Racism has always been a bit of an abstruse concept for the people privileged enough to label themselves as “white.” The meaning of the word and what it looks like in action is known, but the weight it carries throughout the lives of colored people is an outrageously ignorant concept to many whites. The books read in class help shed light on what racism really is and how truly poignant it is in today’s society, which is something society and the media try to bury in attempt to pretend that the issues going on with PoC have to do with anything else except race. It’s interesting that something so prevalent in our nation’s history, and a topic so highly written about in historical books, has yet to make anyone realize that this issue is constantly
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People of different ethnicities, to be truly welcomed in America, needed to first and foremost been seen as white and then as American. Anything else made you “less than” and almost undesirable. The Shifting Grounds of Race validates the above statement because the readers learn about Japanese Americans trying to throw away the “Japanese” part of their label when Pearl Harbor and World War II happens—this shows they wanted to be recognized as Americans so they wouldn’t become ostracized. Unfortunately, even if the white people of that time overlooked the beginning of their ethnic label, they were still seen as “yellow,” as opposed to white. Thus, this minority never stood a chance at being seen as an equal or as a group of people helping America prosper because they were not labeled as a white American. Therefore, even though these books have similar themes, and acknowledging that they were all written to share vastly different topics of history, they can all still be boiled down to the same idea: your race …show more content…
In Exiles and Pioneers, English settlers came to a foreign land and stumbled across a new nation of people. Instead educating themselves about the people they found or at least engaging with them enough to understand their customs, the settlers shunned them as uneducated savages who posed a threat to their new livelihood. As time moved on, the now Americans still found themselves at a “clash between the native traditions” mostly involving their movement, which caused rising tensions between the two people because Americans refused to understand why the Natives’ land means so much to them. They remained ignorant and instead passed acts to forcibly remove Native Americans or start wars with them. Moreover, Americans would continue to paint these people as savages even though they began to learn the law and customs of America and tried to assimilate themselves in this new world. Part two of the book basically relates all the ways Native Americans accepted and utilized western culture, but this never made them become anything other than “less than” to white people. If we go back to when the English settlers first arrived, the only physical difference these settlers must have saw between themselves and the Native Americans is that they had a much lighter skin tone than the Natives did. This might have then led to the English settlers deciding that their light skin tone must be why they are so
People of different ethnicities, to be truly welcomed in America, needed to first and foremost been seen as white and then as American. Anything else made you “less than” and almost undesirable. The Shifting Grounds of Race validates the above statement because the readers learn about Japanese Americans trying to throw away the “Japanese” part of their label when Pearl Harbor and World War II happens—this shows they wanted to be recognized as Americans so they wouldn’t become ostracized. Unfortunately, even if the white people of that time overlooked the beginning of their ethnic label, they were still seen as “yellow,” as opposed to white. Thus, this minority never stood a chance at being seen as an equal or as a group of people helping America prosper because they were not labeled as a white American. Therefore, even though these books have similar themes, and acknowledging that they were all written to share vastly different topics of history, they can all still be boiled down to the same idea: your race …show more content…
In Exiles and Pioneers, English settlers came to a foreign land and stumbled across a new nation of people. Instead educating themselves about the people they found or at least engaging with them enough to understand their customs, the settlers shunned them as uneducated savages who posed a threat to their new livelihood. As time moved on, the now Americans still found themselves at a “clash between the native traditions” mostly involving their movement, which caused rising tensions between the two people because Americans refused to understand why the Natives’ land means so much to them. They remained ignorant and instead passed acts to forcibly remove Native Americans or start wars with them. Moreover, Americans would continue to paint these people as savages even though they began to learn the law and customs of America and tried to assimilate themselves in this new world. Part two of the book basically relates all the ways Native Americans accepted and utilized western culture, but this never made them become anything other than “less than” to white people. If we go back to when the English settlers first arrived, the only physical difference these settlers must have saw between themselves and the Native Americans is that they had a much lighter skin tone than the Natives did. This might have then led to the English settlers deciding that their light skin tone must be why they are so