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203 /////////////~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In the closing decade of the twentieth century, a veritable cottage industry of research bemoaning the decline of civic engagement and political participation in the United States sprang up (Putnam, ; Skocpol & Fiorina, ). The focus of most studies was on social trust, social capital, and other individual-level factors . The political system was treated as open and even encouraging everyone to participate. Racial and economic inequalities and their structural origins were virtually ignored as factors linked to participation, and thus the search was to find out what was happening in the lives of individuals or in their personal ties or associations that influenced civic engagement and political participation rates. An intersectional lens reveals the concern over the level of participation in the United States and the overreliance on personal characteristics are ironic, as, for most of U.S. history, the emphasis has been on limiting participation through exclusion of a considerable number of people from the U.S. political community on a group, not individual, basis. Thus property-less, non-Protestant, White men were initially barred from voter participation in many places during the colonial period in the United States (Kernell & Jacobson , ; Neuborne & Eisenberg, ). The battle to extend political rights to all White men, however, took minuscule effort compared to the battle for rights for other groups. Inclusion of the pan-European population of White men did not require constitutional and statutory change as it did for women, youth, and African Americans (DeSipio, ). In contrast, women of all races were forced to struggle a century for suffrage; they (mostly White women) did not get the vote until the Nineteenth Amendment in  (Flexner, ). U.S. youth who were challenging the Vietnam War and supporting civil rights during the s and s were provided the vote almost as a consolation prize in the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, ratified in  (Kernell & Jacobson, ). 9 Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Disparities in Political Participation and Civic Engagement LORRIE ANN FRASURE AND LINDA FAYE WILLIAMS The struggle for people of color was different. Not only were enslaved Africans not provided the right to assemble and organize, it took a civil war to provide African American men the right to vote—a right soon nullified in the South where most Blacks still lived after the short-lived Reconstruction era. For more than fifty years after Reconstruction, African Americans faced poll taxes, literacy requirements, gerrymandering, at-large elections, White primaries , violence, and other devices which denied them the most basic of democratic rights (Grofman, Handley, & Niemi, ). American Indians faced relocations and reservations, Americanization campaigns that sought to destroy their cultures, and a host of other indignities and brutalities. Given assimilationist campaigns forced on the native peoples, it is ironic that the franchise was first denied and then forced upon American Indians. In , they were made citizens in their own land. In actuality, however , American Indians continued to face antidemocratic contrivances to keep them from voting. For example, states with large populations of American Indians, such as Idaho, New Mexico, and Washington, denied them the vote because of specific provisions such as “Indians not taxed.” As late as , Colorado claimed American Indians were not yet citizens. Until , Arizona denied American Indians the right to vote on the specious grounds that they were “under guardianship.” North Carolina required American Indians to pass literacy tests (Wilkins, , ). Asians, also, were barred from participation in democratic life. Indeed, after the infamous decision in People v. Hall, handed down by the California Supreme Court in , “Asiatics” were not only prohibited from serving on juries but their participation in politics was viewed as “an actual and present danger.” Whether Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Indian, Korean, or any of the other nationality groups now lumped under the Asian-Pacific Islander (API) category by the U.S. Census Bureau, Asian Americans were subjected to deep suspicion about their political loyalties; this suspicion led to attempts to exclude Asians, not only from citizenship rights, but from immigration through laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act in , the Asiatic Barred Zone in , and the Immigration Act of  (Chang, ). Latinos stand out among people of color in regards to their social construction as an ethnic, not racial, group. For example, Mexicans were legally defined as “White” at the conclusion of the War of . To an extent, then, Latinos are framed as an extension of the conceptualization of European immigrants to the United States, “Yet the pattern of relations that established the initial set of parameters that defined the ‘place’ of Mexicans in the transformed...

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