How did "white skin privilege" unite wealthy and poor whites in accepting slavery in eighteenth-century North America? Were laws necessary to enforce relations between the races?
What will be an ideal response?
The ideal answer should include:
- Social status of poor whites: shared a privileged status of skin color with the white elite; given citizenship rights that free blacks were denied
- Religious perspectives: black skin seen as "God's curse"; free Africans prohibited from owning Christian slaves; any African who struck a Christian was whipped
- Slave colony politics: laws imposed severe penalties for interracial sexual relationships, although these were overlooked when slave masters had relations with their female slaves; free blacks could not vote, hold office, or testify in court; free blacks denied citizenship and seen as outcasts
- Race relations: Mulatto children born to slave mothers were slaves (Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings), but mulattoes born to white women were free; mulattoes made up three-quarters of the free African American population; racial distinctions promoted debasement of all blacks, free or slave; racism shaped inferior views of blacks, and deeply rooted prejudices entertained by whites divided the two races
You might also like to view...
The scholar who described, and exaggerated, the effects of the frontier on American character was:
a. Ralph Waldo Emerson b. Frederick Jackson Turner c. Herbert Bancroft d. Brigham Young
All of these factors hastened the industrialization of the United States in the three decades following the Civil War EXCEPT
a. the national reconciliation and harmony between North and South b. cheap unskilled labor caused by massive immigration c. the accumulation of large pools of liquid capital for investment d. the tapping of rich natural resources of coal, oil, and iron e. technological inventiveness and innovation
Why did the United States enter World War I in 1917?
A. The Germans attacked Cuba. B. The Germans started sinking U.S. ships again. C. The Germans bombed Rhode Island. D. The German sinking of the Lusitania. E. None of these answers.
By 1956, white-collar workers
a. had organized themselves into unions. b. had grown in numbers but were still a minority in the workforce. c. outnumbered blue-collar workers for the first time. d. had been ruled ineligible to receive unemployment insurance.