Invisibility who gets to be invisible Nich suggests that the people doing the othering are invisible The author suggests the people othered are invisibile Nich says that the author missed talking about the struggle between the unhyphenated Americans and African Americans Author only gave passing opinion of this struggle In order to fit the definition of race as place making that Nich gave us we need to think about struggle between groups Says he agrees that unhyphenated Americans are an invisible race but the struggle that the author identifies to make this argument doesn t fit In addition to these struggles there are others Antebellum Pre Civil War right before it o Civil rights bill is passed o Opulent mansions of slave masters o Enslaved working the fields There were a small group of elite landholding whites Overwhelming majority were poor non landholding whites and enslaved people There were gender distinctions between each of these but this is just a class breakdown The practices in the south that had a dramatic impact on identity practices o Chattel slavery Property slavery Assumption of ownership enslaved people were considered property Slaves are being actively exploited Poor white people were being exploited as well They were put into competition with slave holders Behaviors that surrounded chattel slavery was o Profitable Elite Whites o Exploitable Poor Whites Enslaved o Distinction between Elite Whites and Poor Whites Enslaved Ideology of white supremacy among every white in the south o Related to understanding the vast majority of slave people in the US South Enslaved were livestock and should be treated as such Distinction in middle of whites blacks for who can be considered to be a person Reconstruction 1865 1877 Unions of federal troops were stationed throughout the south Period of federal control over states in the confederacy and their political actions Have an existing social order in place and then an unsettling event takes place which shakes up the hierarchy Political steps are taken to change social order o Changes the legal structures which allow the hierarchy to exist Struggle over identity who gets to say what the identity is Those being othered or those othering o Classification of people formerly enslaved are now card carrying citizens o The identities of two distinct groups starts becoming important Formerly enslaved begin to exercise their rights threatening to old social order Freedom of movement o Chattel slavery did not allow slaves to move because they were considered property and you couldn t decide where to move for yourself o Formerly enslaved can leave the region o Madison FL reporter for several weeks a steady exodus of negroes has been going on from every county in middle FL and have at last reached such serious proportions they should cause serious inconvenience from farmers and a positive damage to the planting interests of this section Not one farmer in ten has or can procure hands enough to pitch up a full crop If the negroes were going to benefit themselves by their change of place we could understand their motive in immigrating but as the large majority are going to East and South Florida where very little corn and no cotton is raised and where the demand for their labor except on the railroads must be limited we confess our inability to perceive wherein they will better themselves Why would you leave Youre not going to be better off There is no corn to be planted Elite whites couldn t even see through it in the after math this was a threat that the formerly enslaved were picking up and leaving Identity and the practices that formed the identity of the formerly enslaved was being challenged o Practices and identities can put you in place or out of place movement put them out of place Black consumption The establishment of the franchise o They were allowed to spend money and accumulate money for the first time o This was not the case in the Antebellum South the enslaved had no income they were just owned o Poor white farmers were upset because they were seeing people who they thought were below them acting as if they were equal to them o The south has been totally transformed o There was a struggle over practices and identity o the right to vote was still only for men at this time o Black men got the chance to vote for the first time o Voting makes a difference in a dramatic sense When you start voting people into public office they can serve your interest You can get a representative on city council to talk about your civil issue Potential to redirect critical resources to move money around society to disrupt the profitability structure of whites Black people were being othered and are no longer defined by their past enslavement Structure changed and all of a sudden those who had been othered got a new set of rights that dramatically changed the dynamic and gave them the potential to be defined as out of place The group who had done the othering mainly elite whites saw that the formerly enslaved challenged their place in society This is countered by arguably other forms of othering Labor contracts o Between formerly enslaved workers and whites o Labor contracts were used as a force to maintain the Antebellum order but more importantly to keep the formerly enslaved in place to keep them in the South rather than moving around o There is a level of unfairness with labor contracts When a farmer makes the contract they are generally more educated When they tell the formerly enslaved what it means generally the formerly enslaved is not educated and does not know what the various parts of the contract mean The farmers ask for a certain amount of money back in return and say that if they do not get a certain amount of money back the formerly enslaved is in violation of the contract and the work put into the contract is for not o Reference to the tenant farming system A piece of land was given to the person Formerly enslaved needs to meet the needs of production using grass animals tools seeds etc to make money but they don t have these means while the whites do Whites offer their tools of production to the formerly enslaved by entering into an agreement with the formerly enslaved for them to farm the white s land Poor white farmers and formerly enslaved were hired to work the lands You rent all of this stuff from the landowner and then you pay them back a portion of the sales made from selling the crop The rental agreements made it difficult