Sociology: Class Assignment Questions
Answer each question in a clear and organized way. Each answer should include a precise thesis (2-3 sentences) that directly addresses the question prompt, 1–2 direct quotes from the primary materials of the course, and at least 8 additional sentences that analyze the direct quotes and explain how the evidence supports your thesis:
- Using either an order theory model, or a conflict theory model, please describe the causes and mechanisms of immigrant assimilation.
- Omi and Winant discuss the parallels between gender and race relations in the US. What similarities and differences do they identify that link race and gender?
- Discuss how the suburbanization of the middle classes impacted racial contestation and contributed to the erosion of overt Jim Crow segregation.
- Almaguer discusses the role that emerging class tensions between whites play in the exclusion of non-whites (in his chapter Chinese immigrants) from the labor market. Discuss the ways and reasons that capitalists employers divided the working class along racial lines, or discuss the ways in which laborers attempted to preserve their social position through exclusion.
- Dorothy Roberts, W.E.B. DuBois and Omi and Winant all discuss the political origins of race in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Pick one of the following institutions and discuss how it impacted the development of race in the US: Christianity, Colonialism, Slavery, Capitalism.
