A Brief History of Racism in America

The Europeans were the first in the United States to express their hatred and racist behavior toward the Native Americans once they settled onto U.S. soil in 1609. Their actions and behavior follows the conflict perspective, considering the elite (Europeans) did everything in their power to dominate the weak and powerless (Native Americans), thus denying the Native American of any resources found in the United States. Even then, the

The Chinese Exclusion act banned all Chinese people moving to America. Chinese people emigrated to California in 1848 during the California Gold Rush. Massive amounts of Chinese people moved to the west Coast to make money and return home to the Qing Empire. They were mainly drawn to the west coast as a way to prosper economically. Many were discriminated against and given low wages, and had poor

One of the first significant pieces of federal legislation aimed at restricting immigration was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese laborers from coming to America. Californians had agitated for the new law, blaming the Chinese, who were willing to work for less, for a decline in wages.The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first significant law restricting immigration into the United States. Those on the West Coast were especially prone to attribute declining wages and economic ills on the despised Chinese workers. Although the Chinese composed only .002 percent of the nation’s population, Congress passed the exclusion act to placate worker demands and assuage prevalent concerns about maintaining white “racial purity.”

While White Americans can only trace their arrival in America back to the early 16th century, scientists and historians have placed the Native Americans arrival in North America around 50,000 years ago (Sciencedaily, 2004). In the thousands of years before the arrival of the white man, Natives developed intricate cultures, which included equally developed governments. These governments did not mimic that of the White Americans; nevertheless they were fully functional and succeeded at keeping order throughout each individual tribe. Natives were used to consulting with the chief or religious leader of the tribe for advice and governance, they were eventually forced onto reservations where they had to turn to whites for permission to participate in even the simplest of tasks. White Americans viewed the Natives as uncivilized, which led to them placing Native Children in boarding schools run by whites (Attending the White Man’s Schools, p.168-169). By doing this, Whites hoped

In 1849, an inundation of Chinese immigrants came to the United States to take part in the California gold rush. Relations between the Chinese and Americans started off neutral, but soon conflicts arose. White workers saw Chinese as a threat to their status and tried to solve this issue by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act; this severely limited the number of Chinese allowed to immigrate into the country at the time. Although this compromise satisfied the white protests, it only lead to more conflicts with how the Chinese were treated during immigration. These conflicts would not be resolved for another 61 years.

The first Chinese immigrants flooded to America, in the hopes of “striking gold” during the California Gold Rush of 1849. Unfortunately, the citizens of California greeted these newcomers with many unfair laws. Beginning with the Foreign Miner’s License Tax Law of 1850, the Chinese experienced nothing but bigotry from the citizens who surrounded them. This inequality peaked when President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, barring the immigration of Chinese workers for ten years. During that time, the immigration of Japanese in search of work rapidly increased. These immigrants also faced racial discrimination, from their ineligibility for citizenship to the laws prohibiting Japanese from owning land. The full

Racism goes a long way down the American history. It came as a result of slavery which began in 1619 when African slaves were brought to Jamestown, Virginia, which was an American colony in the North, to help in producing crops such as tobacco. Slavery was then a common practice in all American colonies through the 17th and 18th centuries, where African slaves helped in building the economic foundations of the now American nation. Slavery was then spread to the South in 1793, with the new invention of the cotton gin. About halfway through the 19th century, there was immense westward expansion in America, together with the spreading abolition movement in the North,

There was not a lot of Chinese in the United States until around the California Gold rush in 1849, many entrepreneurs trying to make it rich. In the 1860s a pushback was sparked by political parties of labor groups like the Knights of Labor who wanted to protect American jobs because in their perspective, they couldn’t compete with the cheap labor source of immigrants. These political labor groups emphasized the feeling that the Chinese didn’t belong, shortly after massacres began to occur. California tried to band Chinese immigrants in 1858; however, that power was way above the states, thus resulting in failure. Again by 1878, there was enough people in congress to pass the Chinese exclusion Act; however, a man named Rutherford B Hayes had strong ties to the Republican party and other interests that he vetoes the bill, and once again the efforts to ban Chinese ends in failure.

The Chinese Exclusion Act was established in 1882, in which the first time United States prevent a group of immigrants with nationality (Lee 4), marked United States’ from welcoming nation to an enclosed and discriminative nation, has monumental impact on each Chinese immigrants and culture of the entire American Chinese community (6). The poor conditions and lack of opportunities in the 19th century China and the Chinese’s hope of accumulating wealth to support their families in China fostered the huge influx of Chinese immigrants to United States. The discovery of gold in California also fuelled many Chinese’s dream of fast wealth (112). Due to the need for mass labour stemming from industrialization and high productivity of Chinese labours, employers would enthusiastically hire Chinese labour, which in turn sparked the increasing competition with the local workers and a growing anti-Chinese sentiment (114).

In any case, financial misery in the 1870s raised hostile to Chinese assumption as white workers and lawmakers censured Chinese work for California's monetary troubles. After expanded savagery and segregation by hostile to Chinese developments, the United States passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, banning every single Chinese worker into the nation and extremely limiting vast scale Chinese migration. Just vendors, ambassadors, researchers and understudies, voyagers, and offspring of American residents were permitted. Incompletely because of China's interest with the Allied countries amid World War II, the U.S. canceled the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 permitting Chinese to wind up naturalized residents and allowed 105 Chinese to go into

Racism is the trend of thought, or way of thinking, which attaches great importance to the notion of the existence of separate human races and superiority of races that are usually associated with inherited physical characteristics or cultural events. Racism is not a scientific theory, but a set of preconceived opinions they value the biological differences between humans, attributing superiority to some according to racial roots. Even in such ethnically diverse country as the United States, racism continues evident against people of different ethnic traits and skin color. According to Steinberg (Steinberg, 1995), racial discrimination has been the most important cause of inequality between whites and blacks in the U.S. Because of that, minorities in American society have been fighting over years for equal rights and respect, starting with the civil rights movement in 1960s. Also, public policies implemented since 1964 in the United States have been instrumental in reducing economic inequality between blacks and whites, such as the affirmative action, a federal program that tries to include minority groups by providing jobs and educational opportunities (Taylor, 1994). From this perspective, does racism still play a dominant role in American values and American society? If so, what are the consequences of this racism that still remain in American society? What is the impact of the Barack Obama presidency on the unending fight against racism in this country?

Is racism still a problem in America more than fifty years after the Civil Rights Movement, and 48 years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson? How far has America come from the days when African Americans were lynched by fanatical racist mobs and from the days when Jim Crowe laws trumped the laws set forth by the U.S. Constitution? This paper delves into those and other issues involving racism in America. Thesis: American has come a long way from the days of lynchings and prohibitions against African Americans voting or sitting at the lunch counter. There are laws that protect minorities from discrimination in housing and hiring, and great strides have been made. However, racism remains a reality, including institutional racism in America.

In 1882, Congress made considerably stronger move in the Chinese Exclusion Act, the country's first supremacist, prohibitive movement law. The Act suspended all movement of Chinese workers for ten years and precluded any court to concede Chinese individuals for citizenship. What brought the Chinese to America in any case? Likewise with numerous migrant gatherings, it was a combo of "push" and "draw" components. Numerous meant to escape destitution and oppression in China and would have liked to make a fortune in America, particularly after John A. Sutter uncovered gold in California in 1849, starting the Gold Rush. Maybe nothing better exhibits the gigantic trusts that the Chinese had for their lives in America than the way that they

After living in a place like Bend Oregon for 18 years I haven’t ever noticed a difference between blacks and whites. Bend has been said to be “one of the whitest places to live”, yet I never viewed a city by its race. Being racist to me meant that it was the whites who had a problem with the blacks and whites didn’t want anything to do with blacks. I hadn’t actually seen racism in action from anyone here. Now, after watching the film Crash and reading the essays “Blinded by the White: Crime, Race and Denial at Columbine High” written by Tim Wise and “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” written by McIntosh, my understanding of race, diversity, and communications have changed.

The population of the United States of America has been one of mixed race since its very beginning. Boatload upon boatload of enslaved Africans provided a labor force which would fuel the American South’s economy for many years, until national abolition and the subsequent civil rights movement created a primarily biracial population of blacks and whites. The US has come a long way since those days, and today every child born into the US is taught from an early age the evils of racism and the shameful actions committed by slave-owning US citizens in the past. From textbooks to televisions, the modern USA seemingly works tirelessly to teach its population that discrimination by race is wrong and that all races are equal. This has led to a great national complacence among whites, and a widespread belief that the US has mostly eradicated racial prejudices. But it is not so, and despite a population almost entirely composed of people who would not consider themselves racists, racism still pervades in the US. In many cases modern racism occurs at the hands of whites who almost absolutely are completely unaware of their discriminatory actions. In the films “Frozen River” and “The Visitor” racism was touched on repeatedly and played an evident part in the messages they were trying to portray.