From a young age, we are educated about how upstanding our country is. We are instilled with an immense amount of patriotism, and our adolescent minds are filled with the great deeds of the first American pioneers.
What we did not realize at the time was that the history that was taught to us was but a loose recollection of the events. Many reprehensible actions have been taken by our country throughout its history.
And much of it is held back from us in our education. In reality, throughout our nation’s history minorities’ rights have been restricted through the systematic racism committed by white Americans.
For the most part, this is kept under wraps. By peeling back this façade, we can begin to discover this racism that so heavily dominated an evolving America and still remains to this day.
African Americans have had to live through intense racism since the earliest days of the United States. In the reconstruction era, efforts were finally being carried out to protect African American rights.
However, many of these efforts failed to make any lasting change for decades to come. The institutions created to protect African Americans, such as the Freedmen’s Bureau, overall did little to stem the tide of racism.
According to many reports, a multitude of “blacks eventually found themselves once again in a state of dependency as sharecroppers” due to the lack of protection.
Many white Americans devised the Black Codes in an effort to further subjugate the African Americans. The legislation was passed to “regulate black behavior and impose social and economic control” by denying blacks their “fundamental rights”.
Many racists justified these reprehensible actions by believing in the “Lost Cause”, which was an “ideology that preached white supremacy and romanticized the Confederate secession.” As time went on, the reasoning behind the subjugation of blacks changed.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, phrenology was used as a scientific justification for racism, by stating differences in skull shapes meant other races were inferior to white.
Native American history is largely neglected in American education, and due to this many are largely unaware of the atrocities that they were subjected to. The expansion of white man land, in the form of the Homestead Act and other acts, openly denied Native Americans their rights and broke treaties made by the US government.
In the words of the Indian chief Joseph, “If you pen an Indian up on a small spot of earth and compel him to stay there, he will not be contented nor will he grow and prosper”.
He also speaks of the countless broken promises made by the white man. Indians were bound to reservations and were killed in mass numbers should they not comply with their land being stolen.
Countless Native Americans were forced to choose either life or their culture; the only way they could keep their lives as if they gave up their way of life. The Dawes Allotment Act was used to destroy “the sovereignty of Native American nations”, by “breaking up their reservation lands.”
Many Indians resorted to new religious movements such as the Ghost Dance to try and keep their culture alive. This seemingly only made the paranoia amongst white men even more intense, leading to tragic events such as the Wounded Knee Massacre.
The massacre was a brutal event, celebrated by the government as a win against the savages. John C.H. Grabel recounted that they “sent 200 Indians to that heaven which the ghost dancer enjoys.”
In yet another attempt to crush Native Americans individualism, residential schools were formed in an attempt to reform indigenous children into the “social norms of the colonizing culture.” When this was ineffective, US colonizer women often “played pivotal roles” of dispelling the culture of indigenous people
Immigrants were yet another example of white Americans’ tendency to treat any minority as inferior. In the US, Chinese immigrants had to deal with racism all around them.
According to Joseph Becker, they were continuously “viewed like thieves and enemies” masquerading themselves as citizens just for their own self profit.
In “The Biography of a Chinaman,” Lee Chew discusses how “by sticking to our old customs”, the Chinese were judged even more harshly. He further elaborates on the reasoning behind the hatred; according to him, no American “would hire Irishman, German, Englishman, or Italian” if they could hire Chinese.
This goes to show that the Chinese were persecuted not “for their vices, but for their virtues.” The Chinese were viewed as an infection, a disease that should be snuffed out.
Despite being viewed as hardworking, their refusal to conform to American culture led to them being viewed as doing more harm than good. The American people’s desire to subjugate the Chinese, and by extension the other immigrants, stems from the inherent Nativism that dominated their minds.
Many could not handle the paranoia that stemmed from these aliens. This partially inspired the passing of the Immigration Act of 1924, which “restricted immigration” and established “national quotas directed against southern and eastern Europeans.” This did not stop workers from other countries from being attracted to the booming US industries.
The only price they had to pay for the endless opportunities was intense racism directed at them. The paranoia led “to the ethnic segregation in many large cities” nationwide.
There are many similarities between the racial issues of the past and issues in our modern society. We are in a time of great political turmoil, what with the countless civil rights movements and unprecedented events that have quite literally plagued our populace.
The division that has grown in America has begun to fracture the very ideals upon which our country was founded. Movements like BLM have highlighted the racism that is still present in the United States to this day. Racism still causes division across many Americans.
No matter what one’s view on these matters is, there is no denying that change must take place in order to break down these barriers of division that sprouted from the injustice that is so prevalent in our modern society.
These movements show that despite the leaps the United States has taken to become a more equal society, there are still problems grown from the seeds planted in our country’s beginning. We must begin an era of learning from the mistakes of the past, so we can avoid repeating the reprehensible actions of our past.
