This chapter focused on different cultures and the education system various immigrant American groups. The chapter covered Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, African Americans, Puerto Ricans and Filipinos.
One of the things that stood out to me was regarding the reforms America made in the Puerto Rican public school system. America implemented American holidays, the pledge of allegiance, and even placed our own textbooks and teachers into their schooling system. This attempt to Americanize the people of this land came as a bit of a shock to me for some reason. I know from another class I took in sociology that the people of Puerto Rican over 90% of the time classify themselves in censuses as white, and given all this Americanization I can understand why now.
The same Americanization that I talked about with Puerto Ricans also took place with other races as well. The Native Americans we have talked about in class before, and they come back up in this chapter. The chapter talks about their deculturalization and how “it combines education for democracy and political equality with cultural genocide—the attempt to destroy cultures”
Some questions I had regarding the ideas discussed in this chapter are:
Today, many schools talk about how diverse they are and how they try to be accepting and welcoming to different races and cultures, do you think that schools today actually allow the same opportunities to all races?
Also, the chapter went into some detail about the old segregation practices and the ways in which different cultural groups were viewed. For instance, Robert Lee mentioned five major type of Asians on page 173: “the coolie, the deviant, the yellow peril, the model minority and the gook.” Each type of group had different reason for their name, such as threatening American jobs and wages. Do you think that sub-groups of stereotypes still exist in America, or do institutions like public education use less direct methods of stereotypes or prejudice?
