Race, Color, Culture

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

TR 12:30-1:45pm Car Barn 202 In the 1850s, New York establishments advertising for new employees often added the coda, “No Irish need apply,” reflecting Americans’ widespread fear of being swamped by low-class, Catholic immigrants from Éire. In 1857 in the Dred Scott decision, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney pronounced black Americans “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his own benefit.” In the 1920s, the U.S. Congress passed deeply restrictive immigration laws for the first time since our independence, certainly targeting and limiting immigrants then arriving from East Asia, but more so the larger numbers from eastern and southern Europe, notably peasants from Italy and Jews from Russia and Poland. In 1939, the U.S. government refused to allow a ship loaded with German Jewish refugees to dock at our ports; the ship was forced to return to Germany, and its passengers to their fates. By the 2050s, some demographic prophets tell us, fully half of the U.S. population will (may?) be Latinos, due to current -- and for many native-born Americans, much feared -- waves of immigration from Latin America. Such political targetings of selected “suspect” groups are thus a near-constant in U.S. history: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same). Yet a closer historical look suggests that adage to be both deeply right and thoroughly wrong. By 1960, a wealthy Catholic of Irish descent, John F. Kennedy, won the presidency of the United States; less than a half-century later, a Harvard-educated African-American repeated the unlikely story, as Barack Obama rose to assume the title, Mr. President. We no longer wring our hands over the huge numbers of our fellow citizens who ethnically identify with the Irish, Italians, or Germans (the last being the most common national heritage that Americans claim). Instead, we live in world where a spate of books tells us how, over time, the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews each “became white,” and where a 1992 novel, perhaps also portending a thoroughly assimilated future for Latinas (and their brothers), describes How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. To better instruct ourselves about the hues of our humanity, we will also consider other societies where race, color, and culture intersect in intriguing ways. In Peru, an old racist adage declared that “[t]he indian is the animal that most resembles man,” yet Peruvians elected a full-blooded Inca-descendent to the presidency early in this century. Brazil has recently instituted quota-systems by (dark) skin-color for greater access to the public universities, a matter tricky to implement given the complex skin-tone spectrum that prevails there. (The policy is attacked by critics as injecting into Brazilian society’s vaunted “racial democracy” some previously unknown forms of tension, i.e., American-style race-mongering.) Brazil’s race-mixture has long included Japanese-descent Brazilians from early 20th-century immigrant waves. Now a recent wave of counter-migration, wherein hundreds of thousands of Japanese-descent Brazilians have gone back to their ancestral homeland, vividly shows the cultural differences between those of the Japanese “race” who stayed put, and the samba- and beach-loving returnees who are Brazilian born-and-bred. Throughout this term we will critically and deeply explore the three concepts that compose its title, and how they relate to one another in our minds, in our cultural attitudes (both today and in the past), and (by term’s end) in some better understood social reality. Research from the fields of sociology, anthropology, and history may be central to our venture, but we also will draw fruitfully on materials and studies ranging from population genetics all the way to visual and verbal symbolic representations, such as caricatures, comedy routines, posters, and ethnic jokes. Why is any of this important? Throughout the entire semester, we will be confronted with the “facts of life” for various races, skin-colorations, etc. in the U.S. and elsewhere. Precisely because different “types” of people often come into tension-filled contacts with one another, their life-courses are predictably apt to go down very different roads. Those differences, and our interactions with others of different races, colors, and cultures, are thus profoundly consequential for people’s life-styles and – far more importantly, in my view – for their life chances: their likelihoods of having good (or bad) jobs, high (or low) incomes, more (or fewer) years of education, better (or worse) health and life expectancy, and so forth.