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Week 8 · Midterm study guide

Midterm Exam — Study Guide

Introduction to Ethnic Studies Free sample edition

Coverage — what the midterm covers

The midterm is cumulative over Weeks 1 to 7, which is Objectives 1 to 5 as taught in those weeks. It opens in the Week 8 module and closes at the due time your instructor sets. There is no time limit, and you get one attempt. The questions appear one at a time, and you cannot go back once you move on.

Format: 25 questions, and every question counts the same. Twenty-three ask you to pick one option, one asks you to judge a statement as true or false, and one asks you to pick every option that fits. Every scenario, excerpt, or date a question uses is written out in the question, and no question needs a chart, a map, or a table. The midterm is closed to AI.

What is in scope, with the number of midterm questions on each course objective:

Midterm coverage by course objective: the weeks its questions come from, its main skills, and its number of questions out of 25
Course objective	Weeks its questions come from	Main skills	Questions
The field and its methods	1 and 2	What ethnic studies is and is not; the 1968 and 1969 strikes; the four core fields; the four questions and three methods; positionality; the archive's rules	5
The core concepts	2 and 3	Race, ethnicity, and nationality; racialization and racial formation; ethnocentrism; prejudice and discrimination; the three-way sort; intersectionality; the federal categories	6
Theories of belonging	3, 4, and 5	Assimilation and the melting pot; Gordon's two kinds; cultural pluralism; segmented assimilation; immigrant and incorporated peoples; internal colonialism; double consciousness	3
Indigenous nations and Native experiences	4 and 5	Sovereignty and tribal citizenship; treaties; removal, allotment, and boarding schools; settler colonialism; 1924 and 1934; termination and relocation; Alcatraz; 1975 and 1990; survivance	4
African American experiences	6 and 7	Slavery; the citizenship thread; the proclamation; three amendments; Jim Crow; the Great Migration; Brown; the boycott; the 1964 and 1965 laws; redlining; de jure and de facto	7

African American experiences carry the most questions, 7, and the core concepts come next with 6. By week, Week 2 holds 5 of the 25, Weeks 1 and 6 hold 4 each, and Weeks 3, 4, 5, and 7 hold 3 each. So put extra review time on Week 2's look-alike pairs, on Week 1's account of the field, and on Week 6's laws and cases. By difficulty, 11 questions are easy, 13 are medium, and 1 is hard. Week 8's new material on oral history and testimonio is not tested on its own, and it still helps you read the archive excerpts that Weeks 1 to 7 used.

Topic-by-topic review

Each week below follows the order Week 8 used for its review. It names the one distinction the week asks you to keep, then the key idea in plain words, the course's own definitions, the course example, and the predictable mistakes with their cures. The deeper review for every topic is that week's chapter, lecture, slide deck, and readings.

Week 1 — What ethnic studies is

The distinction: the field's shape, meaning the four core fields and the field's origins, and what the field is not.
Key idea: ethnic studies asks how race and ethnicity came to matter in the United States, and how the people affected answered.
Definition: ethnic studies is the interdisciplinary study of how race and ethnicity have been made, lived, and contested in the United States, drawing on history, law, sociology, literature, and the accounts of communities themselves. Interdisciplinary means drawing on the questions and evidence of several fields at once. The introductory course is comparative: it studies several groups and the connections among them.
What it is not: a history survey, a sociology course, the study of one group, or a course about blame.
Origins: the student strikes of 1968 and 1969. At San Francisco State the strike began in November 1968, led by the Black Student Union and a coalition of student groups called the Third World Liberation Front. The strikers demanded four departments within a College of Ethnic Studies, and the College was established there in 1969, which the university describes as the country's first. That is 1969 − 1968 = 1 year from the strike's start to the College. At Berkeley a strike in 1969, co-led by the Asian American Political Alliance, pressed for ethnic studies there. The course says the strike's length in words, "from November 1968 into the spring of 1969", because university pages give it differently.
The four core fields: Native American and Indigenous studies, African American studies, Chicana/o and Latina/o studies, and Asian American and Pacific Islander studies. The strikers' 4 departments line up with the 4 fields: American Indian Studies, Black Studies, La Raza Studies, and Asian American Studies.
The four questions the field asks of any category, law, or record: who made it, whom it served, whom it affected, and how the people affected answered. The three methods: reading the public record, listening to community accounts, and comparing across groups.
The reading walk: what a record says, who made it, whom it affected, what it leaves out, and what a comparison with another group adds, ending in one plain sentence.
Positionality is the way your own background, such as where you grew up, your languages, and your family's history, shapes what you notice, ask, and miss when you read evidence. Every reader has one, and naming it is part of reading fairly.
Course example: the community oral-history archive (illustrative), an unnamed public library's collection of 7 excerpts, E1 to E7, each identified by the narrator's role and decade, never by name. It has 5 intake rules: rules 1 to 3 protect consent and choice, and rules 4 and 5 protect privacy, so 3 + 2 = 5. Its interviews come from three decades: 2 in the 1990s, 3 in the 2000s, and 2 in the 2010s, so 2 + 3 + 2 = 7.
Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) ethnic studies read as the study of one group. Cure: it compares four fields and the connections among them. (2) the field read as a course about blame. Cure: it studies how categories were made and how people answered. (3) the field read as a recent invention. Cure: it began with the strikes of 1968 and 1969. (4) positionality read as a bias that disqualifies a reader. Cure: everyone has one, and you name yours.

Week 2 — Race, ethnicity, and racialization

The distinctions: race against ethnicity, ethnicity against nationality, prejudice against discrimination, and the three-way sort of individual, institutional, and structural.
Key idea: words that sound alike name different things, and the course asks you to keep them apart.
Race is a social classification of people by perceived physical difference, made and changed by societies over time. It is not 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. It is a different idea from race and from nationality.
Nation is a self-governing people with its own territory, government, and history, the sense in which the course speaks of Native nations. Nationality is legal membership in a state, which is citizenship. A person can hold all of these at once.
Racialization is the process by which racial meaning is attached to a group, a practice, or a relationship that was not classified that way before. Racial formation, from Omi and Winant (1986), Racial Formation in the United States, is the historical process by which racial categories are created, lived, changed, and contested through social, economic, and political forces, including law and policy. Racialization is one move; racial formation is the whole history of a category.
Ethnocentrism is judging another group's ways by the standards of your own group. Eurocentrism is treating European and European American experience as the standard against which every other is measured.
Prejudice is an attitude: a fixed, usually negative prejudgment about a group, held whether or not the person ever acts on it. Discrimination is an action: unequal treatment of people because of the group they belong to or are seen to belong to.
Who or what does it: individual discrimination is one person's act. 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, so disadvantage carries forward even after a single discriminatory rule ends.
Intersectionality is Crenshaw's term, from Crenshaw (1989), "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex", University of Chicago Legal Forum. Overlapping categories such as race and sex produce experiences that neither category alone describes. Antidiscrimination law that looks at race alone or at sex alone fails people, such as Black women, whose experience is shaped by both at once. It is not adding identities together.
The federal categories are the race and ethnicity categories the federal government sets for collecting data. The 2024 list has 7 minimum categories in one combined question, select all that apply. The issuing bodies describe them as social and political categories, not biological ones.
Course example: the illustrative concept-sorting set (Dataset E). P1, a shopper who privately assumes a new neighbor will not keep up the yard, is prejudice. I1, a landlord who turns away a caller after hearing an accent, is individual discrimination. N1, a lender's written rule that rates every loan in a D-rated neighborhood as too risky, is institutional discrimination. S1, lower home values, family wealth, and school budgets decades after the lending maps, is structural inequality. The set keys 4 + 4 + 4 + 3 = 15 scenarios, and 4 + 4 = 8 of them are acts of discrimination. Its 3 borderline cases are discussed and never keyed.
Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) race read as biology. Cure: it is a social classification with real effects. (2) race and ethnicity used as synonyms. Cure: ethnicity is shared ancestry, language, religion, or customs. (3) ethnicity read as nationality. Cure: nationality is legal membership in a state. (4) prejudice and discrimination used as synonyms. Cure: an attitude against an action. (5) racism read as individual intent alone. Cure: a rule can do the work. (6) institutional discrimination read as needing a prejudiced person. Cure: no one has to intend it. (7) intersectionality read as adding identities. Cure: overlap makes a new experience. (8) a census category read as a biological fact. Cure: it is the issuing body's category for collecting data.

Week 3 — Theories of belonging

The distinctions: assimilation against cultural pluralism, assimilation against segmented assimilation, and immigrant peoples against colonized or incorporated peoples.
Key idea: scholars have offered several frameworks for how groups come to belong. Each is a tool with an author, a year, and critics, and none settles a real case on its own.
Assimilation is a group taking on the dominant society's culture and entering its institutions. The melting-pot image, of many peoples fusing into one new people, was popularized by Israel Zangwill's play The Melting-Pot, first staged in 1908. The melting pot is an image, not a description of what happened to every group.
Gordon's split: Gordon (1964), Assimilation in American Life, separated cultural assimilation (taking on the dominant group's language and customs) from structural assimilation (entering its institutions, networks, and families). A group can do one without the other.
Cultural pluralism is keeping distinct cultures within a shared democracy, from Kallen (1915), "Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot", The Nation. Assimilation asks a group to blend in; cultural pluralism asks the democracy to make room.
The critics: classic assimilation theory is criticized for treating one Anglo-American core as the standard, for assuming every group follows one immigrant path, and for not fitting peoples incorporated by conquest, slavery, or colonization.
Segmented assimilation, from Portes and Zhou (1993), "The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and Its Variants", The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, holds that the children of immigrants follow different paths. They may move upward into the middle class, downward into lasting poverty, or upward while keeping the community's ties and values.
Immigrant peoples came by choice under a country's immigration rules. Colonized or incorporated peoples became part of the United States by conquest, annexation, or force. The course names five: Native nations, Mexicans in the lands ceded in 1848, Native Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans, and enslaved Africans.
Internal colonialism, from Blauner (1969), "Internal Colonialism and Ghetto Revolt", Social Problems, separates groups that entered by force from groups that entered as immigrants. Critics question how far the colonial comparison fits.
Double consciousness, from Du Bois (1903), The Souls of Black Folk, names "the problem of the color-line" and describes double-consciousness as "this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others". It names an experience a color-line produces. It is not a psychological disorder.
Course example: the frameworks in time are Du Bois 1903, Zangwill 1908, Kallen 1915, Gordon 1964, Blauner 1969, and Portes and Zhou 1993. The archive's E3, a nurse who arrived in the early 1970s after the 1965 immigration law, is an immigrant account that points toward segmented assimilation's third path, though E3 speaks only for the first generation, so it cannot settle which path the children took. E4, a man whose family moved to a city under the federal relocation program in the late 1950s, is the account of a colonized or incorporated people, so the melting pot misreads it.
Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) the melting pot read as what happened to every group. Cure: it is an image from a play. (2) assimilation read as the only path. Cure: pluralism and segmented assimilation offer others. (3) every group read as immigrants. Cure: five peoples were incorporated by conquest, annexation, or force. (4) double consciousness read as a disorder. Cure: it is an experience a color-line produces.

Week 4 — Indigenous nations, sovereignty, and settler colonialism

The distinction: tribal sovereignty as a political status, not a racial category.
Key idea: a Native nation is a government. Membership in it works the way citizenship in any nation works, and the nation sets its own rules.
Tribal sovereignty is the inherent right of Native nations to govern themselves. A federally recognized tribe deals with the United States in a government-to-government relationship, as one government to another. Tribal citizenship is membership in a Native nation, set by that nation's own government; it is a political status and not a racial category.
The term rule: use a nation's own name first wherever the material is about one nation. Native American and Indigenous are broad terms, and American Indian is also a legal and federal term. Speak of Native nations in the present tense.
A treaty is a written agreement between nations in which each side gives something and is promised something. The Fort Laramie Treaty (1868), between the United States and the Sioux Nation, set aside the Great Sioux Reservation, including the Black Hills, which are sacred to the Sioux people. After gold was found following an 1874 expedition, the government confiscated the land in 1877. Ownership of the Black Hills remains the subject of a legal dispute between the United States and the Sioux Nation, which the course describes without a verdict.
Removal: the Indian Removal Act of 1830 authorized removal treaties with tribes living east of the Mississippi River. The Cherokee removal under the Treaty of New Echota, ratified in 1836, is known as the Trail of Tears. The National Archives gives an estimate of about four thousand of sixteen thousand Cherokees dying on the way, a figure the course says in words and never treats as exact.
Allotment is dividing land a nation held in common into parcels assigned to individuals. The Dawes Act of 1887 divided reservation land into individual allotments, a quarter section to each head of family, opened the land not allotted for sale, and made allottees citizens.
The federal Indian boarding schools ran from 1819 to 1969. The Department of the Interior's 2022 investigative report documented hundreds of federal schools across dozens of states and then territories, and the course says its counts in words.
Settler colonialism, from Wolfe (2006), "Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native", Journal of Genocide Research, holds that settlers come to stay and take the land, so colonialism is an ongoing structure rather than a single past event. Set it beside Blauner's internal colonialism from Week 3.
Course example: the Fort Laramie Treaty (1868) read in the field's order. The confiscation came 1877 − 1868 = 9 years after the treaty and 1877 − 1874 = 3 years after the expedition. The treaty came 1868 − 1830 = 38 years after the Indian Removal Act, and the Dawes Act came 1887 − 1868 = 19 years after the treaty. The boarding schools ran 1969 − 1819 = 150 years. Blauner and Wolfe wrote 2006 − 1969 = 37 years apart.
Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) Native nations read as part of the past. Cure: they govern now, so use the present tense. (2) tribal sovereignty read as a racial preference. Cure: it is a political status, the right of a government. (3) treaties read as gifts from the United States. Cure: they are agreements between nations. (4) removal read as a voluntary move. Cure: the 1830 law and the Trail of Tears were forced removal.

Week 5 — Indigenous survivance and self-determination

The distinction: still tribal sovereignty as a political status, and Native nations in the present tense.
Key idea: after removal, allotment, and the boarding schools, Native nations governed, resisted, and endured, and federal policy swung from ending tribes to recognizing their self-government.
Citizenship and self-government: the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 granted citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States. The right to vote was governed by state law, and some states barred Native Americans from voting until 1957. The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 is described by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as establishing modern tribal governments.
Termination is the federal policy, set by House Concurrent Resolution 108 in 1953, of ending the United States' government-to-government relationship with a tribe. From 1953 to 1970 Congress began 60 termination proceedings, and more than three million acres of tribal land were given up.
Relocation is the federal program that moved Native people from reservations to cities for jobs. Relocation offices opened in 1951, and the Indian Relocation Act of 1956 authorized a vocational training program for adult Native Americans living on or near reservations. Both policies pushed toward assimilation, and with Wolfe's framework they show settler colonialism continuing after removal.
Red Power is the Native movement of the late 1960s and 1970s for sovereignty, treaty rights, and self-determination. Indians of All Tribes, people from many Native nations, occupied Alcatraz Island from November 1969 to June 1971.
Self-determination is the federal policy, written into law by the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975, under which tribes run their own programs and services. Repatriation is the return of ancestors' remains and cultural items to the people they belong to. The 1990 repatriation law requires it of federal agencies and of institutions that receive federal funds, through consultation with lineal descendants, Indian tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations.
Survivance is a term associated with the Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor. It joins survival and resistance to describe Native presence that is active and continuing, not a story of disappearance. Federal recognition is the United States' formal acknowledgment of a tribe as a nation with which it keeps a government-to-government relationship. The Bureau of Indian Affairs lists the recognized tribes, and its count changes, so the course never keys it.
Course example: the archive's E4 (illustrative), a man whose family moved to a city under the federal relocation program in the late 1950s, interviewed in the 2000s. The job his father was promised lasted four months, and the family met families from a dozen nations at the Indian center. He says, "My children are citizens of our nation," and "We are still here." That last line is survivance.
Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) the 1924 act read as giving every Native person the vote at once. Cure: voting stayed under state law. (2) relocation read as a voluntary program with no federal goal. Cure: it was a federal program with an assimilation goal. (3) survivance read as survival alone. Cure: it joins survival and resistance. (4) Native nations read as part of the past. Cure: present tense, always.

Week 6 — Slavery, emancipation, and Jim Crow

The distinction: de jure segregation against de facto segregation begins here, with segregation written into law. Also keep what a law did apart from what it did not do.
Key idea: law made slavery and segregation, and law was also used to unmake them, slowly and with gaps.
The term rule: the course writes "enslaved people" in its own voice. Black and African American are both in common use, and Black is the broader term, including people of recent African and Caribbean origin.
Slavery is a system in which people are held as property and forced to work without pay or freedom. The first ship carrying enslaved Africans to the English colony of Virginia arrived in 1619, with people taken captive from the kingdom of Ndongo, in present-day Angola.
Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857): the Supreme Court decided that no Black person descended from Africans brought to the country in slavery could be a citizen under the Constitution. Read the Court's words as the Court's, not the course's.
The Emancipation Proclamation (1863) was an executive proclamation, not a law or an amendment. It took effect in 1863 and applied only to states that had seceded, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states and in parts of the Confederacy already under Union control.
The Reconstruction amendments: the 13th Amendment (1865) abolished slavery, with an exception for punishment for a crime. The 14th Amendment (1868) opens with its citizenship clause: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States". Its equal protection clause forbids a state to deny any person the equal protection of the laws, and every later group in the course relies on it. The 15th Amendment (1870) bars denying the vote on account of race.
Jim Crow is the system of state and local laws and customs that enforced racial segregation and disenfranchisement in the South from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s, backed by racial violence including lynching. Disenfranchisement is taking away or blocking a group's right to vote; former Confederate states wrote grandfather clauses and literacy tests into law to do it.
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) upheld, by a 7–1 vote, a Louisiana law requiring separate railway accommodations by race, the source of the separate but equal doctrine. Segregation written into law is institutional discrimination.
The Great Migration is the movement of about six million Black people from the South to the North, Midwest, and West, from roughly the 1910s to the 1970s. People moved to escape racial violence and Jim Crow and to pursue work and education.
Course example: the archive's E2 (illustrative), a woman whose family moved north in the Great Migration in the 1940s, interviewed in the 1990s. The family left in 1943 and rode in a segregated train car on the way out of the South. In the new city, some neighborhoods stayed closed to the family because the bank refused loans there. Her mother called it "different, not finished." The gaps: 1865 − 1619 = 246 years from arrival to abolition, and 1868 − 1857 = 11 years from Dred Scott to citizenship by birth. Then 1896 − 1868 = 28 years from equal protection to Plessy, and 1943 − 1896 = 47 years from Plessy to E2's train ride.
Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) the proclamation read as freeing every enslaved person. Cure: it applied only to states that had seceded. (2) the 14th Amendment read as only about Black citizens. Cure: every later group uses its clauses. (3) segregation read as custom alone. Cure: Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) upheld it as law.

Week 7 — Civil rights and Black freedom movements

The distinction: de jure against de facto segregation. De jure segregation is separation 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.
Key idea: people won change in the law, and the new laws changed some things at once and left others in place.
Brown v. Board of Education (1954): a unanimous Supreme Court held that segregated public schools are unequal by their nature, overruling separate but equal for public schools, 1954 − 1896 = 58 years after Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Brown II (1955) told the states to desegregate "with all deliberate speed", and the order met considerable resistance, so segregation did not end at once.
The Montgomery bus boycott was an organized movement, not a single act. After Rosa Parks was arrested in December 1955, Black residents of Montgomery refused to ride the city's segregated buses for 381 days. It ended after the Supreme Court upheld a ruling that bus segregation violated the 14th Amendment. The civil rights movement is the organized, mass effort of the 1950s and 1960s to end segregation and win equal rights under law.
The two great laws: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in employment and in places of public accommodation. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 gave force to the 15th Amendment and prohibited literacy tests as a condition of voting, 1965 − 1870 = 95 years after that amendment.
Redlining is refusing loans or other credit to people because of the neighborhood they live in, whatever their own creditworthiness. In the 1930s the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, a federal agency, drew maps grading city neighborhoods A through D, with the lowest grade outlined in red. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 made discrimination in the sale, rental, or financing of housing unlawful.
Black Power, a phrase popularized in 1966, named a strand of the Black freedom movement that stressed self-determination, community control, and cultural pride. Black studies is the field that studies the history, cultures, and experiences of people of African descent; the strikers at San Francisco State demanded a Black Studies department.
Course example: the illustrative lending table (Dataset D), a model and not any real city. In A-rated neighborhoods 180 ÷ 200 × 100 = 90 percent of applications are approved, against 20 ÷ 200 × 100 = 10 percent in D-rated ones. The gap is 90 − 10 = 80 percentage points. A-rated neighborhoods get 18 approved loans each against 2 in D-rated ones, so 18 ÷ 2 = 9, a ratio of 9 to 1. Every lender follows the same rating, so the rule is institutional discrimination, like N1. The lower home values that follow for decades are structural inequality, like S1.
Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) Brown read as ending segregation at once. Cure: Brown II met considerable resistance. (2) the movement read as only Southern. Cure: E2's northern city still had the bank's map. (3) redlining read as only private prejudice. Cure: a federal agency drew the maps, and lenders applied the grades as rules. (4) de facto segregation read as accidental. Cure: lending ratings and boundaries built it.

Week 8's new idea (not tested on its own)

Week 8 adds one piece of new material: oral history as evidence. An oral history is a recorded first-person account, gathered by interview with the narrator's informed consent, read alongside documents rather than in place of them. Memory is selective and reconstructive, so you read an excerpt for experience and meaning and check its dates against dated records. A primary source is a record made at the time by a participant or witness. Testimonio is a first-person account of collective struggle, told by a narrator who speaks as a witness for a community. Every archive excerpt was recorded 30 to 50 years after the decade it describes, and E2's 1943 and E4's late 1950s both check out against the dated record.

Representative practice

These are fresh variants, not the midterm's questions. Work each worked example yourself first, then compare your steps. Every scenario below is illustrative, invented for this guide, and attributed to no real person, lender, or place. The only real laws, cases, and scholars are the ones the course pinned, and every number is computed and checked in advance.

Worked example — four questions about a garden rule (Week 1)

An illustrative community garden posts a new rule: open plots go first to people who have lived in the neighborhood for ten years or more. Ask the four questions the field asks of any rule.

Who made it? The garden's volunteer board.
Whom did it serve? Long-time residents, who move to the front of the line.
Whom did it affect? Newer residents and renters who move often, who now wait longer for a plot.
How did the people affected answer? Suppose newer residents petition the board for a shared waitlist. That petition is the answer the fourth question looks for.

Then add what it leaves out: the rule never says how many newer residents are waiting. Two readers react differently. One grew up on the block and notices first that the rule rewards loyalty. The other moved in last year and notices first who is shut out. Naming each reader's positionality explains why each noticed what they did, and it disqualifies neither reader.

Why it matters: the four questions work on any rule, from a garden board to a federal law. The plain sentence: the rule serves long-time residents and makes newer ones wait, and its own text hides how many are waiting.

Worked example — one form, three ideas (Week 2)

An illustrative scholarship application asks three questions. It asks which race categories apply, which languages are spoken at home, and which country's citizenship the applicant holds. An applicant checks one race box, lists her family's home language and the holidays it keeps, and names her citizenship.

The race box is a race question: a social classification by perceived physical difference, using the issuing body's categories. It is not a biological test.
The home language and the holidays are part of her ethnicity: shared ancestry, language, religion, customs, or common origin.
The citizenship line is her nationality: legal membership in a state.

She holds all three at once, and each answers a different question.

Why it matters: if a form asks "race" and you answer with a language, you have mixed two ideas. Keep each idea on its own line.

Worked example — sorting by who or what does it (Week 2)

Five illustrative scenarios. Sort each one.

A gym member privately thinks members of one ethnic group are rude, but treats everyone at the gym the same way. Prejudice: an attitude with no act.
A museum guard asks only visitors of one racial group to open their bags at the door. Individual discrimination: one person's act.
A car-rental office follows a written policy that refuses rentals to anyone whose license lists an address in certain neighborhoods, no matter who applies. Institutional discrimination: the rule does the work, and no prejudiced person is needed.
Decades after a city built parks and sidewalks only in some districts, children in the other districts still have fewer safe places to play and longer walks to school. Structural inequality: unequal outcomes built up across many institutions over time.
An illustrative company hires women for its office and Black workers for its warehouse, so a Black woman who applies fits neither pattern. Looking at race alone or at sex alone misses her. Intersectionality: overlapping categories produce an experience neither one describes.

Tally: 1 prejudice + 1 individual + 1 institutional + 1 structural + 1 intersectional = 5 scenarios, and 1 + 1 = 2 of them are acts of discrimination.

Why it matters: ask "who or what does it?" One person, a rule, or a pattern built over time each points to a different concept.

Worked example — one family, two kinds of assimilation (Week 3)

An illustrative family runs a hardware store. The children speak only the dominant language, and the family keeps the dominant group's holidays. Yet the town's main business club has never admitted them, and their names never appear on its boards.

Cultural assimilation has taken place: they took on the dominant group's language and customs.
Structural assimilation has not: they have not entered the dominant group's institutions and networks.
The club's admission practice is one reason, which ties back to Week 2's institutional discrimination.

Now picture three illustrative grown children of immigrant parents from one apartment building. One becomes a pharmacist and moves to a distant suburb. One works three part-time jobs and cannot get out of poverty. One becomes an engineer, stays in the old neighborhood's congregation, and speaks the home language with her children. That is segmented assimilation: upward into the middle class, downward into lasting poverty, and upward while keeping the community's ties. The melting pot pictures one path; segmented assimilation finds three.

Placing the frameworks in time: Kallen's essay came 1915 − 1908 = 7 years after Zangwill's play. Gordon's book came 1964 − 1908 = 56 years after the play. Portes and Zhou came 1993 − 1964 = 29 years after Gordon. The span from Du Bois to Portes and Zhou is 1993 − 1903 = 90 years.

Why it matters: a framework is a tool. Test whether it fits the case, and say which framework fits and why.

Worked example — an agreement between governments (Week 4)

Two illustrative school districts sign an agreement to share one bus line. Each district keeps its own board. One district provides the buses, and the other pays for the drivers. Each gives something, and each is promised something.

That is the shape of a treaty: an agreement between governments, not a gift from one side. Now read the Fort Laramie Treaty (1868) the same way. The United States and the Sioux Nation each acted for its own people. The treaty set aside the Great Sioux Reservation, including the Black Hills. The government confiscated the land 1877 − 1868 = 9 years later, and the Sioux Nation's claim remains in legal dispute.

Next, an illustrative member of a Native nation votes in three elections in one year. She votes for her nation's council, for her state's governor, and for the U.S. Congress. Each vote comes from a political membership. None of them is a racial category, and tribal citizenship works the same way.

Why it matters: a treaty is an agreement between nations, and tribal citizenship is membership in a nation. Both are political, not racial.

Worked example — Week 5 on one timeline (Week 5)

Place the week's dated events, then work each gap.

Week 5 events on the law-and-case timeline, with the years between them worked out
From	To	Years between
Indian Citizenship Act, 1924	last state bars on Native voting, 1957	1957 − 1924 = 33
Indian Citizenship Act, 1924	Indian Reorganization Act, 1934	1934 − 1924 = 10
relocation offices, 1951	Indian Relocation Act, 1956	1956 − 1951 = 5
termination resolution, 1953	end of the proceedings span, 1970	1970 − 1953 = 17
termination resolution, 1953	self-determination act, 1975	1975 − 1953 = 22
self-determination act, 1975	repatriation law, 1990	1990 − 1975 = 15

The Alcatraz occupation ran from November 1969 to November 1970, which is 12 months, and then 7 more months to June 1971, so 12 + 7 = 19 months.

Now an illustrative scene. A Native nation runs its own health clinic under a contract with the federal government, instead of a federal office running it. That is self-determination: the tribe runs its own programs and services. Across town, an elders' storytelling night draws families from many nations. Read it as survivance, Native presence that is active and continuing.

Why it matters: a 33-year gap between citizenship and the vote in some states is the course's clearest case of a law that did less than it seems to.

Worked example — equal on paper, unequal in practice (Week 6)

An illustrative condominium board adopts a voting rule. Any owner may vote, but owners who bought after a certain year must first pass a long written exam that the board writes and grades. In practice, the exam falls almost entirely on newer owners, who come mostly from one group.

The rule looks equal on paper and is unequal in practice. That is the shape of the literacy tests and grandfather clauses that former Confederate states wrote into law after the 15th Amendment (1870). The amendment barred denying the vote on account of race, and those laws blocked Black voters anyway.

Now the comparison the course draws. The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 made Native Americans born in the United States citizens, yet some states barred them from voting until 1957. In both cases, a federal right on paper was narrowed by state law in practice.

The timeline: the proclamation took effect in 1863 and the 13th Amendment came in 1865, so 1865 − 1863 = 2 years between the proclamation and the amendment. The proclamation had left slavery untouched in the loyal border states, and it took the amendment to abolish slavery everywhere. All three amendments were ratified within 1870 − 1865 = 5 years.

Why it matters: for every law, ask what it did and what it left in place.

Worked example — new readings of the lending table (Week 7)

Use the illustrative lending table (Dataset D), a model and not any real city or lender.

The illustrative lending table: neighborhoods, applications, and approved loans by rating, with each approval rate
Rating	Neighborhoods	Applications	Approved	Approval rate
A	10	200	180	90 percent
B	15	300	240	80 percent
C	15	300	150	50 percent
D	10	200	20	10 percent

B-rated against C-rated. The gap is 80 − 50 = 30 percentage points. A difference between two percentages is in percentage points, not percent.
B-rated against D-rated. 80 ÷ 10 = 8, so a B-rated applicant is approved 8 times as often as a D-rated applicant.
Approved loans per neighborhood. B-rated neighborhoods get 240 ÷ 15 = 16 loans each, and C-rated ones get 150 ÷ 15 = 10. So 16 ÷ 10 = 1.6, and a B-rated neighborhood gets 1.6 times as many loans.
The whole city. 590 ÷ 1,000 × 100 = 59 percent of all applications were approved.

Reading it as a concept: every lender applies the same rating, so the rule is institutional discrimination. The decades of lower home values that follow are structural inequality.

Now de jure against de facto. In illustrative Town A, a 1940s ordinance required separate public swimming pools by race: de jure segregation. Illustrative Town B never had such a law, yet its two pools serve almost entirely different groups. For decades, lending ratings decided who could buy a home near each pool. That is de facto segregation: built by housing and lending, not by accident.

Why it matters: "no law requires it" does not mean "no one built it". Ask what rule or pattern did the work.

Self-check questions

Try each one, then read the check and the one-line why.

Name the field's three methods. Check: reading the public record, listening to community accounts, and comparing across groups. Why: each method answers a different part of the four questions, and the course uses all three together.
In what year was the College of Ethnic Studies established at San Francisco State, and in what year did the strike there begin? Check: 1969, and the strike began in 1968. Why: the College was won 1969 − 1968 = 1 year after the strike began.
A hiking club's handbook describes every other club's routes as "wrong", measured only against its own trail markers. Which Week 2 term fits? Check: ethnocentrism. Why: it judges others' ways by the standards of one's own group.
An illustrative city starts treating a style of street dancing, once seen as a neighborhood pastime, as a sign of one racial group. Which term names that move? Check: racialization. Why: the city attaches racial meaning to a pastime that carried none before.
Which framework does the course credit to Kallen, and which to Blauner? Check: Kallen (1915), cultural pluralism; Blauner (1969), internal colonialism. Why: the course gives every framework with its author and year.
A student calls double consciousness "a kind of mental illness". What is the cure? Check: it is an experience a color-line produces, from Du Bois (1903), and not a disorder. Why: Du Bois named a social experience of seeing oneself through others' eyes.
Settler colonialism describes colonialism as what kind of thing? Check: an ongoing structure, not a single past event. Why: in Wolfe (2006), settlers come to stay and take the land.
In what year was the Dawes Act passed, and what did it do with land not allotted? Check: 1887; it opened that land for sale. Why: allotment split land held in common into individual parcels.
A classmate says termination and relocation were the same policy. How do they differ? Check: termination ended the government-to-government relationship with a tribe; relocation moved people from reservations to cities for jobs. Why: one ended a political relationship, and the other moved families.
Which amendment overturned the citizenship holding of Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), and how many years later was it ratified? Check: the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, so 1868 − 1857 = 11 years later. Why: its citizenship clause made citizenship a matter of birth or naturalization.
What did the Fair Housing Act of 1968 make unlawful, and how many years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did it come? Check: discrimination in the sale, rental, or financing of housing, 1968 − 1964 = 4 years later. Why: redlining had worked through lending, so the housing law reached financing as well as sales.
On the lending table, how far apart are the A-rated and B-rated approval rates, and in what unit? Check: 90 − 80 = 10 percentage points. Why: the difference between two percentages is in percentage points.

Check yourself — choose one. Write two or three sentences to a friend.

(a) Explain why tribal citizenship is a political status and not a racial category, using a treaty as your evidence.
(b) Explain why de facto segregation is not accidental, using the lending table as your evidence.

Either one rehearses an explain-why skill the midterm checks.

Watch before the exam

These seven videos come from the course's vetted Week 8 pool, and every one has captions. Each was already linked in the week it reviews. Use them to review and to connect weeks, not to learn anything new.

The Legacy of the Third World Liberation Front student strike at SF State — Kapwa Kollective (video, 9 min) (captions: automatic) reviews the Week 1 objective on the field's origins. Participants look back on the coalition and the departments the strike won. One remembers the strike starting in October, so check that memory against the dated record of November 1968. That connects forward to Week 8, where memory is read for meaning and dates are checked.
Racial/Ethnic Prejudice & Discrimination: Crash Course Sociology #35 — CrashCourse (video, 12 min) (captions: creator) reviews the Week 2 objective on prejudice, discrimination, and discrimination built into institutions. Treat its statistic about who receives welfare as the video's own claim, since the course uses no figure about a group's present-day income, and its example about immigrants and jobs as one theory's illustration, not a settled answer. Its closing part on pluralism and assimilation, which Week 2 stopped before, now works as a bridge to Week 3.
Assimilation Theory 101 — Shiyu (video, 5 min) (captions: creator) reviews the Week 3 objective on segmented assimilation and its three paths, set beside the older straight-line theory. It argues one critic's view, so weigh it as a framework with critics, the way Week 3 taught.
What is Tribal Sovereignty? — Native Governance Center (video, 3 min) (captions: automatic) reviews the Week 4 objective on sovereignty and on treaties as agreements between nations. It gives a count of federally recognized nations, and the course never keys that count because it changes.
The Termination Act Explained: Ep 14 of Crash Course Native American History — CrashCourse (video, 12 min) (captions: creator) reviews the Week 5 objective on termination and relocation as one era. Read its figures with their source. It calls the 1953 resolution the Termination Act and dates the relocation program to 1952, so check both against House Concurrent Resolution 108 and the 1951 offices. Then connect it back to Week 3's assimilation framework.
Our Amendments - The Equality Amendments: 13, 14, & 15 — statebaroftexas (video, 5 min) (captions: automatic) reviews the Week 6 objective on the three Reconstruction amendments read together. Listen for its point that the 14th Amendment answered the Dred Scott case. When it says Brown v. Board of Education ended school segregation, it reads that ruling for more than it did, as Week 7 explains.
History, Housing & Health: Redlining — Johnson County Museum (video, 7 min) (captions: automatic) is a synthesis across Weeks 2 and 7. It reviews redlining and the line between de jure and de facto segregation, and it shows a rule producing unequal outcomes, which is Week 2's institutional discrimination and structural inequality.

Study plan

A short countdown. Count back from the day you plan to sit the midterm.

Two weeks out: as you finish Week 6, start a one-page list of the course's swapped pairs. Begin with race and ethnicity, ethnicity and nationality, prejudice and discrimination, and the three-way sort. Add assimilation and pluralism, immigrant and incorporated peoples, and a political status against a racial category. Add de jure and de facto when Week 7 arrives.
One week out: as you finish Week 7, reread the Week 2 topic review and redo its two worked examples. Week 2 holds 5 of the midterm's 25 questions.
At the start of Week 8: take the practice exam once, cold and closed-note. Note which objectives cost you the most. Remember that it leans less on Weeks 1 and 2 than the midterm does.
Three or four days before you sit it: reread the topic reviews for your two weakest objectives, and redo the matching worked examples from scratch without looking.
Two days before: run the paired exam-prep tutorial (the copy-and-paste chatbot tutor, or its no-AI route) for active recall. Tell it which areas the practice exam exposed.
The day before: retake the practice exam, explain every miss out loud, and work the self-check questions above. Then say each week's distinction in one sentence.
Right before: skim the "predictable mistakes → cures" lines for all seven weeks. Then stop studying, and take a few slow breaths.

This guide is for review. The exam-prep tutorial and the practice exam are where you rehearse. Pulling ideas back out of memory, not rereading, is what makes them stick.

Exam format

Every one of the 25 questions counts the same, and the midterm checks your own understanding without AI. The questions come one at a time, and there is no going back, so settle each one before you move on.

Test-taking strategies for this material:

Name the pair before you choose. Most questions turn on two neighboring ideas, such as race and ethnicity, or prejudice and discrimination. Say which pair is in play first.
Ask the one-line test. Attitude or action? One person, a rule, or a pattern over time? By choice, or by conquest, annexation, or force? A political status or a racial category? Required by law, or built in practice?
Place it in time. For a law or a case, picture the timeline first, then ask what it did and what it left in place.
Treat "illustrative" as a cue. The scenario was invented for the question, so judge it by the course's definitions, not by a guess about what happened next.
Watch the tense and the terms. An option that speaks of Native nations only in the past tense, or that calls a federal category a biological group, has slipped.
For a "pick every option that fits" question, judge each statement on its own, as if it were a true-or-false question.

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