The Constitution, until recently, did not apply to blacks; blacks feel they deserve payments from 310 years of slavery, destruction to their minds and culture. Dr. Martin Luther King's dilemma in the United States was of a different kind. He was torn between his identity as a Black man of African descent and his identity as an American. He urged Americans to judge based on the content of the character not by skin color and also believed in non-violent protests. Martin Luther King Jr’s main perspective during the fight on racism was equality.
I have asked people why they are racist and they tell me that they was raised that way and if they was friends with a different race they would get in trouble by their parents. However, I believe that discriminating others start back in the 18th century back when they had slavery and made them do all the work. Here is something I have found about racism. Racial discrimination in the United States has its roots in the enslavement of Africans beginning in the early seventeenth century. However, when they passed the thirteenth Amendment on the US Constitution slavery ended in the United States but it did not end the discrimination on the basis of race.
For example: Race would define an African American but ethnicity would tell us where he and his ancestors come from. There is more attention given to race an ethnicity in our daily lives than we can imagine, in newspapers or in politics. People get hired or discriminated against because of their race. I can relate to this because, after the 9/11 attack, some of my family friends who were Muslims were called in for questioning and even lost their jobs because no one wanted to keep Muslims and any one who looked like them i.e. south east Asians as employees.
Which came first: slavery or racism? The dilemma over whether slavery or racism existed first has placed many historians in heated debates over the years. The theory that “slavery was not born of racism; rather, racism was the consequence of slavery”1 has been challenged by such authors as Winthrop Jordan and Alden Vaughan. Both argue that Africans were objects of prejudice from the start and that their slavery was inevitable. The studying of the relationship between whites and blacks during their exploitation by wealthy planter elites can explain the evolution of racism in American society.
In this short essay I will define institutional racism, its history in American and who it mostly affects. Institutional racism also known as institutional oppression refers to racism perpetrated by government entities, major cooperation’s, schools, the courts or the military (Moore 2008). Unlike the racism perpetrated by individuals, institutional racism has the power to negatively affect the bulk of people belonging to a minority group. This form of racism still persists in America because dominant groups are unwilling to share or give up the benefits inherited from past generations. Through numerous examples, Institutional Racism demonstrates how inequality and racial exclusion are embedded within the fabric of American society.
Racial Discrimination in the United States After 1929 Racism is “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race” (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/racism). Some people think that they are better than others based on the color of skin, religion, where they are from, and other cultural factors. In this paper, I will be focusing mostly on racism that took place against African American men and women after 1929, different acts of discrimination that were carried out, and people that tried to create solutions and take a stand against it. One incident that comes to mind happened in 1931. It was the case of the Scottsboro boys in Alabama.
Many argue that despite the genetic differences between human beings they cannot be 'meaningfully divided into a set of non-overlapping categories called races' (Boyd & Silk 2006: 424). Although it is plain to see that race is very much real in a social dynamic, there is an ongoing debate about whether it is a scientifically valid concept. Social Darwinism sought to integrate the principles of Darwin's evolutionary theory into a social and political context and was inherently racist. Francis Galton's 'Eugenics' argues that some human beings are more evolved than others and therefore superior, and goes to the extent of saying that whites, blacks, Amerindians and Asians are all different species, static and created by god. Many opposers of evolutionary theory point to Eugenics and the principles of Social Darwinism and claim that the theory of evolution and natural selection is therefore racist.
After the emancipation of slavery in the 1800’s, African Americans have struggled to be treated with the same equal rights as Europeans. Even with the laws that were pasted to protect African Americans there were states that ignored and created new laws to overturn the laws to protect African Americans. The ignorant of Europeans who denied African Americans the equal rights the laws stated they deserved. African Americans decided to stand up for themselves by developing non violent protest movement to fight for the equal rights of African Americans. ("Civil Rights Movement") Martin Luther King Jr. became the leader of the non violent protest movement in the 1950’s.The development of Martin Luther King Jr. in this era started when an African American woman named Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama.
For example to discriminate socially is to make a difference among people on the basis of class or group without regarding one’s value. There are some instances of social discrimination such as disability, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, and ethnicity. There are still some forms of discrimination in society today as one knows discrimination has been around for centuries that date back to slavery of African Americans. Society has made some improvements on how society deals with discrimination, which is still a major problem in America society. It is not only occurring in certain parts of the world but also over the United States.
The term race is usually referred as a way to categorize people based on their cultures and physical traits. Racism is the belief that humanity is divided into stratified genetically different socks called races; according to its adherent’s racial differences make one group superior to another. Throughout history, for hundreds of years, the Black race has been considered inferior to Caucasians. African Americans had to go through slavery, segregation, and racial comments of hatred; and they are still fighting for equality. That was in the 1800s and 1900s, and yet in 2009 Black people still have to face the discrimination.