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Racism, Discrimination, And Prejudice

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Racism, discrimination, and prejudice. When most people in America see those words, their first thought is our country’s past relationship with slavery. According to Cunion, slavery is “the institution of human bondage, in which individuals are held against their will in the service of another.” In the movie 12 Years a Slave, we see the unforgiving truths about everything that came along with slavery. Living in Saratoga, New York, 1841, along with his wife and two kids, Solomon Northup is a free African American man who plays the violin for a living. Solomon received news about an opportunity to play music out of town, so he made the journey, excited to showcase himself in the circus. Yet this trip takes a turn for the worst when he is …show more content…

After much research, Wright notes that 12.5 million captive men, women, and children were taken on slave ships for sub-Saharan Africa and 10.7 million of those Africans made it to America. In the sixteenth century, the annual average of slaves going through the Atlantic slave trade was about 3,000; by the last quarter of the eighteenth century, that number sky rocketed to 72,000 (Wright). Between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century, slavery in America was held together by the Atlantic slave trade. Slaves that were brought to the north were treated completely different than the slaves that were brought to the south in America. In the south, there were two regions, the upper and the lower south, each having their own distinctive slave labor systems. The areas of the lower south, “evolved from a frontier settlement to an integrated part of the Atlantic slave economy” whereas the upper south had “gradually replaces indentured servitude” (Keene 82). Although different in the way things were run, but the upper and the lower south held poor working conditions and inequality to the slaves. In the north, the rural slaves would “work as field hands on small family farms” and the urban slaves worked “as domestics in wealthier homes” (Keene 83). Soon, free slaves began to emerge in the North. Some freed by owners who realized how terrible slavery really was,

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