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Siria
Instructor Name
Sociology
7 January 2020
Discussion
Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study is about the differences that are prevalent in American society but are seldom talked about. This book is a collection of well-chosen articles that gradually tried to prove that there is preferential treatment regarding different classes, races, and genders in the US.
In the article For Many Latinos, Racial Identity Is More Culture than Color, the author presented the case for the racial identity of Mexican Americans and other Latin American Immigrants that are collectively known as Latinos. She talks about how the Latinos are going through the process of acculturation and how slowly their identity is disappearing as the Census data is trying to identify them based on the color of their skin.
In the article Crossing the Border Without Losing Your Past, the argument goes further in favor of the Latinos as several of their stories are cited in which their children often find themselves concerning their new identity in the US.
In the article For Asian Americans, Wealth Stereotypes Don’t Fit Reality, the argument is more or less the same, but this time, the stereotype is not racial, but rather an economic one. Many Asians are considered as rich as they live in San Francisco in California. True that Asian Americans are doing better than most ethnic minorities in the US, yet they are not as rich as people deem them to be. The article is basically about an Asian called Rosa Chen and her clarification about the stereotypes that society has attached to her.
In the article The Black Codes, there is a detailed discussion about the laws that were enacted against the African-Americans or the Blacks as they are normally called. Most of these laws were rather draconian as some laws even punished the slaves if they accidentality caused harm to the animals that were in use of their white masters. They were even traded as currency to settle debts among the southern whites. Their status was so low in the courts that they were not allowed to testify against a white person, even though that person was the slave's master or not.
Many articles link themselves to the description of The Black Codes like An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes and Slaves, South Carolina, 1712. This legislation was a collection of codes that were strictly enforced against blacks to keep them in line. Some of the notorious mentions of this article are the check-and-balance imposed on the blacks to leave their plantations, the case of fugitive and runaway slaves and the cases of slaves that steal goods. In all cases, strict and harsh punishments were imposed. Another article An Act Prohibiting the Teaching of Slaves to Read expressly prohibited the learning and educating of the slaves by even their white masters.
Several cases are also cited in this regard like Plessy v. Ferguson in which there were attempts to define the boundary of the blacks concerning the rights of the whites. Another case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was intended at giving the right to blacks to get educated in the same classrooms as the blacks. Today these cases may not seem like a huge deal, yet at the time they were about racial equality and equal protection under the laws of the United States.
The native Indian Tribes were no differently treated like blacks. The situation may have ten times worse for them as they were driven out of their lands, unlike the blacks that did not even belong there. The discussion in this article is strictly based on racial facts and their implications on the Native Indian Population of the United States.
The argument can be summed up in the article Where “English Only” Falls Short. There the author talks about how English is vigorously promoted in the course of the business in New York. Likewise, how other ethnic groups fight fire with fire and value their ethnic brothers and sister first before the general English speakers of the region.
Works Cited
BIBLIOGRAPHY Paula S. Rothenberg, Soniya Munshi. Race Class and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study. Ed. 10th. New York: MacMillan Learning, 2016. Ebook. <https://4.files.edl.io/1c97/05/06/19/170057-b1a94e75-3a11-42ee-aecd-0fe284f6d19e.pdf>.
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