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Week 13 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 13 — Who Could Belong: Citizenship, Quotas, and the Federal Categories 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Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI.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 12 of the term — place this week's citizenship and immigration laws and the federal categories on the timeline, read two narrators beside the record, and explain the census boxes to someone who has them wrong.

This week you traced who could become a citizen from the naturalization law of 1790 to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, read the Immigration Act of 1924 and the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, compared the archive's E3 and E5 excerpts, met nativism and xenophobia, and counted the federal categories of 1977, 1997, and 2024. 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 2's line between race, ethnicity, and nationality, and on Week 11's naturalization cases, Ozawa v. United States (1922) and United States v. Thind (1923).

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 federal-categories timeline lists the three versions of the federal race and ethnicity categories, from 1977, 1997, and 2024, written exactly as the issuing body writes them. 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 E3 excerpt comes from a nurse who arrived in the early 1970s after the 1965 immigration law, interviewed in the 2010s: the nurse came alone in 1972 because hospitals needed nurses and the training counted, sponsored a sister five years later, and says it took the family twenty years. Its E5 excerpt comes from a woman who resettled as a refugee in the early 1980s, interviewed in the 2010s: when she names this town as where she is from, people ask again.

Your cousin is filling out a form that follows the 2024 standards and says two things: "They added a new race in 2024, so scientists must have found a new group," and "Our grandmother's family from North Africa was never counted before 2024." 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 naturalization law came in 1790, and Congress extended naturalization to persons of African nativity and descent in 1870. How many years apart are the two laws?
  2. On the law-and-case timeline, the Immigration Act came in 1924, and its quotas were based on the 1890 census. How many years old was the count the quotas used?
  3. The archive's illustrative E3 excerpt says the nurse came in 1972, and the Immigration and Nationality Act came in 1965. How many years after the law did the nurse arrive?
  4. On the federal-categories timeline, the 1997 standards counted people with origins in the Middle East or North Africa within White, and the 2024 revision gave them their own minimum category. How many years apart are the two versions?

Beside each count, add one brief interpretation:

  • Problem 1: explain what the 1790 law limited naturalization to, and why that is a racial line used to decide a nationality, keeping race and nationality apart.
  • Problem 2: describe the 1924 quotas in the course's words, a quota for every nationality from the 1890 count, and say what happened to immigrants from Asia on top of the quotas.
  • Problem 3: read E3 for one thing it says and one thing it leaves out, and compare it with E5, who came under the Refugee Act of 1980 and is asked again where she is from.
  • Problem 4: explain where the 1997 standards counted people with origins in the Middle East or North Africa, and what the 2024 revision changed.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your cousin has both ideas wrong. Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains that a federal category is the issuing body's social-political category for collecting data, not a group scientists discovered, and that people with origins in the Middle East or North Africa were counted within White under the 1997 standards before they had their own category. Name one limit, such as that a box shows how the government counts people, not who a person is, and that your cousin chooses which box fits. 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 bookstore's new "graphic novels" shelf proves that graphic novels were invented the year the shelf went up. Model message: "The new shelf tells you when the store decided to sort those books on their own, which is a real change worth noticing. But the books existed before; they sat on other shelves under other labels. One fair caveat: a store's shelf labels show how it organizes its stock, not what the books are."

Use that pattern for your cousin, 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 E3 and E5 accounts, 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 two years and the arithmetic shown, and the brief interpretation the task names for that problem;
  • your message to your cousin, explaining that a federal category is the issuing body's social-political category and that people with origins in the Middle East or North Africa were counted within White under the 1997 standards, 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 E3 and E5 only as the course describes them, name people only by role, state documented history plainly, and do not borrow a quotation, a figure, or a court holding from another source without citing it. This assignment asks about dated records, not about any current immigration or enforcement question. 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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