African Americans

The effects of the discrimination of African Americans in the United Sates in 20th – 21st century

It has been a long time that black people have been known as “Colored people,” “People of color,” “Negroes,” “Afro-Americans,” “Aframericans,” “Black Anglo-Saxons,” “Black Americans,” and by a number of other appellations. Even there is a piece of rules declared by the United States Bureau of the Census, “A person of mixed white and Negro blood should be returned as a Negro, no matter how small percentage of Negro blood.”(1)

According to the Kathleen M. Mullin, there are 158 inmates await execution in North Carolina, and most of them are African Americans; 31 were convicted by all-white juries.(2) This bias is not news in North Carolina. Since colonial times into recent decades, racial prejudice has been a huge factor in the imposition of death sentences in the state.

The origin of discriminating African Americans

Racial discrimination is one of the serious problems in the world, which is the belief of inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. Discrimination of African Americans started since the early 17th century, Europeans, who settled in America, brought along the African black population into United States, and let the discrimination still continuing today.

During the period from 1890 to 1940, the Jim Crow era in the history of prejudice against the African Americans, which enacted segregated all the public facilities for the whites and the blacks in the United States. In these years, millions of African Americans were brutalized, killed and frightened to death for voting and taking formal education. “Lynching” was a rampant practice that the whites punished the blacks in an anti-humanism way. The ‘America’s Black Holocaust Museum’ in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has a collection of photographs and other evidences of the plight of African American populace, over the years. Furthermore, in the first half of the 20th century, a lot of African American population was forced to move to North and the Mid-west by the discrimination for searching a better and peaceful lifestyle.(3)

 

Why Black people want to call themselves American?

The reason that Black people consider themselves American, is not only because case national status was conferred upon them gratuitously, but also because they were here in the beginning before there was an America and their blood and sweat and tears are forever mingled with those of others whose struggles and triumphs made this country great.(4)

 

Effects on the living

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of African Americans in the United States in 1980 was 26,624,000. From 1970 to 1980, more blacks moved into the South rather than left, which might reverse by the trends of every decade since the Civil War. For years, African Americans had left their farms and plantations looking for a better life, better jobs, better housing, and better opportunities for themselves and their children. Despite that, the reality was not as the same as they expected, jobs were not always easy to come by, even in the North or in California. High interest rates enforced many middle-class African Americans stop to buy homes under the discrimination of housing in the early 1980s.(5) Even though, this kind of situation is getting better than before, those poor Africa Americans are still segregated into slums in the some major cities of United States, such as New York, Omaha, Atlanta and Memphis.

 

Effects on the employment

Although the property gap between African Americans and the whites is getting better, in the situation today, the black unemployment rate still tends to be about double that of whites, whatever the economic climate.(6) Discrimination in hiring and promotion accounts for a sizeable difference in job status between African Americans and Caucasian workers. In the article, “African Americans and the Workplace: Overview of Persistent Discrimination”, the authors point out that racism often is hidden and appears unintentional in the workplace, for example, personnel officers hire African Americans for low-level and low-paying jobs and ignore their potential experience or qualifications for higher level jobs, especially for African American males. A comprehensive study by the Urban Institute implies that one out of five African Americans experienced discrimination when they were looking for the jobs. In addition, a study in San Diego showed there is 20 percent of discriminatory treatment of blacks in the workplaces studied. Indeed, it also tells people how to distinguish the meaning of words when an employer called seeking a new employee: talk to “Maria” actually means “I prefer Hispanics,” “See me” refers to “No people of color,” and “No T” is “No Blacks”. Based on these two independent studies indicate, the discrimination is a major factor which leads college- educated African Americans have more difficulty than their Caucasian counterparts in securing employment.(7)

Effects on the education

Countless African Americans are suffering the discrimination of the education as well, in the early 1980s more black children attended racially isolated schools than in 1954. Many of them were sent to segregated school and kept them out of whites schools, such as all-black ghetto schools in Chicago and New York. Besides, Black educators held only 8.7 percent of the total administrative positions at all levels.(8)

In the journal “Experiences of Discrimination among African American, Asian American, and Latino Adolescents in an Urban High School”, the main thesis is study how ethnic minority students in an urban high school experience discrimination. The findings suggest critical variations among students that contributed to a hostile school environment. The authors also explore associations of racial identity beliefs regarding how Blacks should act, think, and behave (racial ideologies) and racial discrimination experiences with academic engagement outcomes among 390 African American adolescents in Grades 7 to 10. In spite of that, racial discrimination causes a serious psychological distress among African American young adults.

On the top of that, according to the journal “Journal of Health and Social Behavior”, the author Robert M. Sellers indicates the study which examines the direct and indirect relationships among racial identity, racial discrimination, perceived stress, and psychological distress in a sample of 555 African American young adults. Based on the study, results are discussed within the context of identifying multiple pathways to psychological well-being for African American young adults within the context of racial discrimination.

Conclusion

In a conclusion, even though the discrimination to African Americans is getting better than before, however the discrimination still exists nowadays. Indeed, the damage which racism left behind to these African Americans on psychological part is the hardest to change and cure. As more and more researchers being to investigate the adverse impact of racial discrimination, as a result of new initiatives to understand racial disparities in health outcomes, it is important that we do not fall into the trap of viewing African Americans as simply passive victims of racial discrimination. Thus, we should focus not only on the impact of racial discrimination but also on the protective factors and processes which allow the majority of African Americans to lead psychologically healthy lives.

(1) Langston Hughes, Milton Meltzer, C. Eric Lincoln, and Jon Michael Spencer, A Political History of African Americans (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1995), 3

(2) Kathleen M. Mullin, “Racism and the Death Penalty”, The New York Times, February 14, 2012, accessed March 1, 2012

(3) Prashant Magar, “Racism against Arican Americans”

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/racism-against-african-americans.html

(4) Citation 3

(5) Citation 1, 365

(6) Christian E. Weller, and Jaryn Fields, July 25, 2011

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/07/black_unemployment.html

(7) Felix O. Chima, and William D. Wharton, “African Americans and the Workplace: Overview of Persistent Discrimination” Rivier Academic Journal 7 (2011)

(8) Citation 5