Lecture: Midterm Review & Exam
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 8
Opening
Think about the oldest story your family tells. Maybe it's the year the family moved, or the winter the power went out. Ask two relatives and you'll hear two versions. One remembers the snow, and the other remembers who brought soup. Neither one is lying. Each remembers what mattered to them.
A nurse taking a health history meets that problem every shift. So does a teacher hearing a family's story, or a volunteer recording a neighbor's memories. Each has to decide how far a spoken account can be trusted, and what to check somewhere else. That's the new idea in this lecture.
First, though, a review. You've had seven weeks of terms, laws, cases, and voices. That's a big pile. So here's my plan: we'll ask each topic for one thing, the distinction it asks you to keep. Week 1 gave you the field and its origins. Week 2 gave you race, ethnicity, and the kinds of discrimination. Week 3 gave you the theories of belonging. Weeks 4 and 5 read Native nations' sovereignty and survivance. Weeks 6 and 7 read the laws that made and unmade segregation.
We'll rerun one example you've already worked for each of those. Then we'll meet oral history and testimonio, and we'll read the archive's seven excerpts as sources. The midterm checks Objectives 1 to 5 as taught in Weeks 1 to 7, and you take it without AI help. After it, Week 9 opens a new unit on Chicana and Chicano, Latina and Latino experiences.
1. The field's shape
Picture a club fair. Each table speaks for one group, and you walk past all of them. Ethnic studies does something different. It sets the tables side by side and asks what their stories share and where they differ.
So the first distinction is about the field itself. Ethnic studies is the interdisciplinary study of how race and ethnicity have been made, lived, and contested in the United States, and the introductory course is comparative. It isn't the study of one group, and it isn't a course about blame.
The field has a birthday of sorts. At San Francisco State, a strike began in November 1968, led by the Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front. The strike won a new college for the field, established there in 1969. That's 1 year apart. The strikers demanded four departments, and those four line up with the four core fields you've studied.
Pause and try this. A friend says ethnic studies is a course about one group. What would you tell them?
Think about what the four core fields have in common.
Here's the answer. Ethnic studies is comparative. It studies four core fields side by side, along with the connections among them.
2. Three pairs that sound alike
Think about a form that asks you to check all that apply. One box asks about race. Another asks where your family's ancestors came from. A third asks whether you're a citizen. Those are three different questions, even when people answer them as one.
Here's how the course keeps them apart. Race is a social classification of people by perceived physical difference, made and changed by societies over time. It isn't a set of natural biological groups, but the inequality organized around it has real effects. Ethnicity is a shared identity based on ancestry, language, religion, customs, or a sense of common origin. Nationality is legal membership in a state, which is citizenship.
One more pair lives in the same week. Prejudice is an attitude, and discrimination is an action. A store clerk who privately thinks a shopper can't pay holds a prejudice. A clerk who refuses to ring that shopper up is discriminating. One is in the head, and the other is in the act.
The Census Bureau itself says its race categories reflect "a social definition of race recognized in this country and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically."
Pause and try this. A student speaks Portuguese at home and was born in the United States. Which word fits the language, and which fits the citizenship?
Match each fact to one of the three questions.
Here's the answer. The home language belongs to ethnicity, a shared language and culture. The citizenship is nationality, legal membership in a state.
3. Who or what does it
Picture a board game. If one player cheats, that's one person's act. If the rules themselves give some players fewer turns, nobody has to cheat for the game to be unequal. And if the game has run for years and some families started with more pieces, the gap carries on even after the rules change.
Those are the three levels from Week 2. Individual discrimination is one person's act of unequal treatment. Institutional discrimination is unequal treatment produced by an organization's rules, policies, or routine practices, whether or not anyone involved intends it. Structural inequality is unequal outcomes built up across many institutions over time.
Let's rerun four keys from the illustrative concept-sorting set. In P1, a shopper privately assumes a new neighbor won't keep up the yard, but says and does nothing. That's prejudice. In I1, a landlord says the apartment is taken after hearing a caller's accent. That's individual discrimination. In N1, a lender follows a written rule that rates every loan in a D-rated neighborhood as too risky. That's institutional discrimination. And in S1, decades later, homes in once-redlined areas are worth less. That's structural inequality. The whole set has 15 keyed scenarios, and 8 of them are acts of discrimination.
Pause and try this. Does N1's lender have to be prejudiced for N1 to count as institutional discrimination?
Picture a lender who has never met the applicant.
Here's the answer. No. The written rule does the work, and the result is unequal whether or not anyone intends it.
4. The theories of belonging
Picture a family whose parents keep a home language and a holiday, while the children's friends come from everywhere. What does it mean for that family to belong? Week 3 gave you several answers, and each one has an author, a year, and critics.
Three distinctions carry that week. Assimilation is a group taking on the dominant society's culture and entering its institutions. Cultural pluralism is keeping distinct cultures within a shared democracy, an idea argued by Kallen in 1915. That answered Zangwill's play, The Melting-Pot, first staged in 1908, so it came 7 years later. Next, assimilation pictures one path. Segmented assimilation, from Portes and Zhou in 1993, finds three paths for the children of immigrants. That came 29 years after Gordon's book in 1964.
The third distinction is the field's central one. Immigrant peoples came by choice under the country's immigration rules. Colonized or incorporated peoples became part of the United States by conquest, annexation, or force. In the archive, E3 is a nurse who arrived in the early 1970s after the 1965 law. E4 is a man whose family moved to a city under the federal relocation program in the late 1950s.
Pause and try this. Which of those two excerpts is an immigrant account, and which is the account of a colonized or incorporated people?
Ask how each family became part of the country.
Here's the answer. E3 is the immigrant account, because she came by choice under the immigration rules. E4's nation did not arrive as immigrants, so his is the account of a colonized or incorporated people.
5. A political status, not a racial category
Think about two neighboring towns that sign an agreement about a shared river. Nobody asks what the residents look like. The agreement is between two governments. Weeks 4 and 5 asked you to read Native nations the same way.
Tribal sovereignty is the inherent right of Native nations to govern themselves. Tribal citizenship is membership in a Native nation, set by that nation's own government. It's a political status, like citizenship in any nation, and not a racial category.
The record says so across a century. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 was an agreement between nations, the United States and the Sioux Nation. The Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act came in 1975, so 107 years later, and under it tribes run their own programs. And E4 says it in one line: "My children are citizens of our nation."
Notice the tense in that line. "Are." Native nations exist and govern in the present, and you speak of them that way.
Pause and try this. Is tribal citizenship a political status or a racial category?
Think about who decides who belongs.
Here's the answer. It's a political status. A nation's own government sets who its citizens are, the way any nation does.
6. De jure and de facto
Picture two towns' schools. In the first, a printed rule assigns children to schools by race. In the second, no rule mentions race, but the school boundary follows a highway, and the housing on each side was shaped by lending ratings. Both towns are segregated. Only one has a law that says so.
De jure segregation is separation of groups that a law requires. De facto segregation is separation that exists in practice without a law requiring it, often built by housing patterns, lending rules, and school boundaries rather than by accident.
Start with the law. Plessy v. Ferguson, in 1896, upheld separation by law on railways. Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, struck down school segregation by law, 58 years later. Now the practice. In the illustrative lending table, A-rated neighborhoods have an approval rate of 90 percent, and D-rated neighborhoods 10 percent. That's a gap of 80 percentage points. A-rated neighborhoods get 18 approved loans each, against 2 in D-rated ones, a ratio of 9 to 1.
E2 holds both halves. On the train, her family sat in the car set aside for Black passengers. That was the law. In the new city, there were neighborhoods where the bank would not lend to them. That was a rule doing quiet work.
Pause and try this. Was E2's train car de jure or de facto segregation, and what about the bank?
Sort each half by whether a law required it.
Here's the answer. The train car was de jure, because a law required it. The bank's neighborhoods were de facto, built by a lending rule rather than a law naming a race.
7. Oral history as evidence
Let's go back to that family story from the opening. Your grandparent's account of the move tells you how it felt. A dated notice from that year tells you when it happened. Each answers a different question, and a careful reader keeps both.
Here's the new material. An oral history is a recorded first-person account of the past, gathered by interview with the narrator's informed consent. It's a source for how people experienced events, and you read it alongside documents, not in place of them. The narrator is the person telling their own experience. Informed consent means the narrator agreed after understanding what would be asked and how the account would be used.
Now the caveat. Memory is selective and reconstructive. People remember what mattered to them and retell it in later terms. So you read an excerpt for experience and meaning, and you check its dates and figures against dated records.
That gives you the week's last distinction. A primary source is a record made at the time by a participant or witness, like a statute, a court opinion, a letter, or a photograph. An oral history is an account recorded later, by interview, about the narrator's own experience. E2 describes leaving the South in 1943, and she was interviewed in the 1990s. The Great Migration ran from roughly the 1910s to the 1970s, so her date fits the record.
Pause and try this. Is the court's opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson a primary source or an oral history? What about E2?
Ask when each one was made.
Here's the answer. The opinion was written by the Court in 1896, at the time, so it's a primary source. E2 was recorded decades later by interview, so it's an oral history.
8. Testimonio
Picture a member of a tenants' committee telling the story of a rent strike in her building. She says "I," but she makes sure her neighbors' part goes on the record too. Who knocked on doors. Who kept the list. Her story is hers, and it's also theirs.
That shape has a name. Testimonio is a first-person account of collective struggle, told by a narrator who speaks as a witness for a community. The form is associated with Latin American writing, and it's used in Chicana and Chicano, Latina and Latino studies. Its "I" carries a "we."
You've already heard a line that makes that move. E4 is an oral history, not a testimonio. But his last words, "We are still here," turn from "I" to "we" and speak for a nation. That's the move testimonio makes all the way through.
Pause and try this. A classmate calls testimonio a diary of one person's private feelings. What's missing from that description?
Think about who the narrator speaks for.
Here's the answer. Testimonio speaks as a witness for a community's struggle. It's told in the first person, but it isn't a private story.
9. Seven excerpts, read as sources
Now let's read the whole archive once, the same way, as sources. For each excerpt you ask three questions. Who is speaking? When was it recorded? And what can an interview prove, and what can't it?
Here's the pattern, counting decade to decade. E1, E2, E4, and E7 were each recorded 50 years after the decade they describe. E3 and E6 were recorded 40 years after. E5 was recorded 30 years after. That's 4 plus 2 plus 1, all 7 excerpts, and every one was recorded at least 30 years later. The laws and events tied to E1, E5, E6, and E7 come in Weeks 9 to 12, so for now you read those four only as sources.
Let's check one more date. E4's family moved in the late 1950s. The relocation offices opened in 1951, and the Indian Relocation Act came in 1956, 5 years apart. A late-1950s move falls after both, so the date fits.
And here's what E4 can and can't prove. It can tell you the promised job lasted four months, and how the family met families from a dozen nations. It can't tell you how many families the program moved, or how long most jobs lasted. Those questions belong to dated records.
Pause and try this. E4's interview came about 50 years after the move. Does that make the account worthless?
Think about what only the narrator can tell you.
Here's the answer. No. You read it for experience and meaning, and you check its dates elsewhere, as E4's late 1950s checks out.
Closing
Let me pull it together, in the order we went. Ethnic studies compares four core fields, and the strike that began in 1968 won a college in 1969. Race, ethnicity, and nationality answer three different questions, and prejudice is an attitude while discrimination is an action. Individual, institutional, and structural name who or what does the harm.
Cultural pluralism answered assimilation, segmented assimilation found three paths, and immigrant peoples differ from colonized or incorporated peoples. Tribal citizenship is a political status. De jure segregation is written in law, and de facto segregation is built by practice.
Then the new material. An oral history is read for experience and meaning, with its dates checked against the record. A primary source is made at the time, and an oral history is recorded later. Testimonio speaks as a witness for a community.
Next in this module, you'll find the slide deck, the Readings and Resources page, the practice set, the discussion, and the midterm. After that, Week 9 opens Chicana and Chicano, Latina and Latino experiences, where these reading habits meet new laws and new voices.
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