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Ethnic Groups and Discrimination
By Alan Hood | July 31, 2007
I am closely associated with being a white male in today’s society. Like most Americans though I have a very mixed background, my great grandmother on my fathers side was full blood Iroquois, contrasting with my mothers father immigrated to America from Germany with his parents just before World War II. Mix in a whole bunch of English, hence the last name Hood and you get me. I grew up in New Mexico which boasts that 52% of the population is from a Hispanic heritage, while I associated with being white to me there wasn’t much difference between being Hispanic and being white. I have the same skin tone and almost the same hair color as all of my Hispanic friends, just blue eyes instead of brown. My focus for this topic will be on English immigration and the obstacles faced by English immigrants.
The English are credited with colonizing America when the formed the first township of Jamestown in what is present day Virginia. Life was hard in the new world at first when according to (Thinkquest.org, 2006) “The village was often attacked by Native Americans. In 1622, 350 colonists were killed; 500 in 1644. Colonists rebelling against the rule of Governor William Berkeley burned Jamestown in the seat of government was moved to the Middle Plantation (now Williamsburg) in 1699, and Jamestown was deserted.” Many of the English who left England were being discriminated against by their government on the basis of their religion. While the struggles of the colonizing whites s not what this paper is about I feel it is important to include as a background of why so much of the discrimination of the past is attributed to whites.
After the American Revolution, while the newly formed United States of America was being settled by mostly white Europeans large landowners and wealthy business owners again participated heavily in the slave trade. According to (Davis, Ph. D., 2006) “…slaves were brought into what became the United States, only around 500,000 compared to perhaps 12 to 13 million imported into the Caribbean and South and Central America.” This of course is the root of all racism in America. When one group of people feels so superior to another group that they believe that they can own them as a possession it will take a very long time for both people to forget about those actions. For over one hundred years after the slaves were finally legally freed they have had to fight everyday for the same rights and opportunities that white Americans sometimes take for granted.
Having a different skin tone wouldn’t be the only reason for whites to discriminate against you though. Whites will just as easily discriminate against other whites from different countries or different religions. When the Irish started migrating to America they were treated just as poorly by the English immigrants as everybody else was. The Irish mostly came to America after the great potato famine of the 1840’s with little or no money and were forced into hard labor to make a substantive living. The Irish had no other choice but to leave their country or stave to death leaving them at the mercy of other whites in order to survive. When people are forced to make decisions like emigrate or die they leave themselves open the discrimination in the country they land in. As shown by (Thinkquest.org, 2006) “Their only mode of escape was emigration, starving families that could not pay landlords faced no alternative but to leave the country in hopes of a better future. And thus the steadily scaling number of Irish who entered the U.S. between 1820 and 1830 skyrocketed in the 1840’s, nearly 2 million came in that decade.”
So far I have clearly pointed out that whites have been a participant in every form of discrimination lately though we have been hearing a very big uproar about reverse discrimination against whites. Like the case pointed out on the Washington Times web site by (Archibald, 2004) “An English professor at the University of North Carolina illegally subjected a student to “intentional discrimination and harassment” because he was “a white, heterosexual Christian male” who expressed disapproval of homosexuality, the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights has ruled.” I don’t believe that any discrimination is acceptable in today’s society, but what do you expect to happen after hundreds of years of oppression and discrimination by your race. I almost find it amusing how many white people are yelling about discrimination now.
I defiantly associate with American mainstream culture more than I would any English immigrant or colonizer. If all Americans are willing to work hard at building unity between the races then America will have an even brighter future.
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