Tomas Almaguer's Racial Fault Lines, And Fit To Be Citizens?

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The United States of America is often portrayed as the ideal place for freedom, but the flaws of this depiction are overshadowed by what’s known as the “American Dream”. For centuries and still today, issues of race relations are often only expressed through a Black and White dichotomy. But, the essence of race has come to be more of an amalgamation of historical racialization. Racial Fault Lines and Fit to be Citizens focus on how California was formulated from past immigration, and racialized, emphasizing issues that are alive in present day. Tomas Almaguer and Natalia Molina explore the issues of citizenship through American ideals by use of exploitation, science, and disease.
Through Almaguer’s, Racial Fault Lines, the understanding …show more content…

Metaphorically speaking, there is a concept throughout Molina’s Fit to be Citizens; this personally resonating find is the view of poverty as a disease. The reasoning behind segregation is not solely the bravado of the self proclaimed Anglo-American, but is is also the idea that being of lower class (non-white) is the undesirable; therefore, a disease. The irony of perpetuating such beliefs is that what is feared becomes what is spread. So, it is not only the feared brown or yellow peril…eventually, class by race creates poverty through the succession of white supremacy and capitalism. This supremacy is in conjunction with segregation of those labeled as of lesser European (white) stock. Almaguer and Molina focus on racialization in California, but sociologically racial hierarchy is nationwide. These two authors have expanded the field of …show more content…

The research of these two authors has essentially broken past standards, presenting a challenge to historians and sociologists. The challenge being, to find the reason why Californians, a multi-ethnic peoples with multi-ethnic areas of population, continue to hold race as a prevalent indicator of socio- economic variables and social problems. This is the critical thinking that Almaguer and Molina present in their works, driving the interest and study of sociology. The new school of thought is why race continues to

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