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The state of being active on behalf of oneself or of a group, as a result of knowledge and consciousness, and which allows one to exert power over oneself and others.
One of the only times in her narrative that Harriot Jacobs feels a sense of agency is when she purposefully sleeps with an unmarried white man. She says that "there is something akin to freedom" about having the control of choosing to have sex with someone rather than being sexually abused as she has been may times in her life by Dr. Flint. |
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Using opposition for the purpose of non-racial or racial classification. These oppositions frequently express and implied hierarchy of value between the two terms. (e.g self/other, man/woman, black/white)
In the film, Birth of a Nation, white women are portrayed as pure and loyal to both their homes and their husbands, while mulato women are portrayed as beastly and sexually active. |
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Practices in an organization or system that result in the subordination and control over some racial groups and the inequitable distribution of power and privileges.
Institutional racism is evident in the article "Possessive Investment in Whiteness". According to this article black people were denied loans by banks; they were not given the same privileges as other races. |
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An approach to the understanding of racial discrimination through means of market forces and the unequal distribution of wealth.
The article "Inbetween Peoples" explains how Jews and Italians were not considered white when they first immigrated to America, rather it was not until they elevated in economic status that they were considered white. |
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An ideal that defines what it means to be a woman through piety, purity, and domesticity. This is a gender convention that most strongly associates with northern, white, middle class women. Historians date the origins of this back to at least the 19th century, but it is also relevant to femininity today.
Mrs. Flint is the epitome of a "true woman" She is pure, loyal to her husband and her children, as opposed to Harriet Jacobs who is a slave and repeatedly sexually abused by Dr. Flint. Jacobs claims that she has been unfortunate and does not have the luxury to be able to act like a true woman. |
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The natural process by which we group people along physical characteristics. Race is an example of this, gender is another. Classification helps us sort out the world in meaningful ways, and it doesn't necessarily mean that we prefer one group over another, but frequently it does.
In the article "First Impressions" the white people are successful in racially classifying the Africans when they first encounter them. Clearly they are different along physical characteristics and, therefore, they group them as a different category of people. |
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Those who are simultaneously non-white and non-black. As such, these people have a relatively fluid social location within a society that promotes a racial hierarchy of differential power and privileges.
In the article "Inbetween peoples" they speak of how the Italians were involved in a "spectacular diaspora" where they were racialized as the chinese of Europe and in the U.S. they were more likely to connect them with Africans than they were to connect them with whites. |
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The socially recognized groups and categories to which we belong in society such as our gender, class, religion, age, etc. These shape our experiences and thus provide vantage points for interpreting the world.
In the film Lone Star, we can see a vivid example of social location, in the fact that there are two bars in town; one for white and one for the black. There are also differences of social location within particular race such as Mercedes and her daughter as well as the Colonel and his father. |
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The 19th century political movement intended to end racial slavery. Some white abolitionists believe that African Americans are inferior to the white people and thud don't want them to have equal rights.
John Brown was an abolitionist. He believed slavery was wrong and entirely against the Christian religion. |
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The opposition to intermarriage and interbreeding between the white race and the supposedly inferior non-white race. Intermarriage and interbreeding was regarded as racially suicidal as well as a dire threat to the Saxon government and civilized way of life. Under anti-miscegenation legistlation, a non-white man could be persecuted for "race mix-up" if marrying a white woman, white women could lose their citizenship for marrying a non-white man.
In the film Lone Star, Mercedes and Buddy Deeds hide the fact that they had sexual relations for many years from the public because of and anti-miscegenation view that was persistent in society. |
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The process of adding social meaning to racial classification. Some of this meaning may disadvantage some groups and some may not. Social meaning refers to the fact that we have moved beyond simply saying "people differ through their physical characteristics."
This is evident in Nat Turner's confession, where he describes the violence of slavery and claims a slave is not much higher than a horse. Turner was dehumanized and was compared to an animal, and that was okay because society allowed it so. |
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A shared way of talking or thinking. (e.g. Christianity or science) Whereas, a "dominant" discourse supports the convention relations of domination and subordination, "counter" discourse" challenges and critiques these conventions. A single discourse can have both dominant and counter elements and this be contradictory.
Frederick Douglas's narrative is a counter discourse because it is an abolitionist statement than counters the dominant ideology of the time, that is slavery. |
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An "imagined community" whose geographical borders are artificially constructed and whose members typically enforce a self/other binary relationship with foriegners, minorities, and other out-groups. In group pride (AKA patriotism) often leads to out-group hatred (AKA xenophobia) when a boundary-grounded in racism- is drawn between those who are part of a group and those who are not.
In Professor Sawyer's lecture, he spoke of the how all nations are imagined communities because their is nothing natural about them. Instead, it is the members and their qualities, both physical and not, that create these non-concrete divisions and call them nations. |
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The expectations that society has regarding the morality, spheres of influence and activity, perceptions, and lifestyles of women and men. Conventions can vary across cultures, classes, and generations.
In Sojourner Truth's Aint I women, she clearly lays out the difference between the gender conventions for black and white women, trying to make a point of the double standards for black and white women. |
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A term used by historians to describe how women's authority was, beginning in the mid 19th century, situated in the "seperate sphere" of the home. This emerging discourse allowed (primarily) northern, white, middle class women to connect new ideas about gender roles within the family to their growing participation in abolitionism.
Mrs. Flint is the perfect example of a women situated in the home. She is loyal to her husband and children, and is pure. |
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Beliefs, practices, and system sanctioned in the 19th century with a systematic ideology based on full-blown pseudoscientific theories of racial inferiority (where blacks are assigned the lowest position within a strict racial hierarchy)-- that serve to make some groups disadvantaged and other groups privileged.
In the article "Continuing Significance or racism" there is an anecdote that adequately portrays was racism is. After a white woman did not bother saying thank you to a black man who opened the door for her, the man said next time he would just shove the door in a white woman's face. First of all, the white woman shouldn't just assume that is the man's job to open the door, and the black man cannot generalize and assume all other white women in this world would do the same as this particular one. Things such as this are what stimulate a higher degree of racism. |
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A representation- licensed by racism- based on negative and degrading types assumed to be fixed in nature. Critiques of stereotypes as misrepresentations are typically based on either the promotion of positive types or on the assertion that real people are complex beings from whom generalizations cannot be made.
In the article "Possessive Investment in Whiteness" the results of a research report showed that more than 50% of American whites viewed blacks as innately lazy and less intelligent and less patriotic than whites. |
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Doctrine of biological inheritance, the root of all racist thinking/doctrine/ideology that asserts that some groups of people inherit specific characteristics- intellectual and temperamental- that make them inferior to other or superior racial groups. When the belief in biological inheritance fuses with and is reinforced by color prejudice, the result is racism.
In the movie, "The difference between Us" they speak of the eugenics movement as supporting view of biological determinism. Basically, they wanted to conserve the Aryan race as best they could, attempting to keep inferior traits from contaminating superior people. |
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