The institution of slavery denied African-Americans the economic, educational, political and social opportunities for nearly 250 years, which relegated them to second class citizenship status. The free labor of African-Americans was part of the economic engine that made the United States today’s richest country in the world. There is no monetary compensation that could repair the psychological and economic damages Black people suffered as a result of slavery and the systematic racism instituted by White Americans to keep black people at the bottom of the totem pole. African-Americans are owed more than just monetary compensation by the United States.
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade nearly 450,000 Africans were brought to the United States, …show more content…
White southerners instituted the Black codes which sharply restricted the rights of the newly-freed slaves. The Jim Crow laws were simply a continuum of slavery. Government policies prevented blacks from benefiting from the government programs available to whites. Southern states enacted vagrancy laws under which black men were incarcerated and leased out as forced labor and under apprenticing laws the state placed black children with white employers if the court deemed the children were without proper care. Sharecropping and the crop-lien system led to debt peonage and robbed black farmers of their …show more content…
In the Moynihan Report black women were depicted as the “welfare queens” when in fact 69 percent of government welfare recipients are white. These studies appeared to be designed to psychologically condition the mind of the whites to believe that blacks are always at the bottom. Further, Black people do not choose to live in the ghetto or be unemployed; they have been placed there by the machine of racism that continues to suppress their economic development. The continuum of racial discrimination in corporate and the government policies have robbed Black people of the opportunity to create wealth, have good paying jobs, acquire properties and live freely in their communities without being racially profiled by the
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade nearly 450,000 Africans were brought to the United States, …show more content…
White southerners instituted the Black codes which sharply restricted the rights of the newly-freed slaves. The Jim Crow laws were simply a continuum of slavery. Government policies prevented blacks from benefiting from the government programs available to whites. Southern states enacted vagrancy laws under which black men were incarcerated and leased out as forced labor and under apprenticing laws the state placed black children with white employers if the court deemed the children were without proper care. Sharecropping and the crop-lien system led to debt peonage and robbed black farmers of their …show more content…
In the Moynihan Report black women were depicted as the “welfare queens” when in fact 69 percent of government welfare recipients are white. These studies appeared to be designed to psychologically condition the mind of the whites to believe that blacks are always at the bottom. Further, Black people do not choose to live in the ghetto or be unemployed; they have been placed there by the machine of racism that continues to suppress their economic development. The continuum of racial discrimination in corporate and the government policies have robbed Black people of the opportunity to create wealth, have good paying jobs, acquire properties and live freely in their communities without being racially profiled by the