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Week 11 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 11 — Two Papers: Exclusion, Citizenship, and Redress on the Timeline — 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Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI.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 10 of the term — place this week's laws, cases, and order on the timeline, read one family's two papers beside the record, and explain it to someone who has it wrong.

This week you met the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Angel Island Immigration Station, citizenship by birth in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) and the naturalization cases of 1922 and 1923, Executive Order 9066 (1942), Korematsu v. United States (1944), and redress under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. In this assignment you work four short problems on the timeline, 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 6's 14th Amendment (1868) and its citizenship clause, and on Week 2's racial formation and institutional discrimination.

The task

The law-and-case timeline is the course's list of dated laws, cases, and orders, each year taken from the issuing body's own page. The course's running archive is an illustrative, unnamed public library's collection built for this course; its excerpts are identified by role and decade and are not real people's words. Its E7 excerpt comes from a retired teacher whose parents were incarcerated in the 1940s, interviewed in the 1990s. The parents were teenagers when the order came in 1942, and both were born in this country; the family lost the lease on the farm; after the 1988 law, each parent received a letter of apology from the government and the payment; and the mother kept the letter in the same drawer as her birth certificate, saying the two papers together "finally told the whole story."

A coworker at your part-time job says, "During the war, Congress passed a law to intern Japanese enemy aliens, and the government never admitted anything was wrong." Your job is to answer the way an ethnic studies reader would, starting from a few plain dates on the timeline.

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic:

  1. On the law-and-case timeline, the Chinese Exclusion Act came in 1882, and Congress repealed the exclusion acts in 1943. How many years did exclusion law last?
  2. On the law-and-case timeline, the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, and the Supreme Court decided United States v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898. How many years apart are the amendment and the case?
  3. On the law-and-case timeline, the Supreme Court decided United States v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898, and Executive Order 9066 came in 1942. How many years apart are the case and the order?
  4. On the law-and-case timeline, Executive Order 9066 came in 1942, and the Civil Liberties Act came in 1988. How many years apart are the order and the law?

Beside each count, add one brief interpretation:

  • Problem 1: explain exclusion as a law that names a national origin, which Week 2 calls institutional discrimination written into law, and explain that the 1882 act was extended in 1892, made permanent in 1902, and repealed only in 1943.
  • Problem 2: explain birthright citizenship as Wong Kim Ark held it and set it apart from naturalization, which Ozawa (1922) and Thind (1923) denied, and compare across groups: the same clause was ratified after Dred Scott (1857) denied citizenship to Black Americans.
  • Problem 3: explain Executive Order 9066 as an order of the President, not a law passed by Congress, used to forcibly remove and incarcerate people of Japanese ancestry, most of them citizens, and explain why the course says incarceration rather than internment.
  • Problem 4: define redress and say what the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 did, and read the archive's E7 excerpt (illustrative): the birth certificate shows the parents were citizens by birth, and the letter of apology shows the government admitting the wrong.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your coworker has two things wrong. Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains that Executive Order 9066 (1942) was an order of the President, not a law passed by Congress; that most people removed under it were U.S. citizens, as E7's parents were citizens by birth; that this course says incarceration because internment means detaining enemy noncitizens; and that the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 apologized and paid 20,000 dollars to each surviving person. Name one limit, such as that E7 is an illustrative account whose dates are checked against the record. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good message is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a friend who sees an old store sign reading "Closed for the season" and decides the store went out of business that year. Model message: "The sign is a real record of what the owners posted at the time, and it is worth keeping. But a sign cannot tell you what happened next; the store's later records or the owners' own account would. One fair caveat: a memory needs checking against dated records too."

Use that pattern for your coworker, 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 source, the dated record or the E7 account, 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 counts, each with the years and the arithmetic shown, and the brief interpretation the task names for that problem;
  • your message to your coworker, explaining that the order was not a law, that most people removed were citizens, the word incarceration, and the 1988 apology and payment, with one limit;
  • your reflection, on the option you chose; and
  • a one-line restatement of the years you used, so your counts 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 counts, 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 E7 only as the course describes it, name people only by role, state documented history plainly, 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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