Race: The Power of an Thesis

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It also illustrated the solidification of the definition of a true American as a white male. Andrew Jackson was a populist, and spoke out against the landed aristocracy, of which Jefferson was a member. Jackson wanted votes for all men, regardless of property-holding status, but he also wanted to expand property ownership to a larger proportion of the population. This would be accomplished by expansion westward.

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 confirmed the Jacksonian idea that America was not a race-neutral civilization, and depended upon the subjugation and eradication of some races, while it strove to build up its own status: "They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any change in their condition. Established in the midst of another and superior race, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear," said Jackson, defending his actions.

The war with Mexico, which resulted in the establishment of Texas as one of the states of the union, was also characterized as a battle of civilizations, with Mexicans being characterized as 'inferior' and undeserving of a state that had been their territory, into which they had invited American settlers. Because the American settlers in Texas were white, ergo Texas was seen as a 'white' and 'American' nation in a way that transcended most legal conceptions of what constituted national ownership of a territory.

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As expansion westward continued, so did the divisions in the nation over slavery. A variety of compromises were instated to balance the U.S. between slave and free, but a crisis was clearly building in terms of how the U.S. would finally identify itself -- could an American citizen be anything other than a white man? But not only southerners subscribed to the doctrine of racial inferiority: In a perfect ideological storm, a misinterpretation of Darwinian notions of the evolution of the races and anthropological study of 'primitive' societies and skull sizes were used to justify the inequitable status of black people and the right of Europeans to dominate all other races in the name of progress. Racism and domination of native peoples was cast in a moral light.

Finally, he inferiority of certain races became codified into law: the 1857 Dred Scott U.S. Supreme Court case declared that people of African ancestry, enslaved or free, could never become citizens of the United States. The Court's opinion stated that black people "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect," and in effect, one a slave, always a slave. Hopes that slavery would die out of its own accord were extinguished......

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