The Role Of Immigrants In The Film Race II

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Throughout the film “Race III,” there were a lot of objectives in order to classify people of being white and being eligible of becoming naturalized U.S. citizen. We saw how immigrants started get categorized as a certain racial group. Depending on not only where you traveled from, but highly depending on the color of your body features. Biology was destiny. Which side you found yourself in the racial divide was a matter of life or death. Even those of lighter skin tones were sometimes subjected to being classified as non whites. States started to makes rules and regulations to classify these immigrants. Depending on the state you could change your race. This is because some stated ruled that having a certain percentage of African American in you makes you fully black. Most states varied, making it all extremely unfair. Whiteness was key to citizenship. In 1790 congress passed an act that only free white immigrants could obtain citizenship. After the civil war naturalization was offered to African American descent. Even though citizenship was granted to blacks, they still were treated as if they did not have the legal status. All the whites were the ones who had the better jobs, who had clear access to votes, were on …show more content…

Then, comes the judge deciding if you were white or black. There were many flawing in order to categorize blacks. Depending on the state you were in, they would subject you to being black by the different percentage of blackness you had in your ancestry. This leads to being able to legally change your race by crossing state lines. This is a very ineffective way to classify people. This way of classifying people was seen especially inefficient when the Armenians were ruled as whites. This lead to many different racial groups who have similarities to Armenians to petition whether or not they were white. The flaws were shown throughout this

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