Racism In The 1920s Summary

What is the purpose of racism? In Theorizing Nationalism, Day and Thompson discuss how racism and nationalism are precisely the same. Racism has the ability to help build nationalism, especially in our young country. LeMay and Barkan in U.S. Immigration & Naturalization Laws & Issues talk about how this racism is used during a specific time period, 1880 to 1920, in the United States of America. Both of these articles argue that when the United States was in a time of peril, they used racism as a unifying factor to bring the country together and as a way to put a group of people lower than themselves to bring their status to a higher point in society. During the years of 1880 to 1920, The United States was just coming out of a civil war

Therefore, they excluded the Chinese, Japanese, eastern Europeans, Africans, and other below them to show everyone their perfect race. This happened in many places such as France during the nineteenth century. Day and Thompson state that “… observing that one of the principal ways of defending French colonialism was the doctrine of assimilation, which sought to ‘make over the indigenous “races” in the image of France, out of a belief that France is the perfect embodiment of universal values.’” This is similar to the reoccurring actions of Americans during the 1880 to 1920 timeframe. They were not necessarily colonizing other nations, however, the United States believed that they possessed “perfect embodiment of universal values.” Therefore, they excluded or segregated people of different cultures to make their race seem more superior. Both of these articles concentrated on the significance of using racism as a unifying force to prevent divisions in the majority white culture and as a way to make the majority seem superior to others. The Jim Crow laws aided the nation in becoming a unified force before World War 1, but further damaged our country for decades to come. During the 1880 to 1920 period, the United States should have been more accepting of different types of culture to help build the country since it was so