All Men Are Created Equal

Despite our founding principle that “all men are created equal” (Jefferson), American life isn’t characterized by equality or fairness. Although we acknowledge that each member of humanity bears equal value, we fail to provide them with such equality in life. Racism and anti-immigrant sentiment are two factors that prevent America from being equal. Frederick Douglass identified this gap between value and reality for Americans when he found himself “not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary” (¶3) of the Fourth of July, “a day that reveals to [the American

In the title, “ Racial Formation in the United States”, author Michael Omi and Howard Winant argues that the problems of understanding race and how it can be established and seen to be the answer through the concept of hegemony within the racial cultures. Society needs to understand racial combination within each race, then understand how the force and the consent plays a major role within each party or community in the United States of America. Now, in the title, “A More Perfect Union,” author Barack Obama emphasizes that race has diverse stories in which it proves that we still hold common hopes in understanding society as a whole through common sense in racism. Barack Obama’s speech proves several ideas about race by comprehending how he became the president and how society interacts around the topic in which Michael Omi and Howard Winant tends to prove in the article. Omi and Winant’ s claims that racial categories serve in the U.S can be seen as common sense and hegemony concept.

In Joel Spring’s, “Deculturalization and Struggle for Equality”, he argues that during the construction of the new world (contemporary United States) nonwhite racial groups were created by elitist in order to have them deculturalized and maintain a system of racial superiority. Native Americans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Blacks and Asians were each subject to systematic oppression in regards to racial formation, deculturalization, segregation and nation building. These dominated groups share the struggle of equality in this nation where “All men are equal” brought upon them by educational policies contrary to their socioeconomic interest and appealing to Euro-Americans.

Throughout American history, relationships between racial and ethnic groups have been marked by antagonism, inequality, and violence. In today’s complex and fast-paced society, historians, social theorists and anthropologists have been known to devote significant amounts of time examining and interrogating not only the interior climate of the institutions that shape human behavior and personalities, but also relations between race and culture. It is difficult to tolerate the notion; America has won its victory over racism. Even though many maintain America is a “color blind nation,” racism and racial conflict remain to be prevalent in the social fabric of American institutions. As a result, one may question if issues and challenges

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”. This is a precedent that was established centuries ago to tell the people of its time that there is no man lesser than another. It was set and meant to last for a very long time. Thomas Jefferson was the one who made the phrase famous, but it was his great friend Philip Mazzei who first used the saying through a letter written to Jefferson called “Joint Resolution 175 of the 103rd Congress“, which was later proposed for the United States Constitution. This same phrase Jefferson later used as the groundwork for our nation in The Declaration of Independence of 1776. It was written intending to show

In recent years, there has been increased discussion about the treatment of minorities in the U.S. While there have been numerous laws passed that protect their freedoms, many Americans maintain a negative mindset toward other ethnicities. Due to people’s reservations, our country has been unable to make substantial progress toward equality. In The Nation’s article, “The Truth About Race in America: It’s Getting Worse, Not Better,” by Gary Younge, the author utilizes factual information, historical allusions, and related quotes to effectively contend that race relations are worsening within the United States.

“All men are created equal”, though this would be a fact of the Western World society today, it was certainly not always that way. With the beginning of slavery in the 1600s, to becoming the main cause of the Civil War and abolishment of it, here is slavery; from the Union’s point of view.

Joseph Healey’s “From Immigrants to White Ethnics” is a generalized comparison between the varying groups of individuals that accompanied the colossal waves of immigration to the United States from Europe in the nineteenth century. Immigration to this country resulted from a number of reason such as religious persecution, individuals seeking to find employment after industrialization in their home countries limited their livelihood, and political oppositions to name a few. On arrival the immigrants knew immediately they were of the subordinate group and faced “discrimination and prejudice” (Healey, 2012, p. 54), although some more so than others. Among the first immigrants to arrive in the United States were Northern and Western European citizens. Unlike the immigrants from Ireland and Southern and Eastern Europe that chose the United States for their new homeland these individuals were probably the most accepted by the majority, even if considered just nominally superior to the others. Included in this group were the “English, Germans, Norwegians, Swedes, Welsh, French, Dutch and Danes” (Healey, 2012, p. 56). This acceptance was due in part to the similarities that the dominate group held as ideals such as their religion, along with cultural values and characteristics. If the Northern and Western Europeans found acceptance difficult, individuals from Ireland and the Europeans from the south and east had an even more traumatic experience. Whereas the more accepted group had

Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color offers innovative insight into the concept of “race” and the evolution of “whiteness” throughout American history. Jacobson focuses his analysis on the instability of racial identification over time and how race has been created and perceived throughout different stages of history. He states in his introduction that “one of the tasks before the historian is to discover which racial categories are useful to whom at a given moment, and why” (p.9) and while he is successful in some respects, his analysis is somewhat incomplete in providing a full scope of the power relations that created, altered and maintained racial identities in the United States. While Jacobson offers a detailed

Much of America’s history has been saturated with situations dealing with race and the people associated with them. It is impossible to talk about the founding of America without looking at the invention of race. This is because race was intricately embedded in the foundation of America through the two part process of racialization. Through this a dichotomous race structure was developed and implemented. This was carried out mainly by the U.S. government, which used policies, social arrangements, and institutional patterns (class notes 10-6-10) to further embed race into American society. The government helped to increase white’s superiority. When the government could not do it all publicly they brought in the private sector. The public

As a woman I have always thought that all men were superior to women in a society viewpoint. Black men superior to black women, Hispanic men superior to Hispanic women, and of course, white men superior to, well, all women, especially women of color, and men of color. However, when reading the article “All Men Are Not Created Equal” I had realized that Asian men are significantly inferior to Asian women in western society. I never really thought about the imbalance until just today, reading the article despite having always seen it in my day-to-day life. I really enjoyed how the author, Yen Le Espiritu, focused on the historical reason as to why Asian women are seen as more valuable in western society than Asian men. I, of course, had learned about Chinese and Japanese immigration and the Japanese internment in my high school history class, but I was never taught the societal and family issues that these events had sparked.

Fredrickson says that “It can be misleading to make a sharp distinction between race and ethnicity when considering intergroup relations in American history” He means that these terms do not have clear distinctions and have evolved over time. In paragraph 2, he writes that ethnicity can become racialized “whenever distinctive group characteristics...are used as the basis for a status hierarchy of groups who are thought to differ in ancestry or descent.”

Since the beginnings of our nation’s it has been implied that all people should be viewed as equals but the question is, are all people seen as equal? Our founding fathers wrote that all men were all one of the same. Everyone is familiar with Thomas Jefferson's famous quote," We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” The passage claims that we are all equal but where is the proof that we are? It was stated in the Declaration of Rights of Man and of the Citizen, “Men are born free and remain free and of equal rights”. I do not believe that these statements apply to all of mankind. Throughout history many acts have proven otherwise. As we take a look throughout history we see

By the end of the war, the new immigrant groups had been fully accepted as loyal ethnic Americans, rather than members of distinct and inferior “races.” And the contradiction between the principle of equal freedom and the actual status of blacks had come to the forefront of national life.

Matthew 5:48 was used to illustrate that God had set an impossible goal for us