1. On the Origin of Racism

Debates over the origins of racism often suffer from a lack of _____ over the term. Many mix recent forms of racism with earlier forms of ethnic and national conflict. In most cases ethno-national conflict seems to ____ to conflict over land and strategic resources. In some cases ethnicity and nationalism were ________ to wars between great religious empires (for example, the Muslim Turks and the Catholic Austro-Hungarians). As Benedict Anderson has suggested ethnic ______ and ethno-nationalism became a source of conflict within such empires with the rise of print-capitalism.

In its modern form, racism evolved in with European exploration and _______ of much of the rest of the world, and especially after Christopher Columbus reached the Americas. As new peoples were __________, fought, and ultimately subdued, theories about “race” began to develop, and these helped many to ______ the differences in position and treatment of people whom they categorized as belonging to different races.

Another possible source of racism is the misunderstanding of Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution. Some ___ Darwin’s theories to imply that since some “races” were more civilized, there must be a biological _____ for the difference. At the same time they _______ to biological theories of moral and intellectual traits to justify racial oppression. There is a great deal of controversy about race and intelligence, in part because the concepts of both race and ___ are themselves controversial.

2. Enjoy a Song

Love is Color-Blind

It don’t matter if you're black white or yellow, if you’re brown or red let’s get down to that love is color-blind I remember when I was a child and couldn’t understand people having fun discriminating all the different ones mama just used to say when you grow up you’ll maybe find a way to make these people see that everything I do comes back to me

3. Enjoy a Poem

Let America be America Again

Let America be America again.

Let it be the dream it used to be.

Let it be the pioneer on the plain

Seeking a home where he himself is free.

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—

Let it be that great strong land of love

Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme

That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty

Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,

But opportunity is real, and life is free,

Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free”.)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?

And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

4. Make up a story

Write your own ending of the story.

Background Information

1. Author

Tobias Wolff (1945—) was born in Alabama in 1945. His parents divorced when he was a boy. Wolff’s mother retained custody of him. As a child, Wolff traveled with his mother, Rosemary, to the Pacific Northwest, where she remarried. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, young Tobias soon was forced to endure life under his strict and cruel stepfather. His efforts to get away from his stepfather led to his self-transformation.

That period of Wolff’s life is recounted in This Boy’s Life: A Memoir, which was later made into a film.

He lives with his family in upstate New York and teaches writing at Syracuse University.

From 1964 through 1968, Wolff served as a lieutenant with the U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Berets) in Vietnam. He later recounted his wartime experiences in the memoir In the Pharaoh’s Army: Memoirs of the Lost War.

In 1972 Wolff earned his B.A. and then his M.A. from Oxford University with First Class Honors in English three years later.

He is the author of the short novel The Barracks Thief, which won the 1985 PEN/Faulkner Award; two collections of short stories, Back in the World (collecting “Say Yes”) and In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, which received the Saint Lawrence Award for fiction in 1982.

2. Racism

Racism: the belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others.

3. Ku Klux Klan

Koo Klucks Klan also known as KKK: a secret white supremacist organization at various times in American history terrorized blacks and white sympathizers with violent acts of lynching, shootings and whippings.

Founded: 1866

Founder: Confederate Civil War veterans

Headquarters: Powderly, Kentucky; Butler, Indiana; Jasper, Texas

Background: The Klan has fragmented into scores of competing factions. Most of these are nominally independent.

Estimated size: no more than a few thousand, organized into slightly more than 100 units

Media: mass mailings, leafletting and the Internet

Strategy: public rallies and protests

Ideology: some Christian fundamentalist beliefs, Christian Identity, white supremacy

Financial support: little

Birth: Six college students founded the Ku Klux Klan between December 1865 Tennessee. The six young men organized as a social club or fraternity and spent their time in horseplay of various types, including wearing disguises and galloping about town after dark. They were surprised to learn that their nightly appearances were causing fear, particularly among farmer slaves in the area. They quickly took advantage of this effect and the group began a rapid expansion. Various factions formed in different towns, which led to a meeting in April 1867 to codify rules and organizational structure.

Targeting those set free after the American Civil War—the African Americans, KKK designed to spread fear throughout the Black population that still lived in the southern states. The most hatred was directed against the poor black families in the south who were very vulnerable to attack.

Reconstruction: In 1867, General Nathan Bedford Forrest, converted the Klan into a paramilitary force that served to directly oppose the formation of Republican governments. Klansmen dressed in white robes and covered hoods, rode on horses, and dragged black people and some white republicans from their homes, assaulting them by whipping or lynching them. Such assaults were successful in keeping black men from the polls, and thus altering election results.

With the enactment of Congressional legislation and enforcement of the law by the federal government, the Klan was extinguished in 1871—1872.

By the 1960s, as the Civil Rights Movement was emerging, the Klan’s membership reached almost twenty thousand. Like the former Klan organization, there was not a central leadership.

While the Klan still exists today, its membership is in the low thousands. The Klan has ties to other white supremacist organizations such as the Aryan Nations and the Skinheads.

4. Jim Crow Laws

Racial segregation, called “Jim Crow”, excluded blacks from public transport and facilities, jobs, juries, and neighborhoods. Blacks had separate hospitals, prisons, orphanages, parks and pools. The 19th century ended with the races firmly segregated—culturally and legally.