South.

4. Reflexive Commentaries – Yang, Chapters 7-9 • Excellent work. Solid questions and answers. Particularly impressed by the questions posed. Seemed to foster much stronger linkages to course ideas than earlier rounds. • Bodes well for WA2 and beyond. • Remember, your role in WA2 is to be a “Analytical Thinker Positioned in a Critical Conversation” • Reflexive commentaries are designed to reflect this rhetorical context with regards to role, audience, and purpose.

5. A House Divided • 1999 – based loosely on the life and family of Amanda America Dickson. • Film takes place before, during, and after the Civil War. • Additional literature can be found on the ETHN 100 website under Resources.

6. Group Discussion • Question from your online session: When does Amanda become Black? • What are some different ways of thinking about this? • How did you answer this question and why?

7. Omi and Winant’s “Racial Formation” “Scientific interpretations of race have not been alone in sparking heated controversy; religious perspectives have done so as well. Most centrally, of course, race has been a matter of political contention. This has been particularly true in the United States, where the concept of race has varied enormously over time without ever leaving the center stage of US history… …Race is indeed a pre-eminently socio-historical concept. Racial categories and the meaning of race are given concrete expression by the specific social relations and historical context in which they are embedded. Racial meanings have varied tremendously over time and between different societies.”

8. Amanda’s Experience • Phenomenology – Study of experience • Experience is tied to Intention, Perspective and Context • Interdisciplinary framework to understand experience: • Power • Culture • Structure • Identity • Experience is “socially constructed”

10. Two Key Assumption in Ethnic Studies • Experience is “socially constructed” and can therefore be “deconstructed.” • Power is central to this construction.

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12. From Slavery to Reconstruction to Jim Crow • Slavery is abolished • Key question: How to establish cultural and structural systems to reestablish Black-White relations? • Jim Crow – A song-and-dance caricature of blacks performed by whites in blackface • Nickname for laws that segregated southern society. • Supposed guiding notion: Separate but equal. • Anti-miscegenation • Education • Private Businesses • Public Accommodations

15. Key Questions • What were the structural and cultural continuities between slavery, reconstruction, and Jim Crow? In other words, what about the plantation system remained relatively in place or unchanged? • What belief system or ideology regarding power relations did southern whites rationalize segregation? • How were identities with regards to race, class, gender, and sexuality shaped by these factors?

16. Master-Slave Relations • The American brand of slavery was a system of paternalistic domination, creating, in some degree, a father-child relationship between master and slave. • Slaves lacked virtually all legal rights. They could not own or inherit property, testify in court, hire themselves out, or make contracts. • Slave laws provided that marriage between slaves held none of the rights of marriage between free people. • Families could be broken up in trade with no consideration given to keeping husband, wife, and children intact as a single unit. • Laws forbade teaching slaves to read and write. • Interpretation of Slave Laws • Left almost entirely to the master, not to the courts. • This wide discretion utter cruelty was not uncommon.

17. Continuities from Slavery to Jim Crow • Access to political representation (voting and legal representation) • Opportunities to own property (land) • Opportunities for fair employment • Restrictions on forming families (anti-miscegenation laws) • Access to education

18. Physical versus Social Distance • Maintenance of social distance between the races, not physical distance, was central to reinforcing the racial political and economic system. • Physical contact was rare between most slaves and masters. The majority of slaves were field hands. Personal relationships between household slaves and master were rarer and quite different.

19. Social Intimacies • Social intimacy came in some forms: • Concubinage between White men and Black women • Raising of white children by black “mammies” • It was out of this closeness that the myth of racial harmony in the Old South emerged. • These were of course relationships between unequals. • Where did we see this in the relationship between Julia and David Dickson?

20. Rationalizing Separate But Equal • The dominant culture developed an ideology that the system in place was a happy one. • Minstrel characters: i.e. Mammie, Sambo, Happy children.

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23. Parting Questions • How do we situate our own experience in social context? How are our experiences socially constructed? • What ideologies do we unknowingly subscribe to that justify systems of inequality and the oppression of “others”?

24. Next Session • African American Experience in the Post-World War II Era • RN on Lipsitz article, “Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White’ Problem in American Studies”