The Public City
The Public City

Author: Philip J. Ethington

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2001-07-06

Total Pages: 484

ISBN-13: 9780520927469

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Philip J. Ethington challenges the assumptions of several decades of urban history that treat American urban politics as the expression of social-group community experience. Instead, he maintains in The Public City, social-group identities of race, class, ethnicity, and gender were politically constructed in the public sphere in the process of political mobilization and journalistic discourse.

White Borders
White Borders

Author: Reece Jones

Publisher: Beacon Press

Published: 2021-10-12

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0807054062

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“This powerful and meticulously argued book reveals that immigration crackdowns … [have] always been about saving and protecting the racist idea of a white America.” —Ibram X. Kendi, award-winning author of Four Hundred Souls and Stamped from the Beginning “A damning inquiry into the history of the border as a place where race is created and racism honed into a razor-sharp ideology.” —Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The End of the Myth Recent racist anti-immigration policies, from the border wall to the Muslim ban, have left many Americans wondering: How did we get here? In what readers call a “chilling and revelatory” account, Reece Jones reveals the painful answer: although the US is often mythologized as a nation of immigrants, it has a long history of immigration restrictions that are rooted in the racist fear of the “great replacement” of whites with non-white newcomers. After the arrival of the first slave ship in 1619, the colonies that became the United States were based on the dual foundation of open immigration for whites from Northern Europe and the racial exclusion of slaves from Africa, Native Americans, and, eventually, immigrants from other parts of the world. Jones’s scholarship shines through his extensive research of the United States’ racist and xenophobic underbelly. He connects past and present to uncover the link between the Chinese Exclusion laws of the 1880s, the “Keep America American” nativism of the 1920s, and the “Build the Wall” chants initiated by former president Donald Trump in 2016. Along the way, we meet a bizarre cast of anti-immigration characters, such as John Tanton, Cordelia Scaife May, and Stephen Miller, who pushed fringe ideas about “white genocide” and “race suicide” into mainstream political discourse. Through gripping stories and in-depth analysis of major immigration cases, Jones explores the connections between anti-immigration hate groups and the Republican Party. What is laid bare after his examination is not just the intersection between white supremacy and anti-immigration bias but also the lasting impacts this perfect storm of hatred has had on United States law.

West
West

Author: Paisley Rekdal

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press

Published: 2023-05-02

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1619322773

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Punctuated by historical images and told through multiple voices, languages, literary forms and documents, West: A Translation explores what unites and divides America, drawing a powerful, necessary connection between the completion of the transcontinental railroad and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943). In 2018, Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal was commissioned to write a poem commemorating the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad. The result is West: A Translation—an unflinching hybrid collection of poems and essays that draws a powerful, necessary connection between the railroad’s completion and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943). Carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station, where Chinese migrants to the United States were detained during the Chinese Exclusion Act, is a poem elegizing a detainee who committed suicide. As West translates this anonymous Chinese elegy character by character, what’s left is a haunting narrative distilled through the history and lens of transcontinental railroad workers, and a sweeping exploration of the railroad’s cultural impact on America. Punctuated by historical images and told through multiple voices, languages, literary forms and documents, West explores what unites and divides America, and how our ideas about American history creep forward, even as the nation itself constantly threatens to spiral back. West is accompanied by a website (www.westtrain.org) which features video poems and encourages self-exploration of the transcontinental railroad’s history through an interactive, non-linear structure. Pairing this urgent book and innovative website, Rekdal masterfully challenges how histories themselves get written and disseminated. The result is a tour de force of resistance and resilience.

An Aristocracy of Color
An Aristocracy of Color

Author: D. Michael Bottoms

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2013-02-11

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0806188863

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In the South after the Civil War, the reassertion of white supremacy tended to pit white against black. In the West, by contrast, a radically different drama emerged, particularly in multiracial, multiethnic California. State elections in California to ratify Reconstruction-era amendments to the U.S. Constitution raised the question of whether extending suffrage to black Californians might also lead to the political participation of thousands of Chinese immigrants. As historian D. Michael Bottoms shows in An Aristocracy of Color, many white Californians saw in this and other Reconstruction legislation a threat to the fragile racial hierarchy they had imposed on the state’s legal system during the 1850s. But nonwhite Californians—blacks and Chinese in particular—recognized an unprecedented opportunity to reshape the state’s race relations. Drawing on court records, political debates, and eyewitness accounts, Bottoms brings to life the monumental battle that followed. Bottoms begins by analyzing white Californians’ mid-century efforts to prohibit nonwhite testimony against whites in court. Challenges to these laws by blacks and Chinese during Reconstruction followed a trajectory that would be repeated in later contests. Each minority challenged the others for higher status in court, at the polls, in education, and elsewhere, employing stereotypes and ideas of racial difference popular among whites to argue for its own rightful place in “civilized” society. Whites contributed to the melee by occasionally yielding to blacks in order to keep the Chinese and California Indians at a disadvantage. These dynamics reverberated in other state legal systems throughout the West in the mid- to late 1800s and nationwide in the twentieth century. As An Aristocracy of Color reveals, Reconstruction outside of the South briefly promised an opportunity for broader equality but in the end strengthened and preserved the racial hierarchy that favored whites.