Reference no: EM133716192

Assignment:

1. After reviewing the content on Understanding Constructs of Race and Ethnicity, please reflect on and respond to the following questions.

This is also an opportunity to think about and practice analyzing data using your classmates' posts in the discussion board as content to examine.

• How did your personal definition of race and racism compared to those presented in the materials and presentations?
• What did you notice about how your classmates defined race and racism? Were there patterns, similarities, differences? Provide examples if possible.
• What did you notice about how your felt about talking about race and racism? Were there patterns, similarities, differences? Provide examples if possible.

Please answer the following questions

2. RACE-The Power of an Illusion is a provocative three-hour series that questions the very idea of race as biology. Scientists tell us that believing in biological races is no more sound than believing the sun revolves around the earth. So if race is a biological myth, where did the idea come from? And why should it matter today? RACE-The Power of an Illusion provides an eye-opening discussion tool to help people examine their beliefs about race, privilege, policy, and justice.

Episode II - "The Story We Tell" uncovers the roots of the race concept, including the 19th-century science that legitimated it and the hold it has gained over our minds. It's an eye-opening tale of how America's need to defend slavery in the face of a radical new belief in freedom and equality led to a full-blown ideology of white supremacy. Noting the experience of Cherokee Indians, the U.S. war against Mexico and annexation of the Philippines, the film shows how definitions of race excluded from humanity not only Black people, but anyone who stood in the way of American expansion. The program traces the transformation of tentative suspicions about difference into a "common-sense" wisdom that people used to explain everything from individual behavior to the fate of whole societies, an idea of race that persists to this day.

1. What is the significance of the episode's title, "The Story We Tell"?
2. What function has that story played in the U.S.?
3. What are the stories about race that you tell?
4. What are the stories you have heard?
5. Did the film change the way you think about those stories? If so, how?
6. In the film, historian James Horton points out that colonial white Americans invented the story that "there's something different about 'those' people" in order to rationalize believing in the contradictory ideas of equality and slavery at the same time. Likewise, historian Reginald Horsman shows how the explanation continued to be used to resolve other dilemmas: "This successful republic is not destroying Indians just for the love of it, they're not enslaving Blacks because they are selfish, they're not overrunning Mexican lands because they are avaricious. This is part of some great inevitability... of the way races are constituted." What stories of difference are used to mask or cover up oppression today? Why does society promote/perpetuate these kinds of stories?
7. Please engage two of your classmates in discussion on any of the above where you can respectfully expand on what was said, explore ideas shared, and/or provide your thoughts.