Hello there, I need help with a few assignments regarding my anthropology class. I have attached the assignments with the questions. It should be pretty straightforward; you have to read a few articles and answer some questions. Thank you! I will attach the pdf for each assignment.
11.4 ? Karen Brodkin Sacks: How Did Jews Become White Folks? Start Assignment · Due Apr 26 by 11:59pm · Points 40 · Submitting a text entry box, a media recording, or a file upload ? This task should take about 1.5 hours of your time. ❗️Please read Karen Brodkin Sacks' work Actions . ? Take notes on this reading as the material will appear on the upcoming quiz. ⚖️ This assignment is part of the "Course Participation" group which is weighted at 20% of your grade. Sacks examines the social construction of "whiteness" throughout American history in order to illustrate the way that race and social status changes over time. Guidelines ❗️Please remember: it is your responsibility to demonstrate a sincere knowledge of the reading. Please reply with complete and thoughtful answers that prove – beyond any doubt – that you took the time to complete this important reading. Academic Integrity · The ideas in your response must be your own. Do not take ideas verbatim from any "study" or plagiarism websites. · You're always encouraged to tie in elements from other readings or lessons. If you incorporate ideas from our lectures or other readings, please remember to properly cite the source in-text. If you need help with citations, please refer to Purdue Online Writing Lab (Links to an external site.). Length and Content · Please write 1-3 complete and thoughtful sentences for each question (as appropriate). · Please include some citations in your responses. You can cite this reading, your own outside resources, my lessons, a radio story, etc. Citations need to be academic and reliable. ? Video Option: Consider filming your response! · Instead of writing your answers, please consider filming your response · Read this media submission support page (Links to an external site.) for help Questions ❗️Please remember: it is your responsibility to demonstrate a sincere knowledge of the reading. Please reply with complete and thoughtful answers that prove – beyond any doubt – that you took the time to complete this important reading. 1. Using specific examples from the text, explain how power and racial identity intersect. 2. Using specific examples from the text, explain how racial categories change over time. What does this reveal about the cultural reality of race? CLASSIC CONTEMPORARY CROSS-CULTURAL How Did Jews Become White Folks? KAREN B. BRODKIN 46 One way to see how societies construct race and ethnicity is to look at the historical ex- periences of particular categories of people in the United States. A century ago, the author of this selection explains, Jews and other European immigrants were defined as nonwhite. After World War II, however, Jews were included among “white folks.” The American nation was founded and developed by the Nordic race, but if a few more million members of the Alpine, Mediterranean, and Semitic races are poured among us, the result must inevitably be a hy- brid race of people as worthless and futile as the good- for-nothing mongrels of Central America and South- eastern Europe. (Kenneth Roberts, quoted in Carlson & Colburn, 1972:312) It is clear that Kenneth Roberts did not think of my ancestors as white like him. The late nine- teenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries saw a steady stream of warnings by scientists, policymakers, and the popular press that “mon- grelization” of the Nordic or Anglo-Saxon race— the real Americans—by inferior European races (as well as inferior non-European ones) was de- stroying the fabric of the nation. I continue to be surprised to read that America did not always regard its immigrant European workers as white, RACE AND ETHNICITY that they thought people from different nations were biologically different. My parents, who are first-generation U.S.-born Eastern European Jews, are not surprised. They expect anti-Semitism to be part of the fabric of daily life, much as I expect racism to be part of it. They came of age in a Jew- ish world in the 1920s and 1930s at the peak of anti-Semitism in the United States (Gerber, 1986a). . . . It is certainly true that the United States has a history of anti-Semitism and of beliefs that Jews were members of an inferior race. But Jews were hardly alone. American anti-Semitism was part of a broader pattern of late-nineteenth-century racism against all southern and eastern European immigrants, as well as against Asian immigrants. These views justified all sorts of discriminatory treatment, including closing the doors to immi- gration from Europe and Asia in the 1920s.1 This picture changed radically after World War II. Suddenly the same folks who promoted nativism and xenophobia were eager to believe that the Euro-origin people whom they had deported, re- viled as members of inferior races, and prevented “How Did Jews Become White Folks?” by Karen Brodkin Sacks, from How Did Jews Become White Folks & What That Says About Race in America, by Karen Brodkin Sacks, pp. 79–83, 86–87, 88–92, 96 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998) 274 MaciCh46ff.qxd 2/4/06 2:15 PM Page 274 from immigrating only a few years earlier were now model middle-class white suburban citizens. It was not an educational epiphany that made those in power change their hearts, their minds, and our race. Instead, it was the biggest and best affirmative action program in the history of our nation, and it was for Euromales. There are simi- larities and differences in the ways each of the European immigrant groups became “whitened.” I want to tell the story in a way that links anti- Semitism to other varieties of anti-European racism, because this foregrounds what Jews shared with other Euroimmigrants and shows changing notions of whiteness to be part of America’s larger system of institutional racism. EURORACES The U.S. “discovery” that Europe had inferior and superior races came in response to the great waves of immigration from southern and eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century. Before that time, European immigrants—including Jews—had been largely assimilated into the white population. The 23 million European immigrants who came to work in U.S. cities after 1880 were too many and too concentrated to disperse and blend. Instead, they piled up in the country’s most dilapidated urban areas, where they built new kinds of work- ing-class ethnic communities. Since immigrants and their children made up more than 70 percent of the population of most of the country’s largest cities, urban America came to take on a distinctly immigrant flavor. The golden age of industrializa- tion in the United States was also the golden age of class struggle between the captains of the new industrial empires and the masses of manual work- ers whose labor made them rich. As the majority of mining and manufacturing workers, immigrants were visibly major players in these struggles (Higham, 1955:226; Steinberg, 1989:36).2 The Red Scare of 1919 clearly linked anti- immigrant to anti-working-class sentiment—to the extent that the Seattle general strike of native-born workers was blamed on foreign agitators. The Red Reading 46 How Did Jews Become White Folks? 275 Scare was fueled by economic depression, a mas- sive postwar strike wave, the Russian revolution, and a new wave of postwar immigration. Strikers in steel, and the garment and textile workers in New York and New England, were mainly new im- migrants. “As part of a fierce counteroffensive, employers inflamed the historic identification of class conflict with immigrant radicalism.” Anti- communism and anti-immigrant sentiment came together in the Palmer raids and deportation of im- migrant working-class activists. There was real fear of revolution. One of President Wilson’s aides feared it was “the first appearance of the soviet in this country” (Higham, 1955:226). Not surprisingly, the belief in European races took root most deeply among the wealthy U.S.- born Protestant elite, who feared a hostile and seemingly unassimilable working class. By the end of the nineteenth century, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge pressed Congress to cut off immi- gration to the United States; Teddy Roosevelt raised the alarm of “race suicide” and took Anglo- Saxon women to task for allowing “native” stock to be outbred by inferior immigrants. In the twen- tieth century, these fears gained a great deal of so- cial legitimacy thanks to the efforts of an influential network of aristocrats and scientists who devel- oped theories of eugenics—breeding for a “better” humanity—and scientific racism. Key to these ef- forts was Madison Grant’s influential Passing of the Great Race, in which he shared his discovery that there were three or four major European races ranging from the superior Nordics of northwestern Europe to the inferior southern and eastern races of Alpines, Mediterraneans, and, worst of all, Jews, who seemed to be everywhere in his native New York City. Grant’s nightmare was race mixing among Europeans. For him, “the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew” (quoted in Higham, 1955:156). He didn’t have good things to say about Alpine or Mediter- ranean “races” either. For Grant, race and class were interwoven: The upper class was racially pure Nordic, and the lower classes came from the lower races. MaciCh46ff.qxd 2/4/06 2:15 PM Page 275 Far from being on the fringe, Grant’s views resonated with those of the nonimmigrant middle class. A New York Times reporter wrote of his visit to the Lower East Side: This neighborhood, peopled almost entirely by the people who claim to have been driven from Poland and Russia, is the eyesore of New York and perhaps the filthiest place on the western continent. It is impossi- ble for a Christian to live there because he will be driven out, either by blows or the dirt and stench. Cleanliness is an unknown quantity to these people. They cannot be lifted up to a higher plane because they do not want to be. If the cholera should ever get among these people, they would scatter its germs as a sower does grain. (quoted in Schoener, 1967:58)3 Such views were well within the mainstream of the early twentieth-century scientific commu- nity. Grant and eugenicist Charles B. Davenport organized the Galton Society in 1918 in order to foster research and to otherwise promote eugen- ics and immigration restriction.4 Lewis Terman, Henry Goddard, and Robert Yerkes, developers of the so-called intelligence test, believed firmly that southeastern European immigrants, African Americans, American Indians, and Mexicans were “feebleminded.” And indeed, more than 80 percent of the immigrants whom Goddard tested at Ellis Island in 1912 turned out to be just that. Racism fused with eugenics in scientific circles, and the eugenics circles overlapped with the na- tivism of WASP aristocrats. During World War I, racism shaped the army’s development of a mass intelligence test. Psychologist Robert Yerkes, who developed the test, became an even stronger advocate of eugenics after the war. Writing in the Atlantic Monthly in 1923, he noted: If we may safely judge by the army measurements of intelligence, races are quite as significantly