Biological Constructs of Race
This term describes the process by which racial categories are created, institutionalized, and made to seem biologically “natural.”
What is racial formation?
This federal agency institutionalized redlining, labeling Black neighborhoods as "hazardous" and denying home loans.
What is the Federal Housing Administration (FHA)?
Poor Europeans justified siding with wealthy landowners against enslaved Africans through the creation of this shared racial identity.
What is the "White Race"?
This term, popularized by Israel Zangwill’s play, symbolized the ideal of European immigrants blending into a unified American identity.
What is the "Melting Pot"?
This New Deal program’s housing policies institutionalized redlining and racialized access to homeownership.
What is the National Housing Act?
False claims about biological differences led to the exclusion of African Americans from this financial safety net in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
What is life insurance?
Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argued that people of color were excluded from assimilation into American identity but served this metaphorical role in the "melting pot."
What is "wood to fuel the fire"?
Lower-class Europeans elevated their social status through roles like overseers and bounty hunters, which helped control this population.
Who were enslaved Africans?
Historian Mae Ngai described early 20th-century immigrants like Italians and Jews as being in this racial limbo—neither fully white nor fully “other.”
What are "in-between peoples"?
Despite fighting in WWII, many Black veterans were denied access to this postwar program that helped white GIs buy homes.
What is the GI Bill?
Frederick Hoffman’s influential but pseudoscientific book used flawed mortality data to argue for Black inferiority.
What is Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro?
This systemic practice limits access to opportunities based on race, often through policies that appear neutral but disproportionately harm marginalized groups.
What is systemic racism?
Racial hierarchies solidified quickly in early America due to the belief that these divisions were this.
What is "natural"?
This 1915 lynching of a Jewish man in Atlanta sparked national debate about whether Jews were considered white in America.
Who is Leo Frank?
Between 1934 and 1962, less than this percentage of $120 billion in federally backed home loans went to non-white families.
What is less than 2%?
Despite scientific consensus on the nonexistence of biological races, approximately this percentage of human genetic variation exists within, rather than between, racial groups.
What is 85%
This form of social control disproportionately targets communities of color, leading to higher arrest and incarceration rates.
What is racial profiling?
This term was used in the early 20th century to describe the fear that immigrant groups would change American society’s racial makeup and moral standards.
What is "racial invasion"?
This 18th-century intellectual movement led thinkers like Jefferson to believe that education and environment could "improve" Native Americans.
What is the Enlightenment?
In response to federal redlining policies, white residents along this Detroit road built a wall to separate themselves from Black neighborhoods and secure home loans.
What is Eight Mile Road?
Early social scientists used these specific mortality statistics to justify racial segregation and discrimination.
What are mortality rates?
This real estate practice preyed on white homeowners’ racial fears, causing them to sell homes cheaply, which were then resold at inflated prices to Black families.
What is blockbusting?
The Jim Crow era used this legal system to enforce racial segregation in public spaces and disenfranchise Black Americans.
What are Jim Crow laws?
Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia argued that Native Americans resembled Europeans in mind and body, but their skin color was caused by this factor.
What is exposure to the sun?
The FHA labeled racially mixed or minority neighborhoods with this color, indicating that they were high-risk for mortgage lending.
What is red?