Race and Ethnicity

Question 1

Race

Answer 1

Refers to a person’s physical charaacteristics and the concept of dividing people into populations

Question 2

Ethnicity

Answer 2

People that group themselves together on the basis of nationality and shared group history

Question 3

Was Racism a cause or a consequence of slavery?

Answer 3

It developed out of economic need and commodities being used – racism developed to over to get over the moral hurdle

Prime knowledge of blackness – profit

Consequence of slavery embedded those notions in their minds

Racism more severe

Question 4

Rebecca Goetz

Answer 4

Rethinking the “Unthinking Decision” (2009)

Question 5

Rebecca Goetz

Answer 5

Examines the debates over the development of racism and slavery – within the article she concludes that regional variations in slavery played a significant part in the ways in which racial ideologies developed and cannot be taken all together

Question 6

Winthrop Jordan

Answer 6

White Over Black 1968

Question 7

Winthrop Jordan argues

Answer 7

Slave trade is what turned colour from a marvel into an issue

While dated, has significant impact on the way we understand slavery and race

Question 8

Gwendolyn Hall

Answer 8

Slavery and African Ethnicities 2005

Question 9

Gwendolyn Hall argues

Answer 9

Argues whilst some times and place, newly arrived Africans were purposefully separated by ethnicity, the countervailing patters show that Africans were generally clustered by ethnicity and region

Question 10

Kathleen Brown

Answer 10

Engendering Racial Difference 1996

Question 11

Kathleen Brown argues

Answer 11

As slavery became a more important form of labour, replacing indentured servitude, construction of racial difference provided background for more blatant measures of legal and social discrimination

Question 12

David Brian Davis

Answer 12

Construction of Race 1997

Question 13

David Brion Davis argues

Answer 13

Trying to understand race in the future we have to ground it in the past – in this past that the notion of separate human species were conceived – biproduct to facilitate religious, econmimc and imperial expansion across the world

Question 14

Tim Lockley

Answer 14

Race and Slavery

Question 15

Lockley argues

Answer 15

When scholars use race as a category they are not saying they are a different status of being – mechanisms informing the social construction of colour in a given historical context that are significant

Question 16

Barbara Fields

Answer 16

Ideology and Race in American History 1982

Question 17

Fields argues that

Answer 17

Positions the ideology of race to the American experiences that are still felt today – just as race is essential, so too is slavery – similarities between Africans became more important than differences

Question 18

Edward Rugemer

Answer 18

Slave Law and politics of resistance 2018

Question 19

Rugermer argues

Answer 19

While rebellions were rare they were significant on the development of slave societies by solidifying racial regimes through refining the laws

Question 20

Key Passages of White over Black

Answer 20

• Impact of colour on English due to rapidity of contact and how dark the people of West Africa were
• Concept of blackness loaded with more meaning than in southern Europe – symbol of danger
• Heathenism seen as manifestation of black refusal to live up to standards of civilisation
• Apes and Africans encountered at the same time

Question 21

Explanation for white over black

Answer 21

Attempt to disentangle slavery and race

Question 22

Key historical arguments: Brown

Answer 22

The tendency to begin with a view of race as a biological fact rather than as an ongoing historical and cultural construction and, second, the failure to acknowledge that competing concepts of racial difference

Question 23

Key Historical arguments: Gioventti

Answer 23

Plantations as a place of racial formation, reclaiming the centrality of slavery for understanding of race and racism in the region

Question 24

Key Historical Arguments: Barbara Fields

Answer 24

Race is purely ideological notion - once ideology is stripped away it is mainly abstract

Question 25

The Golden Coast (1665)

Answer 25

“a people of beastly living, without a God, law, religion, or Commonwealth”

Question 26

Darold Wax

Answer 26

Only after the discovery of the New World and After colonists from Europe yearned for cheap labour to work the lands did Europe define Africa’s place under domination

Question 27

Black men and…

Answer 27

comparisons with Apes found in the same region - black sexuality

Question 28

In Brazil

Answer 28

Residential segregation in Brazil is believed to be class based, and race is simply not an independent factor (Telles 2004)

Question 29

Telles argues that in Brazil

Answer 29

Assumed integration led to eventual assimilation…racial differences disappeared

Question 30

Issues with Telles

Answer 30

Cannot assume discrimination at all levels the same

Question 31

In Jamaica

Answer 31

Controlling activities of all African-descended people underscores the serious dilemma facing colonial officials in Jamaica

Question 32

Ideas about ‘corruption of…

Answer 32

blood’ - sexual intercourse between white and African-descended women - permanent alien born status

Question 33

Religion

Answer 33

Difference in prejudice to anything not christian

Question 34

Christian’s associate blackness with..

Answer 34

evil, literary construction of racial difference

Question 35

Christian vs heathen

Answer 35

Civilisation and civility

Question 36

Jobson says blackness was

Answer 36

Not the first impression of his encounters…it was the absence of Christianity

Question 37

Why was religion difficult to sustain prejudice?

Answer 37

When Africans started to adopt Christianity

Question 38

Laws and legislation

Answer 38

incorporated into the social order, endowed with legal, economic, and social meaning

Question 39

Legal ambiguity did not mean

Answer 39

there was no discussion on the issue of racial difference

Question 40

Virginia General Assembly

Answer 40

Repeated attested it was illegal to enslave the colony’s native population

Question 41

African women who were free were in a liminal position

Answer 41

detrimental laws of tax

Question 42

Alden Vaughan

Answer 42

English expressed racist belief about blacks in 17C, but the concept of racial ideologies` did not emerge until later

Question 43

Sweet claims

Answer 43

there was a European understanding of race before there was a modern vocabulary

Question 44

In Brazil there are….

Answer 44

mixed racial lines, more so than in any other society (Telles 2004)

Question 45

Analytically, Telles finds…

Answer 45

the conception of exclusion is inadequate because it expresses a dichotomy in which persons…are either in or out (Excluded from what?)

Question 46

Blood of the father - Brooke Newman

Answer 46

Interplay between the specific local conditions and broader historical process

Question 47

Race laws in Jamaica

Answer 47

June 20 1735 - New Bill for making African descended serviceable - avoid fighting the rebellious maroons

Question 48

G Hall - Slavery and African Ethnicities

Answer 48

Africans of same origins arrived in the Americas in clusters

Question 49

Banton

Answer 49

Meanings as something that are ever changing – first used in reference between a related set of people – all descendant were connected to the same lineage or the same race

Question 50

Racialised chattel slavery developed in the Americas

Answer 50

Themes of dehumanisation, violence, mental difference