Homework answers / question archive / GHSN 240 – Ethnic Groups in America Take-home Midterm Exam Spring 2021 Instructions: Answer three (3) of the following questions as completely and thoroughly as you are able

GHSN 240 – Ethnic Groups in America Take-home Midterm Exam Spring 2021 Instructions: Answer three (3) of the following questions as completely and thoroughly as you are able

Sociology

Share With

GHSN 240 – Ethnic Groups in America

Take-home Midterm Exam

Spring 2021

Instructions: Answer three (3) of the following questions as completely and thoroughly as you are able. Be sure to get into specifics and provide evidence for each of your points.  Then, upload your answers into the Assignment “Midterm Exam.”

1. Barbara Fields states, in her essay “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” that “race is not an element of human biology (like breathing oxygen or reproducing sexually); nor is it even an idea (like the speed of light or the value of) that can be plausibly imagined to live an eternal life of its own. Race is not an idea but an ideology. It came into existence at a discernible historical moment for rationally understandable historical reasons and is subject to change for similar reasons.” And, she concludes that “If race lives on today, it does not live on because we have inherited it from our forebears of the seventeenth century or the eighteenth or nineteenth, but because we continue to create it today.”  Based on your reading of both the Fields and the Goodman essays, and on your viewing of the first episode in the series Race: The Power of an Illusion, explain how “race” can be both “real” and “not real” at the same time.

2. Describe the experiences of Asians in America prior to 1882.  What drew Asians to America, either voluntarily or otherwise?  For what reasons did the United States adopt the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882?
3. The Irish Potato Famine of the mid-1840s created the first “mass refugee” crisis to affect the United States, with almost two million Irish Catholics entering the U.S. by 1850.  What sort of welcome did the Irish receive?  Who were the “Know Nothings,” and what was their view towards immigration by those like the Irish?

4. The rapid industrialization that took place in the U.S. during the Gilded Age of the late 19^th century created a need for a large and growing urban labor force.  Answering that demand were the “New Immigrants” who came in increasing numbers from the rural countryside of Southern and Eastern Europe, including from southern Italy and Eastern European Jews.  What were their experiences in America?