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Latino Studies 101: Latinos in the U.S. A Seminar on Race, Power, and Resistance Ester Trujillo, PhD .
"Course Description: This class explores the social, racial, legal, and discursive construction of immigrants from Latin America to the U.S. and their progeny. Latinas/os in the U.S. are discursively constructed as threats to the “American” way of life because they do not present the typical markers of immigrant assimilation; markers such as upward economic mobility, the adoption of English as a primary or sole language, and intermarriage with white Americans. The Latino Threat Narrative has long shaped the characterization of Latinas/os as a monolithic group. However, Latinas/os come from many different backgrounds and represent various origin nations. In this class we will primarily examine how Latinas/os of various national origins have become the focus of the Latino Threat Narrative and how various types of violence shape their lives. Our examination of the ways immigrants and their children respond to their depiction as threats to the social order will take us through a discussion of race, class, gender, sexuality, and migration. This course also investigates ethnic and racial tensions and points of solidarity across these populations in the U.S. Together, we will delve into various debates in the field of Latino Studies:" .
The Use of the Terms "Negro" and "Black" to Include Persons of Native American Ancestry in "Anglo" North America Jack D. Forbes
"In 1854 the California State Supreme Court sought to bar all non Caucasians from equal citizenship and civil rights. The court stated: The word "Black" may include all Negroes, but the term "N egro" does not include all Black persons . . . . We are of the opinion that the words "White," "Negro," "Mulatto" and "Black person," whenever they occur in our constitution . . . must be taken in their generic sense . . . that the words "Black person," in the 14th section must be taken as contra distinguished from White, and necessarily includes all races other than the Caucasian. ! As convoluted as the quote may be, it tends to express a strong tendency in the history of the United States, toward creating two broad classes of people: white and non-white, citizen and non-citizen (or semi-citizen). The tendency to create a two-caste society often clashed with the reality of a territory which included many different types of people, of all colors and different degrees of intermixture of European, American, African, and Asian. Native American people, whether of unmixed ancestry or mixed with other stocks, were at times affected by the tendency to create a purely white-black social system, especially when living away from a reservation or the ancestral homeland.2 In the British slave colonies of North America along the Atlantic coast, many persons of American ancestry were at times classified as blacks, negroes, mulattoes, or people of color, and these terms were, of course, used for people of African ancestry. The manner in which Americans and part-Americans were sometimes classified as "mulat toes" and "people of color" from New England to South Carolina and in the Spanish Empire are explored elsew here. 3 The purpose here is to illustrate how the term "negro" has also been applied to people of American descent."
“What’s ‘Colorism’?”
How would your students answer this question?
David Knight
Issue 51, Fall 2015
"When I began teaching in Boston, I was struck by how often students of color referred to each other as “light-skinned” or “dark-skinned.” Almost daily, I witnessed high school students identify, categorize and stereotype their peers based on skin tone. Having grown up African American in Louisiana, I was used to white people’s ideas of white superiority and even those “colorstruck” black people who preferred lighter skin. But I did not expect that so many young people of diverse ethnicities—including Dominicans, Puerto Ricans and Cape Verdeans—would actively engage in everyday forms of skin-color bias. As one teacher in one classroom, what was I to do?
Any response to this question is complicated due to the deep legacy and influence of skin-color preference in the United States and in other parts of the world. Within-group and between-group prejudice in favor of lighter skin color—what feminist author Alice Walker calls “colorism”—is a global cultural practice. Emerging throughout European colonial and imperial history, colorism is prevalent in countries as distant as Brazil and India. Its legacy is evident in forums as public as the television and movie industries, which prefer to cast light-skinned people of color, and as private as the internalized thoughts of some Latino, South-Asian or black parents who hope their babies grow up light-skinned so their lives will be “just a little bit easier.”
It makes sense that teenagers—who are working out their own identities on a day-to-day basis—also engage in color-conscious discourse. But how do young people negotiate such powerful stereotypes, particularly when many of the contributing elements are out of their control?
African American Studies Second Edition Edited by Jeanette R. Davidson
"Georgene Bess Montgomery’s chapter, “Reading Black Through the Looking Glass: Decoding the Encoding in African Diasporic Literature,” highlights the importance of understanding literary texts by properly applying culturally spe cifi c theories in their analyses. While she acknowledges that other approaches may be helpful, she stresses that any analysis employing only these will never be suffi cient to understand correctly, and in full, any African Diasporic work. Using the Ifa Paradigm, Georgene Bess Montgomery presents an analysis of the short story “The Youngest Doll” by Rosario Ferré as illustration. Grace D. Gipson’s chapter, “Diversity and Representations of Blackness in Comic Books,” presents a detailed overview of the history and development of representations in comic books inclusive of race, gender, disability, sexual ori entation and identity. She describes the ongoing challenges to develop diverse and intersectional characters, the writers and artists creating these works, and the growing scholarship in this fi eld of study. Beginning with a focus on the need to reset the standards, she guides us step by step through the transforma tion of comic books full of stereotypes and derogatory images to comics with a growing number of characters illustrating Black life, challenges, hopes and aspirations, as well as science fi ction fantasies."
20Hip-HopDamon Chandru Sajnani
"The word “hip-hop” has various uses and overlapping meanings. People who most identify with hip-hop recognize it as a culture, and this meaning was developed and is advocated in explicit contrast with the more mainstream understanding of the term as a musical genre. When understood as a genre, it is most often thought to be synonymous with “rap music.” The term is also used to reference a dance style, and—in my experience—this is the word’s primary association for those who are least familiar with it. Related to its historical association with Blackness and social critique, hip-hop is also sometimes characterized as a cultural or social movement. As KRS-ONE rhymes, hip-hop is “more than music, hip is the knowledge, hop is the movement” (2007).
Civil RightsQuincy \ T. Mills
The civil rights movement looms large in twentieth-century African American studies. Regardless of one’s politics or the dearth of course material on race in American primary schools, the struggle for integration, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and the March on Washington (sans the “for Jobs and Freedom” part of the march’s title) have come to stand in for civil rights. The heroic icons and damning imagery naturalizes civil rights as a corrective to American democracy. Yet “civil rights” is a rather vague term. Do noncitizens have civil rights? If not, where can they turn for protection? Do political actors decide the boundaries of civil rights? And does the “civil” in “civil rights” account for the exigencies of humanity or the demands of everyday human existence?
Experiment delves into one of the most egregious violations of medical ethics in U.S. history. From 1932 to 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducted a study in Macon County, Alabama, to observe the natural progression of untreated syphilis in Black men. Approximately 600 impoverished African American men were enrolled—399 with syphilis and 201 without. These men were misled into believing they were receiving treatment for "bad blood," a term used to describe various ailments, but in reality, they were not treated for syphilis, even after penicillin became the standard cure in 1947. The study was rooted in racist assumptions prevalent at the time, including beliefs that Black individuals were biologically different and less intelligent than whites. Researchers used the study to test these unfounded theories, further perpetuating racial stereotypes. The unethical nature of the study included the lack of informed consent and the deliberate withholding of effective treatment, leading to severe health consequences and deaths among participants. The study was only terminated in 1972 after public exposure, resulting in national outrage, a $10 million settlement, and a formal apology from President Bill Clinton in 1997. This episode underscores the lasting impact of the Tuskegee Experiment on the Black community's trust in the healthcare system and highlights the importance of ethical standards in medical research.
Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois represented two contrasting strategies for Black progress in the post Reconstruction era: Washington, born into slavery, rose to prominence as an educator and championed vocational training and economic self‑sufficiency, famously urging African Americans to “cast down your bucket” and accept segregation temporarily for gradual uplift thecrashcourse.com+9en.wikipedia.org+9coursehero.com+9 In contrast, Du Boist he first Black Harvard Ph.D. urged immediate civil rights, higher education, and political empowerment through sculpting a leadership class he called the “Talented Tenth” Their debate shaped early 20th-century Black leadership: Washington focused on industrial education and accommodation, while Du Bois insisted on equality, intellectual development, and activism.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931) was born into slavery in Mississippi and became a pioneering journalist, teacher, suffragist, and fearless anti lynching activist. After three of her friends were lynched in Memphis in 1892, she co-owned the Memphis Free Speech, published Southern Horrors (1892) and The Red Record (1895), using data and journalism to expose that most lynchings were not about rape but tools of racial terror . When her press was destroyed and she faced death threats, Wells relocated north, continued her investigations, and brought her anti-lynching campaign to the U.K., helping found the British Anti Lynching Society In Chicago, she co-founded the Alpha Suffrage Club (1913) to empower Black women voters, launched the Negro Fellowship League to support southern migrants, and was a founding member of the NAACP She also challenged Jim Crow laws directly suing a railroad in 1884 and lobbied U.S. presidents for a federal anti-lynching law, planting groundwork for future legislation. Wells died in Chicago in 1931, but her trailblazing journalism, data-driven activism, and intersectional leadership laid crucial groundwork for later civil rights movements and her legacy helped spur the eventual passage of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act in 2022
In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court’s May 18, 1896, decision upheld a Louisiana law enforcing racially segregated train cars based on the “separate but equal” doctrine, a legal cornerstone of Jim Crow. Homer Plessy’s intentional legal challenge prompted the case, and although Justice Harlan’s powerful dissent insisted the Constitution is “color‑blind,” majority rule permitted segregation for nearly 60 years until Brown v. Board of Education (1954) repudiated it. In 2022, Louisiana issued a posthumous pardon for Plessy, marking a formal recognition of that historic injustice.