Reference no: EM133259084

Film commentary: "The Story We Tell"

1. According to the film, what statement in our Declaration of Independence was a contradiction? Why was this statement a contradiction?

2. How did the idea of race help to resolve the contradiction in our Declaration of Independence? Why were some groups of people excluded from receiving the rights guaranteed to all individuals in the Declaration of Independence?

3. Although we know that discrimination based on skin color was imported to (what became the) United States from Europe, was skin color the primary way that people in the thirteen colonies categorized people? If skin color was not the primary category, what were the two categories that were used to divide groups of people in the thirteen colonies?

4. When did "race" become the main way to categorize people?

5. How did categorizing people by the color of their skin benefit poor whites?

6. According to the film even though both slaves and Native people were seen as inferior to whites, by the beginning of the 19th century it was argued that Indigenous people had the capacity to be "civilized" (or they were "brown, white men") while slaves did not. What accounted for the differences in viewpoints about these two races? Why were the two races viewed in these different ways?

7. What did tribes like the Cherokee do to test Jefferson's words that their blood would run in the veins of whites and would spread with them over the continent?

8. What shift in racial thinking about Native people was caused by Cherokees resisting removal?

9. Besides manifest destiny, upon what basis did many Americans begin to justify white racial superiority over Native Americans and other groups after 1848 in the United States?

10. How did researchers like Samuel Morton "prove" that the white race was superior to all other races and that the oppression of non-whites was normal and natural? In other words, what physical difference existed between whites and all other non-white groups that supposedly resulted in whites being the superior race?

11. How was late-19th thinking about Native people different from what Jefferson had said about them at the beginning of the 19th century (as described in question 5 above-i.e. that they were "brown, white men")? Were they "brown, white men" at the end of the century? If they were not, what were they?