A Response To Mr. Slade's Arduous Task

Mr. Slade, in response to your assignment:

America has done a lot of things to minorities.  It’s frightened them, it’s enslaved them, and it’s tortured and killed them.  But never has America been really scared of them.  It has taken a close to home minority to instill fear in many Americans.  The influx of Mexican illegal immigrants has scared the pants off of the American public.  And though this issue has taken a back seat to the economic crisis, they are still prevalent.

Surprisingly, this does not seem to be an article about America’s racist ways or its economic interests as much as it is about the positives and negatives of these aliens.  America is most freaked out about “loosing its identity”, but after 300+ years of immigrants, wars, and depression, we haven’t really budged except for becoming more open and tolerant.  The tolerance is limited, however, because in the 1900’s we decided to cap our immigration quota at a much lower point than before.  America is trying to protect the population density and integrity of itself.  People are afraid that Spanish might be as prevalent as English and we will all blend in to one big melting pot.  Now what is the problem with that?  It is the “great American melting pot”, right?

All there is to say is that “America” still considers itself to be white, when in reality pretty soon white will just be the largest of very many minorities.  So, white America should be accepting of their new friends because one- they were here first, and second- we’ve been inviting them in for the past 300 years, why stop now?  Over reacting? You bet you are.

 

A Tribe Called Webquest

So I just read Richard Wright's Native Son. What probably effected me the most (more than the murders and the action) were the reactions to those things. I would think that in this day and age, no minority would have that sort of reaction to white people. Plainly stated in the novel, "to Bigger and his kind, white people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force" (Wright, 109). With that, I thought of how America has progressed in the field of tolerance and racism - how the "natural wall"(102).   But what really changed racism from the extreme paranoia of the old days to the playful banter of now? I decided to research it a little in the only way a high school senior knows how – Wikipedia. To my surprise, there was a specific article on African American racism in the United States… but there was a problem. It skips straight from the Civil Rights out of 1964 to the Election of 2008. There is a whole lot missing.
And so I found my idea for an assignment. I want you, the read, to go peruse my links and videos below in search of the cement that binds the then and now of the American view of African Americans on Wikipedia. Make a new chapter (or two or three, depending on how you want to organize it), that helps to piece together the puzzle of this newfound tolerance.  

Associated Content has a huge amount of articles dealing with past and present racism from several different points of view.  This one is cool.  This one has to do with Black Literature. And this one is my favorite of the three.

While those article are more about current issues, this article I found on EBSCO about segregation is a retrospective on the hardships against African Americans in the middle of the 20th century.  I have a few more links on my Delicious if you want to check it out.

One of my favorite animated shows right now is the Boondocks created by Aaron McGruder.  It is the story of two young kids and their grandfather that move from the ghetto to the whitest suburbs imaginable.  They get in to all sort of shenanigans.  While most of their episodes deal with African American issues and most are relevant to this topic, Return of the King is the most relevant.  It's about what would have happened if Martin Luther King didn't die and it discusses the progress of African American culture.

Also, I'm going to toss in a couple of blogs to help you on your quest.  The first was done by my classmate and the second is a blog about a documentary.  

It is still amazing to me that Bigger could live the way he did.  How "he passed his days trying to defeat or gratify powerful impulses in a world he feared" (44) is unimaginable to me.  And for the cause of this mass divide to be race is even more amazing.  I know America has changed in the past few decades, but how those changes made such a drastic change on the human ideals is remarkable to me.  Bigger thought little of himself - that he "... [was] black. [He only] works and [doesn't] bother [anyone]" (170).  Times have changed.