After the Civil War, the United States experienced social, legal, and political development and transformation. As the nation began to transform, so too were the dynamics of race and gender, that intersected within immigration and/or labor. The decades between 1877 and 1914 witnessed the legal construction of race, partially catalyzed by an influx of non-Anglo immigrants from Europe and Asia, and new found freedom for Black slaves. For instance, in order to be naturalized as a US citizen, one had to be “white” which before World War I had been loosely defined. In addition, the protections of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments granted to newly freed slaves threatened nativist white superiority resulting in a new racial social order. This
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Out of this moment in post-slavery America came the ratification of the Reconstruction Amendments, specifically the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment which for the most part protected the right to “due process” and vote. Thus, for a brief moment, the United States was the most democratic than it had been ever before because an entire population that had no impact on politics, before 1877, was able to do so. However, as the black community gained significant political and social protections, the white upper middle class Americans in power felt threatened, mostly because of economic circumstances, and resulted in the legislation of black codes that followed the frame work of the Mississippi model. For example, these codes would allow for the monitoring of African American movement in public space by imposing a curfew. These laws created a hierarchy based on race positioning some as superior (“white”) and others (blacks) as subordinate. Although Jim Crow was created social divisions in American society it also exposed the development of non-Anglo racial ethnicity specifically with immigrants from Europe and …show more content…
was a nation; 2) persons who arrived voluntarily for economic opportunity; 3) persons forced to migrate here as refugees from foreign lands due to political or economic distress or those enslaved to provide labor. These categories, as with most things, is intersected by race, gender, and class and resulted in the racialization of ethnicity that had to be defined in the United States to contain racial order. Due to these ideologies of superiority and with ties to racism and nativism much of the living conditions of those communities were inhumane. This creation of whiteness bounded and constructed by law created a racialized ethnic identity for those who did not smoothly fit the categories of black or white—the foreigner. This is especially evident at the tenements of New York
Out of this moment in post-slavery America came the ratification of the Reconstruction Amendments, specifically the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment which for the most part protected the right to “due process” and vote. Thus, for a brief moment, the United States was the most democratic than it had been ever before because an entire population that had no impact on politics, before 1877, was able to do so. However, as the black community gained significant political and social protections, the white upper middle class Americans in power felt threatened, mostly because of economic circumstances, and resulted in the legislation of black codes that followed the frame work of the Mississippi model. For example, these codes would allow for the monitoring of African American movement in public space by imposing a curfew. These laws created a hierarchy based on race positioning some as superior (“white”) and others (blacks) as subordinate. Although Jim Crow was created social divisions in American society it also exposed the development of non-Anglo racial ethnicity specifically with immigrants from Europe and …show more content…
was a nation; 2) persons who arrived voluntarily for economic opportunity; 3) persons forced to migrate here as refugees from foreign lands due to political or economic distress or those enslaved to provide labor. These categories, as with most things, is intersected by race, gender, and class and resulted in the racialization of ethnicity that had to be defined in the United States to contain racial order. Due to these ideologies of superiority and with ties to racism and nativism much of the living conditions of those communities were inhumane. This creation of whiteness bounded and constructed by law created a racialized ethnic identity for those who did not smoothly fit the categories of black or white—the foreigner. This is especially evident at the tenements of New York