Ethnic Groups and Discrimination

Ethnic Groups and Discrimination

xxxxxxxxxxx

Eth/125

25 June 2011

I identify with the African American ethnic group and will provide some background information on the people of the group. The African American population has experience a great deal of strife and change over hundreds of years. I will take you through the Black Americans experience of colonization, segregation and discrimination that has brought us to this point in society.

It is said that the slavery has existed throughout ages in many forms and by people of many races; it took a drastic change as the Europeans went into Africa in the fifteenth century (Editors of Ebony, 1971). The current black population that exist in the United States today are descendants of the slaves that traveled by ship from their homeland during the mid 1400’s through the early 1900’s. According to Ebony Pictorial History of Black America, “North America received an estimated one million slaves one of the smallest, though historically the most significant portions of the slave trade”. These numbers don’t account for the many died in transport across the Atlantic sea. It is unfortunate to know that the need for cheap labor is the reason that Africans were stolen from their home lands and sold to people around Europe and the United States.

The black race has stood in the face of prejudice, racism and segregation. It is amazing how one ethnic group has dealt with some many issues and still managed to evolve from strife to success. The black population experienced a level of segregation like no other in the 60’s. Blacks had to use different bathrooms than whites, sit in the back of the bus and attend different schools. It was not uncommon to see colors and white only signs all over areas of the south. I remember stories of from my grandmother of how she grew up in Arkansas in the 1930’s. She was married by the age seventeen and her story was about how she used to lay her babies on sacks and pull them through the...