Week 14 — Where Categories Meet: Intersections 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Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI.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 13 of the term — place this week's laws and cases on the timeline, read one family's account through several lenses, and explain intersectionality and the census count to someone who has them wrong.

This week you met intersectionality applied across gender, class, language, religion, and citizenship, Loving v. Virginia (1967), the census option to select one or more races, colorism, and the archive's E2 excerpt read through several lenses. 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 definition of intersectionality as overlap rather than addition, on Week 7's lending table and first reading of E2, and on Week 13's federal-categories timeline.

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 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 E2 excerpt comes from a woman whose family moved north in the Great Migration in the 1940s, interviewed in the 1990s. She says the family left in 1943; her father went first, to work in a shipyard, and sent for them that spring; on the train they sat in the car set aside for Black passengers until they were out of the South; in the new city there were neighborhoods where the bank would not lend to them; and her mother said it was different, not finished.

A coworker at an illustrative community center is drafting a newsletter item that says, "Intersectionality means adding up a person's identities, and the census proves the country got far more mixed in ten years." 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:

On the law-and-case timeline, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 came in 1964, and Crenshaw named intersectionality in 1989. How many years apart are the law and the idea?
On the law-and-case timeline, Brown v. Board of Education came in 1954, and Loving v. Virginia came in 1967. How many years apart are the two decisions?
On the federal-categories timeline, Loving v. Virginia came in 1967, and the 2000 census was the first to let respondents select one or more races. How many years apart are the decision and that census?
On the law-and-case timeline, the archive's E2 family moved north in 1943, and the Fair Housing Act came in 1968. How many years apart are the move and the law?

Beside each count, add one brief interpretation:

Problem 1: name the 5 categories the Civil Rights Act of 1964 lists one by one, and explain intersectionality as overlap rather than as identities added together.
Problem 2: say what Loving v. Virginia (1967) struck down and why the ruling reaches every couple whose marriage crosses a racial line, and explain that laws against interracial marriage outlasted the 1954 ruling.
Problem 3: explain the one-or-more-races option and self-identification, and read the Census Bureau's 9 million Multiracial people in 2010 against 33.8 million in 2020 as a change the Bureau expects was largely due to better measurement, not growth alone.
Problem 4: read E2 (illustrative) through race, gender, and class and place at once, and name one thing E2 leaves out that an intersectional reading turns into a question instead of a guess.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your coworker's newsletter item treats intersectionality as addition and reads the census change as growth alone. Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains intersectionality as overlap, where the meeting point of two categories has its own experience, and explains that the Census Bureau expects the change from 9 million Multiracial people in 2010 to 33.8 million in 2020 was largely due to improvements in the questions' design, processing, and coding. Name one limit, such as that a census count records what people report on a form, so it cannot say on its own how many families changed. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good message is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a friend who says a café's weekend crowd tripled because the food got better, when the café had also started counting takeout orders it used to skip. Model message: "The food may well have improved, and that is worth noticing. But the café changed what it counts at the same time, so part of the jump comes from a new tally, not new customers. One fair caveat: without the old way of counting, you cannot say how much of the jump is real growth."

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 lens, race, gender, or class and place, changed your reading of E2 most, 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 overlap and the measurement change, 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 any AI tool. You may use a calculator or a spreadsheet for the arithmetic. Describe E2 only as the course describes it and invent no detail for it, name people only by role, name groups as their members most commonly name themselves, describe any religious practice without judging it, and do not borrow a figure or a quotation 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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