Biocapital:

1. It is the use of living organisms for the sake of making money.

2. System of capitalist production, accumulation, and speculation that relies directly on
reproductivity as its primary motor.
3. This keyword is relevant to ethnic 1 because in Varo’s article, he discusses how poor
women in India looking for ways to make money turn to becoming surrogate mothers for
wealthier foreign mothers. Most of the surrogates were not making enough money so
they decided to use their empty wombs as a way to make money.
4. This keyword is significant because it shows how poor minority women have been
exploited. Becoming a surrogate mother is voluntary, yes, but the conditions that force
them to become a surrogate is the real problem. Labor is a major theme in this course,
and adding in gender as another obstacle for poor minority women to overcome makes
this inhumane. Why don't we see white women in the US becoming surrogates? That is
because poor minority women are victims of subjectification and their lives are not
valued nearly as highly, so they are forced to take high risk jobs that strain their bodies
in order to be able to make a living for themselves and their families.

Neoslavery:
1. It is modern form of slavery usually disguised as a punishment for crime or when
laborers are forced to repay debt in the form of labor.
2. This keyword is relevant because in Dennis Child’s book, he addresses how five “free”
african americans were sold as slaves just after the 13th amendment had been passed.
They were each accused of small scale crimes and were sold in the 30 dollar range. It
represents how blacks were still racialized and undermined by whites who exploited their
white privw3lilege.
3. This keyword is significant because it brings into perspective the flaws in the wording of
the 13th amendment in the constitution. It also brings forward the inherent racism that is
still present today as the 5 afr americans were given extremely harsh punishments for
minor crimes. Similar to black incarceration today, blacks are often sentenced to tsevere
punishments compared to whites for example.

Possessive investment in whiteness:

1. It is the concept where white european americans created ways in which whiteness was
viewed as superior through appropriation of native land, legalized chattel slavery, and
restricted citizenship to whites.
2. This is relevant bc poss. inv. in whiteness begins when slavery and settler colonialism
become prevalent and accepted in society, according to Lipsitz. Similar to the
significance, he argues that whiteness became a significant racial category when
immigration became restricted, when minstrel shows and the entertainment industry
were making fun of blacks, and when it was increasingly harder for minorities to own
land.
3. This is significant to ethnic studies because it shows what the beginning of white
supremacy and entitlement looks like. Possessive investment in whiteness is an
 umbrella which contains many racial structures / projects beneath it, all of which work to
emphasize the greatness of being white and the inferiority of being a minority race.
Federal Housing Act of 1934
1. Created the federal housing administration which made credit easier to acquire and
encouraged home improvements which in turn would jump start the construction industry
and create more jobs.
2. Historical context: this is relevant bc prior to this act, many americans were losing their
homes due to not being able to pay their mortgages. This act and the subsequent fed
housing admin allowed mortgage issuers to give out loans again with guarantee that
they will be paid back. However, this act also supported institutionalized racism because
less than 2% of housing was sold to minorities and less than 1% was built in minority
areas. Additionally, redlining was subliminally present through the denial of mortgages
based on race and ethnicity.
3. This is significant bc the act prolongs the effects of racialization in terms of land and
where minorities can live and occupy. From settler colonialism and now to redlining and
the denial of services, this act showed how institutional racism was hidden behind acts.
This act seems like it is helping all races and people, but in fact it is again only
contributing to the ideology of white supremacy.

Environmental privilege
1. When certain groups have access to environmental amenities bc of their social status or
race.
2. Historical context: Many activities that cause harm to the environment have been
performed in the land of natives or other minorities. An example of this is the case of
uranium mining, which was far away from white communities and directly on native land
3. This is significant to land and labor as it has started a system in which the land of
minorities, such as indigenous people, is used to provide cheap commodities such as
electricity to privileged groups, while leaving the environmental hazards back in
indigenous land with not much compensation for it.

City of Sherrill vs Oneida Indian nation

1. Supreme court case where the court ruled that land repurchased by the tribal land does
not constitute tribal sovereignty
2. Historical background: this case is another example of the racialization of indigenous
people and how they are treated inferior. They wished to repurchase the land that was
taken away from them by the government and they were then taxed. This represents in a
way settler colonialism bc the govt is making it as hard as possible for the natives to own
their own land, similar to how settlers were overtaking the land.
3. Significant bc it once again contributed to the racialization of native americans due to the
supreme court ruling against the indigenous people.

Affective Labor
 1. Explains emotional energy generated by the intimate connection involved in reproductive
labor. Work that is intended to produce emotional experiences in people.
2. Historical background: This term is relevant bc often times minorities are forced to take
jobs to earn money that other races do not want to take because they may be rough on
the body or unpleasant. During Sal Zarate’s lecture, he brought attention to the fact that
gardeners do produce meaningful relationships, in particular his dad and his neighbor.
They are often seen as workers who get in and get out without interacting with their
clients.
3. This is significant bc it shows how minority races are racialized as being non social
workers who dont interact with the people they work for.
4.
5. As labor is a major theme in this class, affective labor not being associated with
Mexicans, for example, contributes to the hegemonic ideology that they are not hard
workers and they should not be given leadership roles. You can see this today with Pres
Trump and his view on immigration.

NAFTA
1. North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) perpetuated neoliberal and globalist
free market attitudes including “offshoring” and “outsourcing” labor for cheaper exports
into the United States. Enforced January 1st, 1994.
2. Connected to globalization and neoliberalism.
3. Criticized for a lack of domestic industrial jobs, and an over-reliance on industrial
production heavy countries for products including China, India, and Japan.

Gendered Domestic Labor

1. Gendered domestic labor associates types and places of work onto gender. An example
is of racialized assumptions that Latino men work predominantly on exterior grounds of
houses in landscaping and gardening (jardineros) while Latina women work
predominantly in the interiors housekeeping or performing childcare (domesticas).
2. The concept is illustrated in Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo’s book Paradise Transplanted
in the chapter “Gardeners of Eden”. The guest lecture by Sal Zarate on his personal
history with jardineros and domesticas also reinforces this term.
3. The significance of gendered domestic labor is an extension of racialized work and
affective labor. The assumptions that those of Latino descent are more accustomed to
interior and exterior maintenance work yet are invisible in society otherwise embodies
both terms respectively. This ideology also perpetuates sexism and gender roles in
general.

Social Death:

1. This is a process which determines that the life of certain persons or groups is valueless.
 2. Historical background: This idea of social death has been seen continuously throughout
history. It dates back to the enslavement of African captives into modern day where a
group of affluent white teenagefrs avoided serious criminal chargers after attacking a
group of elderly mexican men who for being associated with “illegality” making their lives
be determined valueless in compared to that of the teens. - cacho’s article

3. This idea of social death is significant to land and labor as it can be used to expressed
ongoing injustices. For example. Since natives have historically been seen as valueless
for being “inferior” to whites, settlers felt that they were right in removing them from their
lands. In addition, this idea of socially death was another process used to transform
African captives into chattel slavery and finally now it is being used to unpunish racial
hate crimes against minority groups who are seen as socially death by the criminal
system

Militarized Refuge(es)

1. This term refers to the militarized spaces occupied by the military or made available as a
result of military action. In addition it also refers to the refugees it produces as a
consequence of military action

2. Historical background: Three example of military Refuges are the military bases located
in Guam, the Philippines and San Diego, which were built after U.S. intervention or for
military purposes. In addition, the U.S. military action in Vietnam demonstrates how it
displaces people from their land, forcing them to become refugees

3. The significance of this idea, is that it demonstrates the destructive forces that western
imperial powers unleash on lands and bodies of racialized people across time and space

Wastelanding
1. certain landscapes and the peoples who inhabit them come to be targeted for
disproportionate exposure to environmental harm; colonial processes that render certain
environments for assault; certain bodies and landscapes are disposable
2. Renders indigenous lands and communities as pollutable and disposable → reinforces
idea that indigenous lands are “empty lands” (Espiritu) that can be used or disposed
based upon the jurisdiction of nonindigenous people
3. Relevant to course because it connects to logic of elimination in the sense that it takes
indigenous land away from indigenous groups through harmful environmental methods
such as pollution, etc. (closely tied to environmental privilege)

De Facto status crime

1. Status by which a person is determined to be a criminal or likely to commit a crime

based on their identity; not contingent on whether an actual crime has been committed,
 but the perceived likelihood of a person to commit a crime based on their identity
(specifically race)
2. Since the passing of the thirteenth amendment, black and brown bodies have been
targeted and racialized in a way that leads to a higher rate of their incarceration; de facto
status crime points to the perceived ways in which these groups of people are supposed
“criminals”
3. Relevant to the course because it is an example of racialization of certain groups as
“other”/ “inferior”/ “criminal”

Environmentality

1. Environmentalism turned into a policing action; extension of biopolitics and

governmentality that turns environmental problems into issues of national security
Militarized mentality where environmentalism turned into a policing action; extension of
biopolitics and governmentality (presented as military is adapting to climate change not
extending global reach. Greening of military endeavors) that turns environmental
problems into issues of national security.
2. Military response to climate change. Central military concern. The result of a long series
of exploitative and militarized relations to ecosystems and its purported material domain
– the environment – is a territory of human existence that has, like other fields of inquiry,
been brought within the governing mechanisms of the state
3. Situates military as desire to control wilderness and nature. We saw before how settlers
wanted to control nature/land/wilderness. Manifestation of military policies and
environmental policies that extend beyond a specific area. How these policies come
together and impact each other. Nuclear testing has an impact on climate change.

Which lecture is this in? I believe week 9 on wednesday but if someone knows for sure please
correct me. → it is. Lecture 9.3. If you listen to the audio, its towards almost the end of the
lecture.

13th amendment exception clause

1. Abolishment of slavery or involuntary servitude within the united states unless it’s as a
form of punishment for a convicted crime
2. Essentially justifies the existence of enslavement of incarcerated people who happen to
be disproportionately POCs because of their criminal record → ties into de facto status
crime by which POCs are policed and arrested at much higher rates for their perceived
criminality and handed harsher sentences or convictions than white people
3. Relevant to course because it enforces racialization and criminalization of POCs, and
those in turn justify their enslavement as part of their incarceration
Settler Moves to Innocence

1. “those strategies or positionings that attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or
responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege, without having to change
much at all” takes these forms:
a. i. Settler nativism
b. ii. Fantasizing adoption
c. iii. Colonial equivocation
d. iv. Conscientization
e. v. At risk-ing / Asterisk-ing Indigenous peoples
f. vi. Re-occupation and urban homesteading
2. In E. Tuck & K. Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor” - extends the
conversation of decolonization as not simply a metaphor that can perpetuate or soften
the settler experience into innocence, or imply a settler future.
3. Settler moves to innocence -- essentially White guilt and white fragility today, it obscures
the systemic forces of settler colonialism and responsibility of knowing historical events
in order to comfort those that continue to withhold that privilege. It further divides the
conversational gap between those that have privilege and those that have little to none.

Surrogate refuge
1. Countries perform civilizing work of “sanitizing” cultures, languages, and bodies of
Vietnamese objects of rescue for purpose of Western resettlement; pre-process and pre-
assimilate
2. Racialized Vietnamese refugees as “other” and unassimilable to American culture →
implication that they are a threat to American culture (refugee processing center in
Philippines, other southeast Asian countries)
3. Extends process of logic of elimination, killing Indian to save the man, and racialization
of Vietnamese immigrants and Vietnamese Americans

Scientific racialism
1. The pseudoscientific belief that empirical evidence exists to support/justify racism/racial
superiority. Idea of classifying individuals of different phenotypes or genotypes into
discrete races.
2. Used scientific racialism to support racism -- for example, in class talked about how
scientists used craniometry to measure skull sizes of people, and justified whites as
more intelligent than blacks/indigenous people because their “measurably larger skulls”
implied greater brain size. Scientific racialism was used throughout the 1900’s to
determine who could naturalize in the United State. In Thind’s case, he claimed that he
was white because he was pure-blood Aryan, and Aryans had been included in the
caucasian classification, but the court ruled that Aryans had no understanding of the
white man’s burden and that Aryans actually constituted the white man’s burdens.
3. Significant because was once viewed as scientific but now is not, because of the bias
implicit in the conduction of the science experiments. Was used to support and validate
racist worldviews, based on false empirical evidence. After discrediting scientific
 racialism, we now accept race as a social construct. However, race as a social construct
still has very real implications in the lives and experiences of individuals, for example,
white privilege and the lack of equal access to necessary resources for people of color
within the United States.

National Origins Act (1924)

UCSD BDS Campaign (2010-13)

1. Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions - a Palestinian led organization promoting freedom,
justice, and equal treatment of Palestinians as any other human being. The UCSD BDS
Campaign centered along a movement for UCSD to divest from corporations that were
profiting off of Israeli occupation. A divestment vote was motivated then passed by
UCSD council in 2013. https://bdsmovement.net/news/after-hard-fought-battle-students-
celebrate-divestment-vote-victory-uc-san-diego

2. The Campaign is an on campus connection to globalization and how economic forces

are linked to racialized global affairs, inflicting inequity on nation-states.
3. The UCSD BDS Campaign represents a modern example of globalization and neoliberal
“open market” and “offshoring.” Profits from companies and institutions that have stakes
in Israel have political and social ramifications on Palestinians oppressed in occupied
land.

Globalization
1. “the term “globalization” is used to name a specific set of transformations that occurred
in the late twentieth century: changes in world political structure after World War II that
included the ascendancy of the United States and the decolonization of the formerly
colonized world; a shift from the concept of the modern nation-state as bounded and
independent toward a range of economic, social, and political links that articulate
interdependencies across nations; and an acceleration in the scale, mode, and volume
of exchange and interdependency in nearly all spheres of human activity” - Lisa Lowe
2. In Lisa Lowe’s Keywords for American Cultural Studies on “Globalization” Relates to
concepts of neoliberalism that promote “free trade” and “open market” competition.
3. The idea of globalization attempts to promote equal opportunity meritocracy, yet
reduces/ignores underprivileged, systemic issues that keep racial and ethnic groups
down in the first place.

Necropolitcs
1. “Beyond letting die and making live, the war on terror insisted that it was the United
States’ right to determine who may survive and who must die, to exert the power to let
live and make die. For a state that regulates its population through biopower, racism is
“the precondition that makes killing acceptable,” but when a state secures its sovereignty
through necropower, killing does not need to be justified because what a population
finds acceptable is irrelevant.” - Lisa Cacho -- “account for the various ways in which, in
our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction
 of persons and the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in
which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status
of living dead.” - Achille Mbembe, cited by Lisa Cacho
2. In Lisa Marie Cacho’s Social Death, “Grafting Terror onto Illegality” -- connected to
concepts of racialization and social death that administer second and lower class
statuses on people.
3. Necropolitics is the power to render people as worthy of scrutiny, racism, pre-emptive
violence that further extend to their worthiness of life. Examples include a “war on terror”
based on “hidden weapons of mass destruction” that might never be proved but always
suspected or Mexican “illegality” that reduces peoples’ citizenship or immigration as
questionable and therefore less valuable for life.