American identities

Essay by phiyennguyenUniversity, Bachelor'sB, September 2014

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Name: Nguyen Thi Yen Phi, Code: 1157010174

FINAL PAPER

In this paper, I am going to analyze how the Black- American suffered the oppression caused by the White which typically revealed in the film "The Hurricane".

In the 1830s, predicting trouble between blacks and whites in the United States, Tocqueville said " These two races are fastened to each other without intermingling and they unable to separate entirely or to combine. Although the law may abolish slavery, God alone can obliterate the traces of its existence"( American Ways, Maryanne Kearny Datesman, chapter 8. Ethnic and racial diversity in the United States, pp. 169). This prediction is still true until our recent day, 21st century. So the question is what makes the entirely different between White and Black American?

First of all, considering the origin of these two groups of people, while the African Americans were brought to the United States against their will to be sold as slaves, the white group came to America voluntarily intending to better their living conditions.

And as a matter of fact, for those slave Africans, it is far more difficult for them to become assimilated into the larger group, compared to the White whose the process of assimilation has been much more successful, hence, making them become the dominant culture- the WASPs- white Anglo-Saxon Protestants culture.

Living in such a white dominant culture, the non- white in general especially Blacks were oppressed in one way or another. They are marked out "as the Other, deviant, stereotyped and invisible" by the dominant group who "project their own experience as representative of humanity"( Five faces of oppression, Iris Young, pp. 59). After the Civil War, although slavery was abolishes, its legacy continued. Blacks were not allowed to vote and were legally segregated from whites, and...