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Week 7 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 7 — Different, Not Finished: Reading the Rules Behind Segregation — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Ethnic Studies Free sample edition
Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 7 of the term — work this week's dates and the illustrative lending table, read each result as a concept, and explain it to someone who has it wrong.

This week you met Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and Brown II (1955), the Montgomery bus boycott, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, redlining and the illustrative lending table, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and the line between de jure and de facto segregation. In this assignment you work four short problems, interpret each one, and explain this week's ideas to someone who has them wrong. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Community History Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles. It builds on Week 2's line between institutional discrimination and structural inequality, and on Week 6's reading of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and the literacy tests written into state law.

The task

The law-and-case timeline is the course's list of dated laws and events, each year taken from the issuing body's own page. The course's lending table is an illustrative model in the style of the 1930s lending maps, built for this course and not a reconstruction of any real city or lender: a city's 50 neighborhoods each carry a rating from A to D, and lenders approve loans by the rating. The course's running archive is an illustrative, unnamed public library's collection; its E2 excerpt comes from a woman whose family moved north in the Great Migration in the 1940s, interviewed in the 1990s, who says there "were neighborhoods where the bank would not lend to us" and that her mother called the new city "different, not finished."

A roommate tells you, "Segregation was only a Southern thing, and the Supreme Court ended it in 1954." Your job is to answer the way an ethnic studies reader would, starting from a few plain dates and the lending table.

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic:

  1. On the law-and-case timeline, Plessy v. Ferguson came in 1896 and Brown v. Board of Education came in 1954. For how many years did the separate but equal doctrine stand in public schools?
  2. On the law-and-case timeline, the 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870 and the Voting Rights Act came in 1965. How many years passed before the law that enforced the amendment?
  3. In the illustrative lending table, lenders approve 180 of 200 applications from A-rated neighborhoods and 20 of 200 from D-rated neighborhoods. What is the gap between the two approval rates?
  4. In the illustrative lending table, the 10 A-rated neighborhoods receive 180 approved loans and the 10 D-rated neighborhoods receive 20. How many approved loans does each neighborhood receive on average, and what is the ratio of A-rated to D-rated?

Beside each result, add one brief interpretation:

  • Problem 1: state what Brown v. Board of Education (1954) held, and explain why Brown II (1955), with its order to desegregate with all deliberate speed, meant segregation did not end at once.
  • Problem 2: explain that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 enforced the 15th Amendment by banning literacy tests, and name the civil rights movement as the organized pressure behind the new laws, with the Montgomery bus boycott as one example.
  • Problem 3: name the concept the rule shows, institutional discrimination as in scenario N1, and explain why the gap is measured in percentage points rather than percent.
  • Problem 4: read the long result as structural inequality, as in scenario S1, and distinguish de jure from de facto segregation, using the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which made lending discrimination unlawful without undoing what it had built.

Explain it to a non-expert

Write a 3–5 sentence message to your roommate that explains what Brown v. Board of Education (1954) changed and why Brown II (1955) meant it did not end segregation at once, that segregation outside the South was often de facto, built by lending rules like the ones in E2's city, and what the Fair Housing Act of 1968 made unlawful. Name one limit, such as that the lending table is an illustrative model whose numbers are engineered for teaching. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good message is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a coworker who says a store's dress code is fair because the same rule is printed for everyone. Model message: "A rule printed for everyone is a real start, and it is worth saying so. But a rule can land very differently on different people, depending on what it bans and who wrote it. One fair caveat: you would want to see how the rule is applied before deciding."

Use that pattern for your roommate, with your own wording and evidence.

Your reflection. After you check your draft, write two or three sentences on one of these, your choice: (a) which result, a year count or a lending-table result, changed your thinking more, and why; or (b) which word or phrase in your first draft you replaced, and what the new wording gets right.

Deliverables

Submit a single report containing:

  • the four results, each with the dates or counts and the arithmetic shown, and the brief interpretation the task names for that problem;
  • your message to your roommate, explaining Brown and Brown II, de facto segregation built by lending, and the 1968 law, with one limit;
  • your reflection, on the option you chose; and
  • a one-line restatement of the dates and counts you used, so your results can be checked.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled timeline sketch with a short explanation. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the arithmetic, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. You may use a calculator or a spreadsheet for the arithmetic. Describe the lending table and E2 only as the course describes them, name people only by role, and do not borrow a quotation or a detail about any real person from another source without citing it. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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