Final by Samuel Pasco

Key Term

samrjpasco — 2025-05-02 20:38:57 UTC

“Manifest destiny is the belief that white Christan Americans had the divine right to conquer the people living in North America” (Sparks 2025). A common theme with the settling of colonialism in North America is the idea of justification. We first saw this with made up pseudo-science as a justification for enslaving Black people. But with manifest destiny, it’s religious justification for the destruction of Indigenous peoples. This contortion of religious ideals helped white people conquer massive sections of land in America through any means possible. Their tactics to attain the land consisted of erasing Indigenous peoples through disease, war, genocide, famine, violence, and forced assimilation. Manifest destiny gave peace to the consciousness of white settlers, while they committed acts against humanity on Indigenous peoples.

Key Term

samrjpasco — 2025-05-02 21:45:51 UTC

Sleep Dealer is a movie that comments on the idea of countries having cheap foreign labor without having to care for the immigration or the wellbeing of the workers. This is a very similar situation that is currently taking place in Mexico through maquiladoras, which we talked about in week 12. “Maquiladoras are assembly plants that have operated in Mexico since 1965, when the ‘Border Industrialization Program’ was established by government decree” (Vargas 126). These plants are given raw materials from the U.S., they assemble the raw material into goods, and then give the goods back to the U.S.. The downside to these plants are the workers are paid very little, the hours are extreme, and they are terrible for the environment. These plants can get away with those attributes because the workers are not protested by the U.S. Government, even though the American economy greatly depends on these factories. This is the basis of the movie Sleep Dealer. America receives the benefits of Mexican labor, but has no responsibility for the workers or the Mexican environment.

Key Term

samrjpasco — 2025-05-04 23:40:20 UTC

Settler colonialism is when a group of people come to a land which is not native to them, to take it over permanently with no regard to the people who are native. Settler colonialism is specific to the permanence of the invading group that seeks to strip the preexisting sovereignty. This connects to week 15’s chapter 5 content about Hawaii. In the 1890s, America overthrew the Hawaiian Kingdom and stripped Hawaii of its sovereignty. This settler colonialism continued, eventually turning Hawaii into a U.S. state. The result of America colonizing Hawaii still affects the state today. There is too much tourist infrastructure on the islands that negatively affects the culture, climate, and economy of native Hawaiians. Haunani Kay Trask says, “Psychologically, our young people have begun to think of tourism as the only employment opportunity, trapped as they are by the lack of alternatives” (qtd. in Fischer and Hodges 5.5). These tourist operations only benefit the non-native millionaires who own the tourist attraction, but the native people are trapped in this monopolized commandeering enterprise. Settler colonialism has devoured the freedom and culture from the native people of Hawaii.

Key Term

samrjpasco — 2025-05-05 04:35:26 UTC

Orientalism describes the way Europeans view and described Asians as a lower kind of people. This European racist way of viewing Asian people was created to put themselves on a level of higher civilized importance. In week 15, we read chapter 5, which discussed this in great detail, “Orientalism was rooted in the impulse to dominate, possess and it was about setting Europeans apart as a people who are not only different, but superior to Asia” (Fischer and Hodges 5.2). This view of Asia is so rooted in European characteristics that even ancient Greek philosophers thousands of years ago were documented looking down on the entire idea of Asian people. Orientalisms degrading view of others does a really good job at displaying the white European mindset throughout all of colonialism as this way or excuse to destroy and conquer.

Key Term

samrjpasco — 2025-05-08 06:24:04 UTC

Damaged-based research is when research, stories, and narratives describe the negative events done to a group of people. In this class, we talked about this in reference to Native Americans. Most of the history we learn about Native Americans is about the atrocities that were committed against them. And while that's not a bad thing to understand and learn about, it only describes them as broken and damaged. Tuck describes why that can be problematic, “The danger in damage-centered research is that it is a pathologizing approach in which the oppression singularly defines a community” (Tuck 413). Native Americans are much more than victims and a better way to tell their full complexity is through desire-based research. “Desire-based research frameworks are concerned with understanding complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives” (Tuck 416). Native Americans are a complex group of humans with a culture that differs from tribe to tribe spanning the entire United States, and desire-based research can fulfill that intricate narrative better than damage-based research.

Historical Event

samrjpasco — 2025-05-08 23:00:41 UTC

The Dawes Act split stolen lands into individual allotments of property that were given to Native Americas, they were also given U.S. citizenship. The caveat to this deal was forced assimilation. Assimilation came in many forms, but the main factor we talked about in class was the Native American boarding schools. These boarding schools stripped away Indigenous culture, most famously by restricting their language. The U.S. government wanted Indigenous people to behave and think like the white man, and the Dawes Act set this forward. This quote about the Act by Alice Fletcher, a women of Native American studies during the late 1800s, demonstrates the demented thinking behind the Dawes Act, "The Indian may now become a free man; free from the thralldom of the tribe; freed from the domination of the reservation system; free to enter into the body of our citizens. This bill may therefore be considered as the Magna Carta of the Indians of our country." (Fletcher 1887). The Dawes Act of 1887 also resulted in Native Americans losing a massive amount of their land when the U.S. government sold off the “surplus” to white colonists. This act was a massive moment in America's destruction of Native Americans.

Historical Event

samrjpasco — 2025-05-09 06:01:39 UTC

Zoot suits are big suits with noticeably large lapels and high-waisted baggy pants. These suits were commonly worn in Black and Latino communities in the 1930s and 40s. Because of Los Angeles’s large Mexican and Latino population, zoot suits were big in the Los Angeles area. World War 2 was at its height in the early 1940s and the country was in a cloth shortage because of it, so zoot suits were seen as wasteful and unpatriotic because it took a lot of fabric to make them. White people used the excuse of the suits to justify their festering racism. Servicemen who were stationed in Los Angeles eventually decided to act out their dislike of people wearing zoot suits. In June 1943, servicemen went out and attacked men and boys wearing zoot suits. “For 10 nights, military men dragged men (some as young as 12) who were wearing the suits and beat them” (Sparks 2025). Even the police took side with the attackers and arrested the innocent people wearing the suits. The Zoot Suits Riots were a demonstration of the inequality towards Latino people in America.

Historical Event

samrjpasco — 2025-05-09 07:28:47 UTC

On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, a U.S. naval base on the island Oahu. This attack on Pearl Harbor initiated America's involvement in World War 2, and because Japan committed the attack and was one third of the Axis powers, the U.S. became hyper paranoid of Japanese citizens. "By the time the Japanese army bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the United States government had already made steps toward increasing surveillance of the Japanese American community" (Fischer and Hodges 5.4). This racist paranoia led to Japanese internment camps, which were camps that relocated and held Japanese American citizens. They became prisoners without due process and without committing a crime. The camps had terrible living conditions and were often overcrowded. The largest camp was at the Santa Anita racetrack, which is located near Los Angeles. People lived in horse stables that smelled of manure and were terribly unsanitary. Because the President of The United States Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the order to imprison Japanese American citizens, it created a feeling of justification to hate and be racist towards Japanese people in America. The U.S. didn’t recognize their atrocious mistake until 1988, when president Ronald Regan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which was a government apology and $20,000 to people who were interned in 1942.