 A New Work in Progress... Part Two of my conceptual art project, which explores "what it means to be an American," is now available to view on my website. Called "THE DISSENT COLLARS," Part Two focuses on what I call "American Whiteness Laws," or race prerequisite laws, and deals with how US courts and legislators created a new category of immigrants in the late 1800's labeled "aliens ineligible to naturalize," because they were neither from Africa nor found to be "White" by law. To get a taste of how these laws worked, here's a short essay I was asked to write for The Washington Spectator. It's a history of California's race laws entitled "The Dark Side of Sunny California."
1 Comment
Dale Fink
4/24/2020 02:18:10 pm
I am struck that the period in which courts found basis to legally exclude certain citizens from equal human rights (and classify them as not white) seems to coincide with the surge of mass "IQ" testing in the post-World War I era. While those in charge of the testing claimed to be conducting "science," they always changed, reworked, or outright fudged their results to support conclusions consistent with their prior beliefs: that human beings exist on a hierarchical scale of intelligence, in which white northern Europeans have the most, and the amount of "intelligence" diminished as one went down the ladder through eastern and southern Europeans, Jews, Indians, Asian and Pacific Islanders, indigenous peoples, and down to the African diaspora, who were depicted in caricatures (claiming the mantle of science) as if they physically resembled members of the ape family more so than their fellow humans. Leave a Reply. |
Setsuko WinchesterMy Yellow Bowl Project hopes to spur discussion around these questions: Who is an American? What does citizenship mean? How long do you have to be in the US to be considered a bonafide member of this group? Archives
April 2020
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