SOCIOL 1 Lecture Notes - Double V Campaign, Vietnamese Americans, White Supremacy
Intro to Sociology Lecture Notes Week 7 Thursday Nov 16
Paul Robeson:
• Gilded in language
• Lawyer
• Decided to explore the arts
• Specialized in singing songs from the slave era
• Could sing songs in different languages
• Politically active in the fight against white supremacy;
• Double V Campaign: African Americans will fight in the army against the enemy abroad as well
as the enemy at home (Robeson was a part of this)
• Persona non-grata: Latin for “one not welcome”
• Point: Not many people know who he is despite his well-known activism
Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality:
• Race: Refers to the way that people classify others based on physical characteristics (ex: skin
color)
o Textbooks: Race is a social construction (humans invented the idea of classifying people
according to race)
• Ethnicity: Classifying people according to cultural characteristics (ex: food you eat) national
origin (ex: where you’re from)
• Nationality: Classifying people according to citizenship in a nation-state
o Most textbooks don’t talk about nationality, often blend it in with race and ethnicity
• These three often overlap a lot → Vietnamese American = family came form Vietnam, someone
in family still observes Vietnamese culture
• Race and Ethnicity are not simply social constructions, they are political constructions
Origin of Racial Classification:
• Racism: Ranked system of different races to show which ones are superior over others
o Why would anyone want to do this?
• Goes back to the era of colonization in which the imperial powers could extract wealth from
western hemispheres using cheap labor (enslaving and exploitation of the African Continent)
o England, France, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal
• Slavery DOES NOT SAY that the Africans were the inferior race → this just says that they are
“losers” when they rebelled against slavery
• Maroon Societies: African lived freely so they could be free from imperial powers → Palmares
(Angola Janga)
• Bacons’s Rebellion (1676): Defeated rebellions who were black and white → had a common
enemy (colonial masters)
o Europeans and Africans rebelled together
o Authorities began to pass laws to separate English workers from African Slaves
▪ Crime for English worker and African slave to runoff together and live
elsewhere; crime for English worker to help African slaves; crime to have
intermarriage
o Blacks stigmatized as “inferior” to whites
▪ Black person always gets the harsher punishment
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