Transcript Source: http://www.pbs.org/race/000_General/000_00-Home.htm
Before viewing (Short Answer)
- How long do you think the idea of race has been around?
- Where did the concept of race come from?
- How do beliefs about race influence beliefs about what it means to be civilized?
- 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)
- What are some ways that race has been used to rationalize inequality?
- How has race been used to shift attention (and responsibility) away from oppressors and toward the targets of Oppression?
- 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?
- 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:
- What is common to both policies?
- What differentiate Jefferson from Jackson?
REFLECTIONS (Essay Responses)
- What is the connection of American slavery to prejudices against African-descended peoples? Why does race persist after abolition?
- 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).
- What is the significance of the episode’s title, “The Story We Tell?”
