This course has two goals: to introduce students to the field of public policy, and to offer a new way of thinking about some old and contentious policy issues. To accomplish the former, several class sessions will focus on one of the key components of policy-making (such as issue-definition), or on the roles that individuals and institutions play in the shaping of public policy.
The latter goal will be achieved by teasing out how this country has dealt with race, immigration, and citizenship. These three topics usually have been treated as separate domains of scholarship and policy. Scholars who study race and civil rights seldom pay much attention to immigration; and the interest groups that focus about immigration tend to be different from those that worry about race relations. In this course, we will consider how those topics are related. For example:
the US Constitution explicitly excluded one group, American Indians, from citizenship;
the Naturalization Act of 1790 law prescribed that naturalized citizenship would be limited to “free white persons”;
the key finding in Dred Scott v. Sanford case was that no one of African descent, whether slave or free, was a citizen of the United States; and
starting in the late 19th century, a series of laws restricted immigration from Asia.
Restrictions on citizenship and immigration made the United States “a nation by design,” in the words of one scholar. Add slavery and Jim Crow laws, and we understand why many people came to regard the United States as “a white man’s country.”
Policies governing race, immigration, and citizenship have changed dramatically in the past half-century. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act reduced the social isolation of African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans, and increased their political influence. The 1965 Immigration Reform Act ended quotas that favored Europeans. The resulting demographic changes have shifted our national palette from black-and-white to color. Those changes also have produced feelings of anxiety and anger among those who had grown accustomed to a centuries-old pattern of racial privilege.
Themes
Original Intent. When, how and why did race become such an important feature of American society? Readings include The Constitution and selections from The Federalist Papers.
The Racialization of America. How were laws and lawsuits used to determine who fit into which racial category and thus to determine rights and citizenship? Readings include Gillmer’s article “Suing for Freedom” and the Dred Scott decision.
Emancipation, Separate-But-Equal, and the Dawn of Protest. How did the Civil War Amendments answer the Dred Scott decision? What did Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois disagree about? Readings include Yick Wo. v. Hopkins, Plessy v. Ferguson, Washington’s Atlanta Exposition speech, and selections from The Souls of Black Folk.
The Exclusion of Non-whites. How have immigration and naturalization laws affected the racial composition of the country? How has the implementation of those laws helped to expose the fallacy of race? Readings include selected chapters in Lopez’s White By Law, Ngai’s Impossible Subjects, and the Supreme Court’s Wong Kim Ark, Ozawa and Thind decisions.
The Civil Rights Movement. Which branch of government proved to be most reliable in the advancement of civil rights? Why did the civil rights struggle move from the courts to the streets? Readings include several Supreme Court cases, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and sections from Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters.
The New Policy Regime. What did people expect to happen as a result of the new civil rights laws? How effectively did the new policies address discrimination in education, housing and other areas? Why, with so much apparent progress, was there so much frustration? What was the relationship between the Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Immigration Reform Act? Readings include theCivil Rights Act of 1964 and President Johnson’s 1965 Howard University speech.
Comparisons. How do the experiences of black Americans compare with those of other groups – with the internment of Japanese-Americans, for example, and with the “Caucasian cloak” that concealed discrimination against Mexican Americans? How do American race, immigration and citizenship policies compare with those in other countries? Readings include Telles’ Race in Another America and selected essays in Schuck’s Citizens, Strangers, and In-Betweens.
Outcomes and Controversies. How much better off are African-Americans today than they were before the passage of the civil rights acts? How did affirmative action become such an important part of the policy debate? Readings include Ed Dorn’s slides on trends in black/white income disparities in the post-CRA era.
Forecasts and Policy Options. Where do we go from here? What are the alternative policy paths? What do past experiences tell us about current controversies over immigration and assimilation? Readings include Hochschild’s Creating A New Racial Order.
Principal Texts:
Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988).
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (any edition).
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (any edition).
Ian Haney Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race, (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
Jennifer Hochschild, Vesla Weaver, and Traci Burch, Creating A New Racial Order, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012)
Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and The Making of Modern America, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004)
Edward Telles, Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
Assignments and Expectations:
Two-page paper 10%
Class participation 10%
Mid-term examination 20%
Book review (briefing and paper) 30%
Final examination 30%