Part 2: Arbitrary Construction - Zz*UNPUB* CASTE Resources - ALA Share - GSU Library Research Guides at Georgia State University

Topics for Exploration in Part Two

Slavery in America

Slavery in America timeline
Ferris State University Jim Crow Museum (n.d.) Detailed interactive timeline that links to outside material on the history of slavery in America
The missing pieces of America’s education (The Washington Post Online 8/28/2019)
The Washington Post (8/28/2019) Noted historians asked to write an essay on aspects of slavery that are misunderstood, poorly taught or not covered at all in the nation’s classrooms.
Slavery and the making of America (Streaming Video)
PBS (2004) Documents the history of American slavery from its beginnings in the British colonies through the years of post-Civil War Reconstruction. It looks at slavery as an integral part of a developing nation, challenging the long held notion that slavery was exclusively a Southern enterprise. Offers new perspectives on the slave experience and testifies to the active role that Africans and African Americans took in surviving their bondage and shaping their own lives.
Sharecropper Contract 1867
This 1867 contract between landowner Isham G. Bailey in Marshall County, Mississippi, and two freedmen stipulates different arrangements for each man’s family.
Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America (graphic content)
James Allen - Without Sanctuary (2018) Searching through America's past for the last 25 years, collector James Allen uncovered an extraordinary visual legacy: photographs and postcards taken as souvenirs at lynchings throughout America.
Lynching Postcards Memorabilia Marketplace (graphic content)
Lynching postcards and related items are still sold today on collectible and memoribilia websites.

Race as a Construct

Historical foundations of race
National Museum of African American History & Culture (n.d.) The term “race,” used infrequently before the 1500s, was used to identify groups of people with a kinship or group connection. The modern-day use of the term “race” is a human invention.

Aliya Saperstein - Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality (2017) Discusses whether or not race is "fixed" by using data to suggest that race is "flexible". Used 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.

Halle Berry uses "one drop" rule in custody battle over her daughter
Susan Donaldson James - CBS News (02/08/2011)

Jim Crow Laws

What was Jim Crow?
Ferris State University - Jim Crow Muesum (n.d.) Detailed piece on Jim Crow including historical background and etiquette norms for daily life.

David Cunningham (Brandeis University) explores systems of racial separation and institutionalized segregation known as Jim Crow laws.

Remembering Jim Crow
Stephen Smith, Kate Ellis, and Sasha Aslanian - American Public Media (n.d.) For much of the 20th Century, African Americans in the South were barred from the voting booth, sent to the back of the bus, and walled off from many of the rights they deserved as American citizens. Until well into the 1960s, segregation was legal. The system was called Jim Crow. In this documentary, Americans—black and white—remember life in the Jim Crow times.

Understanding Jim Crow (2015) by David Pilgrim
Understanding Jim Crow introduces readers to the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, a collection of more than 10,000 contemptible collectibles that are used to engage visitors in intense and intelligent discussions about race, race relations and racism.

NBC News Learn (2020) After the Emancipation Proclamation, blacks filled local and national offices, but white southerners were determined to pass new state laws to curtail this progress This legislation is often referred to as Jim Crow laws.

Racism

Racism defined
Dismantling Racism Works website (2021) Robust discussion including definition of racism using critical race theory, discussion of systemic/structural racism, expressions of racism, and how oppression works. includes supplemental video content from outside sources.

Nazism and the Jim Crow South

Nazism and the Jim Crow South resource list
U.S. National Holocaust Museum(n.d.) A list of works that explore race and society in Nazi Germany and the Jim Crow South, including works that focus on one context specifically, but may be helpful in providing background information or contextualizing other regional studies.
How the Nazis used Jim Crow Laws as the model for their race laws
Bill Moyers (10/13/2017) Bill Moyers in conversation with author James Whitman about his new book "Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law."
The Hitler Vortex: How American racism influenced Nazi thought
Alex Ross - The New Yorker (4/30/2018) Lengthy discussion of Hitler's rise to power and his use of American race law and other historic American precedents to develop policy and strategy.

Racial Violence in America

In the Shadow of Slavery (eBook)
In 1991 in lower Manhattan, a team of construction workers made an astonishing discovery - the remains of an eighteenth-century "Negro Burial Ground." Closed in 1790 the site turned out to be the largest such find in North America and contained the remains of as many as 20,000 African Americans. The graves revealed an aspect of American history long hidden: the vast number of enslaved blacks who labored to create our nation's largest city. This book lays bare this history of African Americans in New York City, starting with the arrival of the first slaves in 1626, moving through the turbulent years before emancipation in 1827, and culminating in one of the most terrifying displays of racism in U.S. history, the New York City Draft Riots of 1863.

Who Was Edmud Pettus?
Errin Whack - Smithsonian Magazine (03/07/2015)

Topics for Exploration in Part Two (continued)

Disease, Immunity and Genetics

Europeans, Africans have different immune systems
Science Daily - Cell Press (10/20/2016) Now, two studies show that those differences in disease susceptibility can be traced in large part to differences at the genetic level directing the way the immune systems of people with European and African ancestry are put together.
European diseases left a genetic mark on Native Americans
Michael Price - Science Magazine (11/15/2016) A new study suggests that infectious diseases brought by Europeans, from smallpox to measles, have molded the immune systems of today’s indigenous Americans, down to the genetic level.

Geneva Convention

Writings from Black Experience

Letter from a region in my mind
James Baldwin - The New Yorker (12/3/2018) Reprint of Nov 1962 article The author discusses the life of African American boys as he was growing up, his role as a preacher, and his view of white-African American relations.

New York Draft Riots of 1863

The New York City Draft Riots (1863)
Euell A. Nielsen - BlackPast (11/10/2017) Overview of what is regarded as the single largest urban civilian insurrection in United States history.
Race and Labor in the 1863 New York City Draft Riots
Shannon Luders-Manual - JSTOR Daily (5/4/2017) In July 1863, over a thousand Irish dockworkers rioted against the Civil War draft in New York City in a four-day upheaval, targeting black workers and citizens.

Selma to Montgomery March (1965)

Selma: Beatings start
Life Magazine (3/19/1965) Photo-essay coverage of the first Selma to Montgomery March on March 7th for voting rights. Marchers were violently attacked, including John Lewis.
Selma-to-Montgomery National Historic Trail
National Park Service (2020) In 1996 the Selma-to-Montgomery National Historic Trail was created by Congress under the National Trails System Act of 1968. Like other historic trails covered in the legislation, the Alabama trail is an original route of national significance in American history.

Racial Anthropology

The beautiful skull and Blumenbach’s errors: the birth of the scientific concept of race
Raj Bhopal - BMJ (12/22/2007) Raj Bhopal re-examines the role of perhaps the most important contributor to the scientific concept of race, Blumenbach, whose insights and errors provide important lessons for us today.
Anthropologists' views on race, ancestry, and genetics
Jennifer K. Wagner et al - American Journal of Physical Anthropology (Feb 2017) Controversies over race conceptualizations have been ongoing for centuries and have been shaped, in part, by anthropologists.

Dalit Panther Movement

Dalit Panther Movement (1972-1977)
Diane Pien - BlackPast (8/17/2018) Educated youth from the slums of Mumbai, India started the Dalit Panther Movement (DPM) in June 1972, inspired by Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar and the U.S. Black Panthers. Dalits (“downtrodden”) are the lowest “untouchable” caste in Hinduism. Hinduism views Dalits as sinners in their prior lives who can only redeem themselves by being good servants of the high castes.
Dalit/black solidarity: Comrades in the struggle for racial/caste justice
Shoba Sharad Rajgopal - South Asian Popular Culture (March 2021)
India’s struggle for caste justice has been likened by many to the struggle for racial justice in the United States. Small wonder then, that the activists who spearheaded the movement for caste justice were inspired by the most famous of the activists in the United States, the Black Panthers of the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 70s. One of my most memorable encounters from my newsroom days in India in the early 1990s was with Namdeo Dhasal, one of the Dalit activists who had founded the Dalit Panthers movement. This essay draws on that experience, as also some others with the Dalit movement and Dalit leaders in India and links their struggle for social justice with that of African Americans, from the Harlem Renaissance era to the present.

Race and Color Discrimination in the Workplace

Significant EEOC Race/Color Cases(Covering Private and Federal Sectors)
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission/EEOC (n.d.) - An inexhaustive list of significant EEOC private or federal sector cases from 2003 to present. These cases illustrate some of the common, novel, systemic and emerging issues in the realm of race and color discrimination.

Caste and Surnames

Casteism continues to thrive among Indians abroad – through surnames
Amrita Ghosh and Arun Kumar - Scroll.In (8/28/2020) Asking last names is often how some educated Indian elites politely insinuate their caste. But who gets to ask the caste of others and why?
What's in a surname?
Tejas Harad - Feminism India (5/18/2016) A person’s caste identity is inherent in their surnames (most times, but not always). The corollary of this is that a person’s caste can be discerned by looking at their surnames. This is more true for Brahmins than others.

Eugenics

Laughlin's Model Law
Truman State University (2020) In 1933, the Reichstag of Nazi Germany used Laughlin’s law as a template for the passage of the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring.
Eugenics Archives
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (n.d.) Eugenics Archives reflects the collaboration of scholars, survivors, students, and community partners in challenging eugenics.
The false, racist theory of eugenics once ruled science. Let’s never let that happen again
Dr. Howard Markel - PBS NewsHour (2/16/2018) Some consider eugenics to be merely the weird, step-uncle of modern, scientifically-grounded genetics. Yet this bit of history reminds us to constantly evaluate and test our theories for evidence of racism and prejudice before implementing them and harming the innocent.

Sources Discussed in Text

Transcription of 1740 Slave Code in South Carolina
Letter from the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield, to the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South-Carolina
Special Collections, John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (1740) In this open letter to the inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas, George Whitefield criticizes the slave owners for their mistreatment of slaves within those colonies.
German citizenship law : Nuremberg, September 15, 1935.
Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor
One Drop Rule (Act 320 of 1911 and House Bill 79 of 1911)
Frank W. Sweet - Encyclopedia of Arkansas (2/1/2019) This law made interracial “cohabitation” a felony, and it defined as “Negro” anyone “who has…any negro blood whatever,” thus relegating to second-class citizenship anyone accused of having any African ancestry. Although the law had features unique to Arkansas, it largely reflected nationwide trends.
The Ox-Bow Incident
When a posse captures three men suspected of killing a local farmer, they become strongly divided over whether or not to lynch the men. Stars Henry Fonda (DVD)

ZzUNPUB CASTE Resources - ALA Share: Part 2: Arbitrary Construction

Topics for Exploration in Part Two

Topics for Exploration in Part Two (continued)

Sources Discussed in Text

Guide Editors

Zz*UNPUB* CASTE Resources - ALA Share: Part 2: Arbitrary Construction

Topics for Exploration in Part Two

Topics for Exploration in Part Two (continued)

Sources Discussed in Text

Guide Editors

ZzUNPUB CASTE Resources - ALA Share: Part 2: Arbitrary Construction