Color in the Classroom

How American Schools Taught Race, 1900-1954

Datos Bibliográficos

ID5705757
AutoresRaymond Wolters (University of Delaware, autor de correspondencia)
Año2012
Volumen99
Número2
Páginas629-629
Fecha de publicación2012-09-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
EditorialOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jahist/jas166
OpenAlexW2024871569
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas18

Color in the Classroom describes the efforts of school reformers who worked to change American attitudes toward race during the first half of the twentieth century. Despite dense prose, the book effectively demarcates different phases in the effort to promote tolerance and combat bigotry. At the dawn of the twentieth century, when many Americans used the word race as a synonym for ethnicity, schools sought to Americanize immigrants recently arrived from Europe. Some teachers tried to suppress every vestige of non-Anglo ethnicity, while others fostered assimilation by encouraging respect for carefully selected aspects of immigrant heritage. After immigration was restricted in the 1920s, the latter approach came to prevail. The more tolerant approach had an unintended effect: it reinforced the belief that all European Americans were members of the Caucasian race. According to Zoë Burkholder, this “recasting [of] previously racialized white minorities as members of the dominant racial majority” led to a “hardening [of] the racial distinction between ‘white’ people and those who were ‘colored’” (p. 13

Assimilation (phonology · Ethnic group · Immigration · Linguistics · Political science · Race (biology · Sociology · White (mutation · Critical Race Theory in Education · Diverse Educational Innovations Studies · Gender Studies · History · Law