The Story We Tell: Race—The Power of an Illusion

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    Please consider these questions
    Before viewing (Short Answer)

    1. How long do you think the idea of race has been around?

    2. Where did the concept of race come from?

    3. How do beliefs about race influence beliefs about what it means to be civilized?

    4. Do you think Africans were enslaved in the Americas because they were deemed inferior, or were they deemed inferior because they were enslaved? Why?

    Viewing (Essay Responses)

    5. What are some ways that race has been used to rationalize inequality?

    6. How has race been used to shift attention (and responsibility) away from oppressors and toward the targets of Oppression?

    7. Why was it not slavery but freedom and the notion that “all men are created equal” that created a moral contradiction in colonial America, and how did race help resolve that contradiction?

    8. Contrast Thomas Jefferson’s policy to assimilate American Indians in the 1780s with Andrew Jackson’s policy of removing Cherokees to west of the Mississippi in the 1830s:

    A. What is common to both policies?

    B. What differentiate Jefferson from Jackson?

    REFLECTIONS (Essay Responses)

    9. What is the connection of American slavery to prejudices against African-descended peoples? Why does race persist after abolition?

    10. What is the connection of World War II to prejudice against or stereotypes of Asian Americans? Why do these stereotypes persist?
    **Integrate Nakayama’s article, “Dis/orienting Identities: Asian Americans, History, and Intercultural Communication” (see text, Our Voices pp. 26 – 31).

    11. What is the significance of the episode’s title, “The Story We Tell?”

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