Final Practice Exam

In one family, the grandmother calls herself Chicana, her daughter says Latina, and her grandson prefers Latine. Which description matches how this course defines Chicana/o?

Select one.

• A newer gender-inclusive form of Latino whose use is still a matter of debate
• A self-chosen political identity of people of Mexican descent, rising with the movement of the 1960s and 1970s
• The federal term, paired with Hispanic on forms, for Latin American origin of any race
• A name for anyone whose family comes from a Spanish-speaking country, Spain included

An illustrative salon's owner and every applicant come from the same ethnic group, and the owner keeps hiring lighter-skinned applicants over darker-skinned ones with the same training. Which concept best names this pattern?

Select one.

• Discrimination between groups, since applicants from another group are turned away
• Prejudice only, since a preference about skin tone never becomes an action
• Structural inequality, since it builds up across many institutions over decades
• Colorism, since the line is drawn by skin tone inside one group

A student's timeline of Korematsu v. United States (1944) stops in the year of the decision. Which statement about the Court's ruling on the exclusion order issued under Executive Order 9066 (1942), and about what came later, is accurate?

Select one.

• The Court struck the exclusion order down 6–3, and Korematsu was never convicted of anything.
• The Court upheld the exclusion order 6–3 in 1944, and in 1983 a federal judge overturned Korematsu's conviction.
• The Court upheld the order, and the Supreme Court itself reversed that decision in 1983.
• Congress overturned the ruling in 1983 by passing a law that cleared Korematsu's name.

True or false: the course describes the Cherokee removal called the Trail of Tears as a forced removal carried out under a treaty, not as a move the families chose.

True or false.

• True
• False

An illustrative archive excerpt comes from a nurse who came alone in 1972, sponsored a sister five years later, and says the family's arrivals took twenty years. Which law is the excerpt tied to?

Select one.

• The Refugee Act of 1980, which followed years of admission by presidential action
• The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which followed the 1952 act of that name
• The Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which followed a federal commission's 1983 report
• The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which the Geary Act extended in 1892

A student's notes describe Du Bois's double consciousness as a mental illness. Which description corrects the notes?

Select one.

• A psychological disorder in which a single person has two separate and competing personalities
• A path on which immigrants' children rise while keeping their community's ties
• A policy of keeping two cultures side by side within a single democracy
• The experience of seeing oneself through the eyes of a society that looks down on one's group

Shortly before the Immigration Act of 1924, the Supreme Court heard Ozawa v. United States (1922) and United States v. Thind (1923), brought by a man born in Japan and a man born in India who sought to naturalize. What did the Court decide?

Select one.

• It held that both were citizens by birth under the 14th Amendment, because their parents lived in the country.
• It ended the racial bar to naturalization for Asians and opened citizenship to immigrants from every country.
• It denied each man naturalization because he was not a 'white person' under the 1790 law, as extended in 1870.
• It upheld a wartime order that removed both men from the West Coast.

The course's illustrative oral-history archive holds 7 excerpts. Of these, 2 come from interviews in the 1990s and 3 from interviews in the 2000s, and the rest were recorded in the 2010s. How many were recorded in the 2010s?

Select one.

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4

Members of a campus club disagree about whether to print Latinx on their banner. Which statement about the term matches how this course presents it?

Select one.

• It is the federal term that took the place of Hispanic or Latino on the 2024 combined question.
• It is the political identity that people of Mexican descent chose in the movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
• Its use is a named debate: supporters say it includes people a gendered ending leaves out, and critics object.
• It is a label for origin in a Spanish-speaking country that appears mostly on government forms.

Under the 1997 federal standards, Hispanic or Latino origin was asked as an ethnicity. How many ethnicity categories did that question offer?

Select one.

• 1 category
• 5 categories
• 2 categories
• 7 categories

A Native Hawaiian family reads the 1993 joint resolution in which Congress apologized for the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1893. What does the resolution's last section say?

Select one.

• Each Native Hawaiian living in 1993 is to receive 20,000 dollars as redress.
• Federal lands taken in the overthrow are to be returned to Native Hawaiian organizations at once.
• Nothing in it is intended to serve as a settlement of any claims against the United States.
• The Kingdom of Hawaii is restored as a self-governing nation.

A voter who went to school in Puerto Rico, where classes were taught in Spanish, moves to the mainland and is told to pass an English-literacy test before voting. Which law protected voters in this position?

Select one.

• The Voting Rights Act of 1965
• The Jones-Shafroth Act
• The Cuban Adjustment Act
• The Civil Rights Act of 1964

Illustrative scenario: an apartment company's written screening policy turns away every applicant whose last address is in a listed set of neighborhoods, and the leasing agents who apply it bear no one any ill will. How does the course sort this?

Select one.

• Prejudice, since the policy reveals a negative attitude
• Institutional discrimination, produced by the company's rule
• Individual discrimination, since an agent sends each rejection
• Not discrimination, since nobody involved intends any harm

Illustrative scenario: a family has lived for generations in a town that belonged to Mexico until the lands were ceded in 1848; the family stayed put and the border moved around it. A writer calls the family immigrants who should melt into one new people. Why does that frame misread the family?

Select one.

• The family arrived too recently to have blended in yet
• The family gave up every part of its culture over time
• The family never immigrated; it was incorporated when the border moved
• The melting pot applies only to families who came by ship

A Cuban family that was paroled into the United States later became lawful permanent residents under the Cuban Adjustment Act. In which year was that law signed?

Select one.

• 1917
• 1980
• 1966
• 1959

The 1790 naturalization law limited naturalization to a 'free white person', and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 ended the racial bar to naturalization for Asians. How many years separate the two laws?

Select one.

• 162 years
• 152 years
• 172 years
• 82 years

A student who grew up speaking two languages at home worries that this background makes her unfit to read an interview with a bilingual family. How does the course answer her?

Select one.

• Every reader has a position; naming hers helps others check what she notices and misses
• She should leave the reading to a classmate who has only ever spoken one language
• Positionality is the same thing as bias, so her reading cannot count as evidence
• Only a reader with no background of any kind could ever give the interview a truly fair reading

Excerpt E6 in the course's illustrative archive is from a former high-school student who wanted teachers who looked like the students and classes about their own history, and whose father was angry about the day the narrator left school in the 1960s. Which documented event is the excerpt tied to?

Select one.

• The Delano grape strike of the 1960s
• The San Francisco State strike of the 1960s
• The Bracero Program of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s
• The East Los Angeles walkouts of the 1960s

Which law outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in employment and in places of public accommodation?

Select one.

• The Voting Rights Act of 1965
• The Civil Rights Act of 1964
• The Fair Housing Act of 1968
• Brown v. Board of Education (1954)

Between the 2010 and 2020 censuses the Multiracial count rose from 9 million to 33.8 million. Which explanation matches the Census Bureau's own reading of that change?

Select one.

• The change shows that the federal categories measure biological groups more precisely each decade.
• Births and marriages alone grew the multiracial population by that much in ten years.
• The change came because Loving v. Virginia (1967) took effect only in the 2010s.
• The change was largely due to improvements in question design, data processing, and coding.

The federal race and ethnicity categories had five minimum race categories in 1997 and were rewritten as seven minimum categories in one combined question in 2024. Which concept best names this kind of policy-driven remaking of categories over time?

Select one.

• Racialization: a single act of attaching racial meaning to one practice
• Ethnocentrism: judging other groups by the standards of one's own group
• Racial formation: categories made, changed, and contested over time through law and policy
• Intersectionality: overlapping categories creating an experience neither describes

Two illustrative families moved to the same city in the same decade. The first came from abroad under the country's immigration rules. The second moved from its nation's reservation under a federal relocation program, and its nation became part of the United States by conquest. Which distinction does the course use to say only the first is an immigrant story?

Select one.

• Prejudice versus discrimination
• Cultural versus structural assimilation
• Immigrant versus colonized or incorporated peoples
• Ethnicity versus nationality

A class compares three federal laws of 1988, 1990, and 1993 for what each does. A museum that receives federal funds holds human remains and cultural items of a Native nation's ancestors. Under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, what must it do?

Select one.

• Return the remains and cultural items through consultation with the nation and lineal descendants
• Pay 20,000 dollars to each living member of the nation whose lands were taken
• Issue a formal apology to the nation on behalf of Congress
• Settle every claim that the nation holds against the United States

Reading a city's posted parking rule, a student has written down what the rule says, who made it, whom it affected, and what it leaves out. In the course's reading walk, what should the student add before closing with one plain sentence?

Select one.

• What the rule leaves out
• What a comparison with another group adds
• Who made the rule and when
• Whom the rule served

A student mixes up the 1952 and 1965 immigration laws. Which description fits the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952?

Select one.

• It abolished the national-origins quotas and gave preference to family reunification and skilled workers.
• It offered legal status to undocumented migrants and penalized employers who hired unauthorized workers.
• It ended the racial bar to naturalization for Asians but kept the 1924 quotas, based on the 1890 census.
• It ended the racial bar to naturalization for Asians and abolished the national-origins quotas as well.

In Ozawa v. United States (1922) and United States v. Thind (1923), a man born in Japan and a man born in India each sought naturalization under a rule that went back to the law of 1790. How did the Supreme Court rule?

Select one.

• It ruled that each man was a citizen by birth under the 14th Amendment, so neither one needed to naturalize.
• It ruled that neither man could naturalize, because neither counted as a 'white person' under that rule.
• It upheld the 1924 law that cut off new immigration from Asia entirely.
• It upheld the wartime order used to remove people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast.

A student traces how the 14th Amendment (1868), one of the three Reconstruction amendments ratified from 1865 to 1870, was used beyond cases about Black Americans. Which pair of rulings shows its protections applied to another group?

Select one.

• Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) and Brown v. Board of Education (1954)
• Mendez v. Westminster (1946) and Hernandez v. Texas (1954)
• Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and Brown v. Board of Education (1954)
• Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

A classmate claims that Petersen's article 'Success Story, Japanese-American Style' invented the model-minority image. Which description does this course give instead?

Select one.

• It is usually credited with popularizing the image, not with inventing it.
• It is the article in which Petersen coined the term Asian American.
• It is the report that led Congress to end the national-origins quotas.
• It is the study that first defined a refugee as a person fearing persecution.

A caption in a history display calls the Second World War camps 'internment camps', and a student suggests the word incarceration. Which reason does this course give for that choice?

Select one.

• Internment is a recent word, and the wartime government never once used it in any of its own records.
• Incarceration refers only to prisons, and the camps had no guards or fences at all.
• The two words are legal synonyms, so the course picks the plainer of the two.
• In the law of war, internment means holding enemy noncitizens, and most people held were citizens.

A student studies the checkboxes on a federal form. Following the field's first questions about any category or law, what should the student ask about the list?

Select one.

• Which box lines up with each biological group of humankind
• Which group should be blamed for the way the boxes were worded
• Whether the list has enough boxes to match every ancestry exactly
• Who wrote the list, whom it served, whom it affected, and how people responded

A man born in San Francisco to Chinese parents who lived there permanently claimed citizenship by birth, and the Supreme Court agreed. In which decision did the Court hold that he was a citizen by birth?

Select one.

• Ozawa v. United States (1922)
• Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
• Korematsu v. United States (1944)
• United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898)

In Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the Supreme Court held that a Black person whose ancestors had been brought to the country and enslaved was not a citizen. Which part of the Constitution later answered that holding?

Select one.

• The 13th Amendment (1865), which abolished slavery
• The 14th Amendment's citizenship clause (1868)
• The 15th Amendment (1870), on voting and race
• The 'free white person' rule of the 1790 law

True or false: in Kallen's idea of cultural pluralism, distinct cultures are kept alive inside one shared democracy.

True or false.

• True
• False

A family's papers from the 1920s mention the quotas of the Immigration Act of 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act. How did those quotas work?

Select one.

• Only immigrants from Asia had a quota, and immigrants from every European country entered without limit.
• Each nationality's quota was 2 percent of its number in the 1890 census, and the racial bar to naturalization for Asians ended.
• The quotas ended for every nationality, and family reunification became the main way to enter the country.
• Each nationality's quota was 2 percent of its number in the 1890 census, and immigrants from Asia were excluded entirely.

Which law does the Bureau of Indian Affairs describe as establishing modern tribal governments?

Select one.

• The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934
• The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924
• The Indian Relocation Act of 1956
• The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990

A student is preparing a handout that quotes one excerpt from the course's illustrative oral-history archive. Under the archive's intake rules, which of these may the handout include? Select all that apply.

Select every option that applies.

• A part of the interview the narrator asked to keep private
• The narrator's role, such as a nurse or a student
• The documented law or event the excerpt belongs to
• The narrator's full name
• The decade the narrator speaks about

A Filipino American student association and a Mexican American student association decide to march together for one shared demand. By this course's definition, what makes their partnership a cross-group coalition?

Select one.

• The groups merge into one new group under a single shared name and history.
• Groups with different histories act together on shared demands while each keeps its own name.
• One group speaks for the others, which agree to set their own demands aside.
• Groups that already share one history and one name meet together to plan a single shared event.

A family keeps a great-grandfather's papers, among them a record from the Angel Island Immigration Station, which opened in 1910, together in one drawer. Which description of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 is accurate?

Select one.

• It stopped immigration from every country for ten years and then ended for good in 1892.
• It ordered every Chinese immigrant already in the country to naturalize within ten years or leave.
• It barred Chinese laborers and Chinese naturalization, became permanent in 1902, and lasted until 1943.
• It barred Chinese laborers for ten years only, and Congress never renewed or extended it once that time ran out.

A family answers the census differently in different decades as the boxes change. According to OMB's own description, what is one of the federal categories on the form?

Select one.

• A biological group that the issuing body measured once and has kept unchanged since
• A statement of nationality, showing which country made the person a citizen
• A scientific grouping that the issuing body revises only when genetic research changes
• A social-political category built for collecting data, not a biological or scientific group

A student claims segregation in the South was only a matter of custom and was never written into law. Which Supreme Court decision shows otherwise, and what did it uphold?

Select one.

• Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), upholding a Louisiana law that required separate railway accommodations by race
• Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), upholding a custom of separation that no state had put into law
• Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), upholding a federal ban on separate railway cars in every state
• Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), upholding a state law that barred Black citizens from registering to vote