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Slavery: The Status Of African Americans

Decent Essays

As human beings, we are able to remember events from past and cherish them as important memories. At the same time, we can also grudge the past events that negatively affected us. As long as the event is deeply carved in people’s memories, the feelings that was created during the event will last for many generations. One example of such an event is slavery. For more than 200 years, the brutal memories of slavery were passed down through African Americans. It is obvious that the memories that were passed down for generations would not end and be forgotten immediately after the end of slavery. Similarly, white owners would not be able to get out of the owner mindset because they were owners since the start of slavery. Although slavery itself …show more content…

African Americans often did not get equal opportunities as white people and ended up to be poor compared to whites. The slave status that slaves are lower in status than white owners became a persistent idea that made black people to be less willing to fight against white supremacy because they unconsciously accept that they are the disadvantaged race and that fact cannot be changed. Some blacks like the character Guitar in Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, quoted that “Slave names don’t bother me; slave status does”. In the book Guitar could not bare the situation where African Americans cannot fight back against white supremacy. Guitar strongly believed that if African Americans can fight back against the white oppressors, they would achieve fair grounds or even an upper hand. In the book Guitar decides to kill white people to force them to see blacks as equally powerful. His decision to kill whites instead of negotiating peacefully demonstrates the unconscious idea that blacks are always disadvantaged and cannot change the situation unless they take extreme actions. This idea that there would never be a society of African Americans and whites being treated equally further motivated the race to separate themselves from …show more content…

For example, Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates states that “A national real-estate association advised not to sell to ‘a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and though they were entitled to live among whites’”. The white perspective that blacks do not deserve equal rights as whites is illustrated. At the time when red-lining was legal, white people did not see why blacks would get equal opportunities as them. As illustrated in another quote from Case for Reparations, “bent on upholding a society ‘formed for white, not for black man’”, people viewed the separation of races as a common and acceptable practice. Because white people were not able to see blacks as their neighbors or friends, they were less willing to help the disadvantaged race. In The Case against Reparations by Kevin Williamson, Williamson points out that “blacks remain to a disproportionate extent outside the traditional financial institutions — for instance, a quarter of unmarried black men have no bank account, and fewer than half of black households invest in stocks”. These problem of disadvantages in society continues today because of the cycle where lack of interaction leads to misunderstanding, which leads to negative acts towards one

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