Ethnic Groups And Discrimination Essay

Ethnic Groups and Discrimination
By: Sarah Cullen
Date: November 15, 2009

In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue, on his boat Columbus held one of the first Irish that entered the United States. This was more than a thousand years before the Irish actually started to immigrate to the United States. The earliest family that was Irish-American that was pictured started to immigrate anywhere from the early 1800s, they were running from the ill times in Ireland were they were suffereing from famine. When Irish-Americans first arrived within the US they were either endentured servants or they had some money that they came seeking adventures. Some also arrived without money and were seeking ways to provide for their family, some of these Irish were running from religion and were seeking different lives within the US.

It may come as a surprise to some as to how the Irish-Americans were treated, Irish-Americans were treated just as the African-Americans were treated. The comic Irishman – happy, lazy, stupid, with a gift for music and dance – this was a stock character for English and American stage (1995 The Boston Globe). Blacks and Irish were treated the same and were forced to live in overlapping slum neighborhoods and they were forced to fight for the same low-status jobs to survive (1995 The Boston Globe). The Irish-Americans worked their way out of the slums and were searching for a higher title in life were as African-Americans stayed were they were at. Irishmen within Ireland were greatly against slave holders and saw slavery as evil, were as the Irish-Americans were largely aligned with the slaveholders. Irish-Americans lived with prejudice, racism and segregation, but they had their way of coming out of this and working their way up “the totem pole” as some may call it. The reason why these Irish-Americans were treated the way they were was because the “Americans” say these people were just coming to invade, just as...