White Ethnic American Experience Flashcards
Reasons for studying/ treating White ethnic groups as minority groups?
- They have not completely vanished
- Traditional prejudices against them still persist
- Each group has a unique assimilation history
- White Ethnic groups provide a partial explanation for current situations of other groups
- Use baseline experience of white ethnic groups to test theories and concepts
Whiteness Studies
Examinations of the issues surrounding white privilege as well as a look into the role of whiteness and white culture play in an increasingly multicultural society
- what it means to be white in today’s society
Symbolic Ethnicity
Being only symbolically interested in ones ethnicity like on St. Patrick’s Day when you wear a shirt
Third Generation Interest
Third Generation Interest states that 3rd generation people will start to be interested in their ethnicity even if it is only symbolically and they don’t have any real connection to it
Push and Pull factors for early European Immigration
Push: Declining agricultural sector and emerging industrialization
Pull: opportunities to open trading posts and for new sources of raw material (GOODS and MARKETS) / Labor needs in the expanding American economy
Invention of white Race
The Invention of the White Race -White Anglo-Protestant elite (the dominant group) developed and circulated the idea of an advantaged “white race” in order to provide racial privileges fro propertyless British and other European American immigrants and prevent the latter from bonding with racial minorities.
-At first people of Irish and Italian descent did not define themselves as ‘white’ but eventually they took on the status as moved up politically and economically in the US
Irish American Experience (Push and Pull factors)
Push: Famine that came to Ireland in the 1940’s (Potato blight caused a massive failure of that crop)
Pull: (America) Land of opportunity
Catholic VS Protestant
Need a priest to connect to God vs. individual interpretation of religious beliefs
Catholic
- church is appointed by God as custodian of the Bible to interpret the scripture
- churches should be decorated with painting and statues to show gods glory
- people need the priest as a link between them and god/ pope speaks for all Christians
- the pope and his bishops could forgive sins in exchange for a gift to the church
- priests should wear special clothes because of their special link with god and remain unmarried
Protestant
- Private interpretation of the Bible
- Churches should be plain so that people concentrated on the minister and what he said about god
- people could find god without a priest/ pope speaks for no one
- only Jesus could forgive sins
- ministers were just ordinary people and should wear ordinary robes and get married if they wanted to
Protestant Ethic
- No one knows if God favors you or not, Wealth could be a sign of God’s elects, but acts don’t guarantee you a spot in God’s elect
- Idea that you were chosen by god for hard work and doing good
Xenophobia (be familiar with the fight surrounding a phobia VS an “ism”) Fear of foreigners
- Debate on whether it’s a phobia or an ism.
- ism means that there is an agenda or awareness aspect to it
Nativism
Example: “A deep vein of xenophobia and nativism”
- Actions and policies based on the hostility of natives toward foreigners
Social Darwinism
- The view that groups become socially dominant because they have been more successful than their competitors in the struggle to survive and, therefore, are biologically the “fittest”
- “Survival of the Fittest”
Scientific Racism
- A set of beliefs that includes
(1) the belief that racial and ethnic groups form a natural hierarchy of superiors and inferiors;
(2) the belief the White race is superior to the non-White races; and
(3) the belief that the “Nordic” segment of the White race is superior even to its other segments.
