Role Of Race And Gender In Shaping American Citizenship And Labor - Book Report/Review Example

Role Of Race And Gender In Shaping American Citizenship And Labor I) Thesis and Introduction A), Nakano has examined citizenship and labor as two major structures through which unequal race and gender relations have been shaped and contested in the U.S. B) After struggling for more than two hundred years to realize its professed principles of universality and equality, the U.S. has continued facing racial, class and gender inequalities (15). 1. Inequality has remained a source of great anguish and acrimony over its causes and deep conflict over what can and should be done to change its status. 2. Although U.S is a society that has proclaimed freedom, individualism and unlimited mobility, it has persisted on rampant inequality along inscriptive lines f race and gender, which has contradicted its reality. II) Integrating Race and Gender A)To examine how labor and citizenship constitute and are constituted by race and gender, the author of the book has conceptualized race and gender as interactive and interlocking elements and then considered how the two are incorporated into and shaped by various social institutions (88). A) The first challenge the author face is bringing race and gender within the same analytic plane. 1. Gender 2. Race 3. An integrated framework 4. Relationality 5. Representation and material relations 6. Power III) Citizenship: Universalism and Exclusion A) Citizenship as continued being a principal institutional formation within which race and gender relations, meanings and identities have been constituted in the U.S (114). 1. Citizenship, Equality, and Inequality 2. Universalism and Exclusion 3. Struggles for Civil and Political Citizenship 4. Working-Class White Men 5. Blacks 6. White women 7. Explaining exclusion IV. Labor: Freedom and Coercion A) Gender and Race have been incorporated as fundamental organizing axes of the labor system in the United States. Consequently, the labor system has been organized in ways to generate and regenerate race and gender categories and relationships (121). 1. Antebellum Labor 2. Labor and Independence in the Early Republic 3. Antebellum Northern Free Labor Ideology 4. Exclusions 5. Capitalist Industrialization and Stratified Labor 6. Production and Reproduction 7. Class Formation and Conflict 8. Ideology and identity 9. Labor and Citizenship 10. The Obligation to Work V. Blacks and Whites in the South A) From the end of federal reconstruction in 1877 all through 1920s during the full realization of the system of de jure jim Crow segregation and disfranchisement From 1877, when federal Reconstruction ended, through the 1920s, there was significant variation among southern states in the rigidity of political and social structures of domination and in the timing off moves and countermoves (132). 1. Hierarchy and Control in the Labor System 2. Racial Stratification of Urban Labor Markets 3. Racialized and Gendered Citizenship 4. Interdependent Lives and Identities 5. Anti-Miscegenation and the Black-White Dichotomy 6. Contestation and Resistance a) Building Separate Spaces b) Contestation in Public Spaces c) Oppositional Strategies at work 7. Education, Labor, and Citizenship VI) Mexicans and Anglos in the Southwest A) The Southwest just like the south is a vast and heterogeneous area (241). 1) Hierarchy and Control in the Labor System 2) Coercive Labor Practices 3) Racialized and Gendered Citizenship a) Disfranchisement b) Segregation 4) Interdependent Lives and Identities 5) Contestation and Resistance a) Violence b) Building Separate Spaces c) Protests and Strikes d) Civil Rights Organizing 6) Education 7) Americanization 8) The Coming Storm VII) Japanese and Haolesin Hawaii Hawaii has always been shown as a racial paradise, tolerant multicultural society where natives and immigrants freely intermingle (245). 1) Hierarchy and Control in the Labor System 2) Racialized and Gendered Citizenship 3) Interdependent Lives and Identities 4) Contestation and Resistance a) Building Separate Spaces b) Workplace Resistance c) Protests and Strikes 5) Education and Americanization 6) Portents of Things to Come VIII) Understanding American Inequality 1. Race and gender have been simultaneously organizing principles and products of citizenship and labor in U.S (248). 2. National and Local Connections 3. Patterns of Domination a. Labor b. Citizenship c. Social Interaction d. Racialization and Boundaries e. Openings for Agency f. Racialized Gender 4. Patterns of Contestation a) Micropolitics of Resistance b) Building Community 5. Education and Americanization 6. Roots and Branches IX) Conclusion A) There is need to remain alert to historical contingency and specificity and disjuncture and contradictions in historical processes that have shaped race and gender. This belief is the raison for the comparative regional approach offered in unequal freedom (344). The approach illustrates historical and regional specificity and common threads. 1093804_ Book Review 3: 1890 to the Present Glenn, Nakano E. Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor, Harvard University Press, 2002, 1-320. Print. The author of the book has put together an account of how race and gender inequality in the U.S. are structured and contested in the arenas of labor and citizenship. Apparently, this includes the private and public arenas of life in liberalism. Glenn juxtaposes the histories of Mexican Americans in the Southwest, African Americans in the South and Japanese Americans in Hawaii (8). She has viewed these groups from reconstruction through the progressive era from 1870-1930 to show that although universal citizenship rights were allegedly accessible to everyone who held formal citizenship; those deemed persons of color were excluded (25). The resistances against oppression by these communities of color in these three regions where agriculture dominated the economy transformed the meanings attributed to labor and citizenship. The book has used an absolutely crucial intervention on various debates on citizenship. This has effectively questioned critiques of race activism in present day U.S. Conservatives take on race politics as misreading of American history as all inclusive with possibly slavery as the unfortunate anomaly. The standard argument is that communities of color illiberally politicize race and destroy American ideals f non-sectarianism and equality, which are not worth rehashing here (67). On the hand, the author has shown that there are progressives who claim to be rooted in socially emancipator traditions but keep on arguing that race politics are merely palliative measures that do not basically alter the structuring principles of inequality. The author of this book has demonstrated in details that empirical rigor launched by social movements on communities of color went deep and strengthened participatory democracy along gender, race and crucially along class lines. Racial equality movements supported and nurtured in the subaltern public spaces of Buddhist temples, ethnic newspapers, churches, as well as ethnic unions were after expanding social, civil and political rights of citizenship to enable radicalized communities access a modicum of good life (92). This type of activism pushed for things as diverse as ownership of an individual’s labor, ability to vote and access to social amenities consequently contributing to labor movements in the anion, which extended suffrage and expounded the meaning of social rights associated with citizenship (118). For instance, in the south, there arose resistance to publicly supported education for the working class up to 1880s. But widespread education among blacks after reconstructing urban industrialists, the white farmers and workers began to see the sense of socializing the children of blacks and whites in schools to accept the southern white hierarchy (130). According to Glenn, the existence of literate blacks alongside illiterate whites contradicted the doctrine of the white superiority. In a more pervasive way, the educational achievements of African Americans combined public schooling for working class whites as well. The author of this book convincingly establishes that race movements did nit bring about merely palliative remedies (142). Instead, transformations at fundamental levels were brought about by race politics which were intentional or unintentional. This critique of unequal freedoms makes readers of the work to view instead of making them to make the cases as strongly as it should be. In liberal régimes, it is only through subordination of some communities that freedoms of other people materialize. Race and gender not only shape and are shaped by citizenship, but in due process, they build the nation (197). The American democracy posted as the model for much of the present world is possible only through imperial projects at home and the world at large. For instance, the author acknowledges that race and gender have played significant roles as organizing principles and products of citizenship labor. The readers of Unequal Freedoms obviously observe that the modern nation state is premised on egalitarian principles yet it is birthed only through exploitations and exclusions. States are depicted to be modern bureaucratic associations that claim legitimate dominance of society within a certain territory. Although they are bureaucratic structures, they have not derived their effectiveness from operating in monolithic ways. Instead, their practices are inflected by local customs and traditions (241). This does not contradict because, for example the Treaty Guadalupe Hidalgo between US and Mexican governments promised the conferee of Mexicans in the Southwest all the rights of citizenship of the U.S according to the constitutional principles. Unfortunately, the ground realities did not meet this agreement. This explains the operation of the state. These operations keep on fluctuating in their practices over time and space. Despite this fact, they remain constant in their need to contain the challenges threatening their existence as political entities. While the author was examining the 1870 to 1930 history, she witnessed a massive influx of southern and eastern Europeans into the U.S. The massive were arriving as industrial laborers. They were Slavic, polish, Jewish, Iberic and Mediterranean people who were not quite white in the early 20th century. By 1930s, they had been absorbed into whiteness, which consolidated the entire classification of European races that had disappeared from the American landscape (336). The European immigrants accessed whiteness and full American citizenship substantively, legally, ad culturally through sacrifice as slaves. To gain admission into American citizenship, they were required to give up their cultural, linguistic and religious particularities. Otherwise, this book is an excellent one explaining how race and gender are the structuring and the structured principles of citizenship. The sociology of race and ethnicity is yet to see the work as empirically broad but detailed on the subject as the author of the book still stands as a benchmark for sociological accounts of race and citizenship. The book could have been more effective if it could have pushed further to show that the unequal freedoms associated with race and the current American nation state have emerged together. In fact, the modern American nation state could be birthed only through selective excluded practices. Unequal freedom in the United States is not an exception to the rule, but rather the key constitutive element of the nation forming the foundations for masculine with freedom, independence and democracy. Work Cited Nakano, Glenn E. Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002, 1-320. Print. Read More