Midterm Practice Exam

In the field's central distinction, which of these became part of the United States as an immigrant people, by choice under the country's immigration rules?

Select one.

• Native Hawaiians, whose islands the United States annexed
• A family that moved from another country for a job and later naturalized
• A Native nation whose homeland was taken in by conquest
• Mexicans in the lands ceded in 1848, for whom the border moved

A family's members sit on the town council, belong to the main professional clubs, and have married into long-established local families, yet at home they still speak their first language and keep their own holidays. In Gordon's terms, which kind of assimilation has NOT taken place?

Select one.

• Structural assimilation, since a town's networks can stay closed to newcomers
• Segmented assimilation, since the children took a downward path
• Cultural pluralism, since the council keeps a culture of its own
• Cultural assimilation, since the home language and customs remain

An illustrative excerpt in the course archive comes from a man who was a boy when his family took a bus to a city, where a federal office had promised his father job training and an apartment; the job lasted only months, and his mother found the Indian center. Which program or law does the excerpt belong to?

Select one.

• The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, which made Native Americans born in the United States citizens
• The federal relocation program, whose first offices opened in 1951
• The occupation of Alcatraz by Indians of All Tribes, which began in 1969
• The Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975

A student writes that the Indian Citizenship Act let every Native person vote in every state right away. Which statement describes what the act did?

Select one.

• It made Native Americans born in the United States citizens, while voting stayed under state law
• It ended tribal citizenship, so Native people became citizens of the United States and of no nation
• It guaranteed every Native person the vote in every state in the year it passed, with no exceptions
• It moved Native families from reservations to cities to receive job training and housing

A classmate mixes up termination with relocation. Which statement gives the course's definition of termination?

Select one.

• A federal program that moved Native people from reservations to cities for work and training
• A federal policy of ending the government-to-government relationship with a tribe
• The return of ancestors' remains and cultural items to the people they belong to
• A federal policy under which tribes run their own programs and services

In what year did Congress pass the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, the law under which tribes run their own programs and services?

Select one.

• 1956
• 1969
• 1975
• 1990

The removal of Native nations from their homelands rested on one federal law. What did the Indian Removal Act give the federal government the power to do?

Select one.

• Divide reservation land into individual allotments for each family
• Set aside the Great Sioux Reservation, including the Black Hills
• Make removal treaties with tribes living east of the Mississippi River
• Open a federal system of boarding schools for Native children

Illustrative scenarios. Which of these show discrimination, either one person's unequal treatment or an organization's rule? Select all that apply.

Select every option that applies.

• A restaurant's written seating policy places every diner who speaks with an accent at the tables beside the kitchen.
• A coach privately thinks players from one group are less disciplined but treats every player exactly the same.
• A landlord hangs up on every caller whose name suggests one ethnic group.
• Generations after a town barred one group from buying farmland, that group's families still own less land than their neighbors.

The 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870, and the Supreme Court decided Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. How many years passed between them?

Select one.

• 16 years
• 26 years
• 33 years
• 36 years

One strand of the Black freedom movement was named by the phrase Black Power. Which ideas did that strand stress?

Select one.

• Self-determination, community control, and cultural pride
• Leaving every civil rights question to the courts alone
• Moving Black families from Northern cities back to the South
• Replacing Black studies with a single required history course

A classmate says race is written into a person's genes. Which definition does this course give instead?

Select one.

• A set of natural biological groups that a genetic test could sort every person into
• A shared identity based on ancestry, language, religion, customs, or a sense of common origin
• A way societies classify people by perceived physical difference, made and changed over time, with real effects
• Legal membership in a state, which a person gains by birth or by naturalization

Illustrative scenario: no law sorts students by race, yet a district's attendance line follows a rail yard, and the homes on each side were shaped for decades by lending ratings. Which reading fits?

Select one.

• De jure segregation, because the rail yard was built under a state law
• De facto segregation, built by housing, lending, and where the line was drawn, not by chance
• De facto segregation, meaning the separation happened by accident with no choices behind it
• No segregation at all, because no law names or sorts any group

Which work argued for cultural pluralism, keeping distinct cultures alive within a shared democracy instead of fusing them into one people?

Select one.

• Israel Zangwill's play The Melting-Pot, first staged in 1908
• Kallen's essay "Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot", printed in 1915
• Gordon's book Assimilation in American Life, from 1964
• Portes and Zhou's article on segmented assimilation and the new second generation, from 1993

A student writes that the Emancipation Proclamation freed every enslaved person in the country. Which statement corrects the student about where it applied?

Select one.

• In every state and territory, whether it was loyal to the Union or not
• Only in the loyal border states that had stayed in the Union
• Only in the areas of the Confederacy already under Union control
• Only in the states that had seceded, leaving the loyal border states untouched

Which amendment, ratified after the Civil War, bars denying the vote "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude"?

Select one.

• The 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870
• The 13th Amendment, ratified in 1865
• The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868
• The Dred Scott v. Sandford decision of 1857

A classmate says colonialism in North America happened once, long ago, and is over. Using Wolfe's settler colonialism framework, which statement answers the classmate?

Select one.

• Colonialism ended once the first settlers arrived and set up their towns
• The framework covers only groups brought in by force and set apart from immigrants
• Colonialism is the path that every group follows as it joins a host society
• Colonialism is an ongoing structure, since settlers came to stay and take the land

San Francisco State established its College of Ethnic Studies in 1969, after a student strike pressed for it. In what year did that strike begin?

Select one.

• 1966
• 1968
• 1970
• 1972

A student claims that once the Supreme Court ruled against school segregation, every school desegregated within a year. What does the course say followed the Court's later order to desegregate "with all deliberate speed"?

Select one.

• No deadline was set, the order met considerable resistance, and segregation did not end at once
• Every public school across the whole country desegregated by the end of the very next school year
• The order revived separate but equal for districts that could prove equal schools
• The order covered only colleges, leaving elementary and high schools out of it

Illustrative scenario: an accountant arrives after the 1965 immigration law, builds a career in her new country, and later sponsors her brother so the family stays connected. Her account says nothing about her children. A reader wants to apply segmented assimilation. Which reading is the most careful?

Select one.

• It points toward the upward path that keeps community ties, but one first-generation account cannot show the children's path
• It proves the melting pot, since the family fused into one new people once it arrived
• It shows internal colonialism, since her people became part of the country by force
• It shows the downward path into lasting poverty, since the family chose to stay closely connected to its home community instead

Illustrative scenario: decades after a highway split a neighborhood, the area still has fewer grocery stores and clinics, its homes are worth less, and its schools, paid for by local property taxes, have smaller budgets. No current rule singles out its residents. Which concept fits?

Select one.

• Structural inequality, because unequal outcomes built up across housing, services, and schools over time
• Prejudice, because the residents hold negative beliefs about one another
• Individual discrimination, because a single city official made one unfair choice about one family's home
• De jure segregation, because a current law requires the area to be kept separate

A student sums up the Dawes Act as "a law that handed land to Native families." Which fuller description does the course give of what the act did?

Select one.

• It split land held in common into individual allotments and opened land not allotted for sale
• It authorized removal treaties with the nations that were living east of the Mississippi River
• It confirmed that each nation would keep all of its land held in common
• It set aside the Black Hills for the Sioux people's exclusive use

Illustrative scenario: a city ordinance requires every lunch counter to seat customers of different races in separate sections, and every owner complies, whatever the owner privately believes. Which concept fits best?

Select one.

• Prejudice
• Ethnocentrism
• Individual discrimination
• Institutional discrimination

Illustrative scenario: a rule takes buying a train ticket, an everyday act with no racial meaning, and makes the car a passenger may ride in depend on race. Which concept names attaching racial meaning to a practice that was not classified that way before?

Select one.

• Ethnocentrism
• Positionality
• Nationality
• Racialization

Why does the course describe how long the San Francisco State strike lasted only in words, and never ask students for a number of days or months?

Select one.

• The strike's records were all destroyed in the years afterward, so nobody knows when it came to an end
• How long the strike lasted is a current political dispute that the course stays out of
• Different university pages report the strike's length differently, so no single length is keyed
• Historians agree that the strike never ended, so it has no length that could be measured

Illustrative scenario: an insurance company's written policy charges a higher price to every home in a set of neighborhoods the company rates as risky, no matter who owns the home or how well it is kept. Which concept does this show?

Select one.

• Prejudice, because the company privately dislikes the people who live in those areas
• Individual discrimination, because one agent decides on their own to turn away one particular family
• Institutional discrimination, because one rule applied to everyone produces the unequal result
• Structural inequality, because the outcome builds up across many institutions over decades