Exam 1: Systemic Racism-A Comprehensive Perspective

Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton demonstrated in empirical and theoretical detail the importance of institutionalized racism, which involves more than the individual actions of scattered bigots.

Explain the link between the impoverishment (economic and otherwise) of African Americans and the enrichment and prosperity of white Americans.

While all delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention agreed that the new government should protect private property, and thus existing economic inequality, the right wing, center, and left wing of the white male elite had opposing views. Explain. Be sure to include the similarities in thinking between conservative and center delegates at the convention and thus the limits on what the left wing of this white elite was able to specify.

At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, slavery intruded on important debates, including debates over representation in the new Congress. Northern and southern delegates vigorously argued the matter and reached the famous three-fifths compromise on counting those enslaved for the purpose of white representation. What significance, if any, does the compromise have today?

W.E.B. Du Bois offered some of the first sociological analyses of a globalizing capitalism and imperialism. Writing of the years around 1900, what did he argue?

Analyzing Europe's extensive colonization of Africa, __________ demonstrated that extreme poverty and degradation in the African colonies was a key source of wealth and luxury in Europe.

How does prior wealth and privilege, once gained in an earlier generation, translate into wealth and privilege for later generations?

A majority of white feminist leaders accepted white racial privileges and the new racist theories of U.S. imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century.

In numerous provisions the final document was oriented to political liberty: there was no agreement on rejecting religious tests for office or protecting freedom of debate in Congress.

The white male elite delegates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention:

In recent decades, African Americans have undergone considerably more upward mobility from generation to generation than white Americans.

Systemic racism includes a diverse assortment of racist realities, including:

By the end of the summer of 1787 there were at least seven sections where the framers had the system of slavery clearly in mind. These included all the following EXCEPT:

Over the course of the ___________ and ___________ centuries a strong biological view of a hierarchy of races came to accompany older anti-black views accenting black inferiority in culture, religion, and civilization.

Politicians, columnists, teachers, lawyers, executives, and ordinary Americans routinely cite the U.S. Constitution, and the founders' actions, as the glory of U.S. society. Explain how this is revisionist history.

Explain how slavery's impact extended well beyond the local and national economy.

Joe Feagin and Kimberley Ducey write: "A comprehensive theory of systemic racism should encompass the dialectical idea that oppression creates seeds of its own destruction." Explain.

The demographic make-up (white and male) of those drafting the racialized U.S. Constitution in 1787 is very different to the demographic make-up of those who dominate the top positions in most sectors of U.S. society today.

One of the first extended social science analyses of U.S. society as a well-institutionalized system of racism was that of _____________, who provided in the 1940s a well-researched argument showing how sustained labor exploitation of black Americans created a centuries-old structure of "racial classes."

George Washington: