Unlike most other peoples, Americans are primarily a nation of immigrants. The citizens
or their ancestors immigrated from many parts of the globe - some as refugees from
religious and political persecution, some as adventures from the Old World seeking a
better life, some fleeing a hopeless economic situation or natural disaster, some wanting
greater educational opportunities, and some as captives brought to America against
their own will to be sold into slavery. Though people all share a common American
culture, the nation contains many racial and ethnic subcultures with their own distinctive
characteristics. These differences might seem trivial irrelevant to outside observes, they
have contributed to racial conflicts that have been a persistent social problems to US
society.
The United States was founded on the principle of human equality, but in practice the
nation has fallen far short of that ideal. American society is stratified one, in which
power, wealth, and prestige are unequally distributed among the population. This
inequality is not simply a matter of distinctions between gender and social classes; it
tends to follow racial and ethnic lines as well, with the result that class divisions
often parallel racial divisions. The first male settlers from "Anglo-Saxon" northwestern
Europe quickly took control of economic assets and political power in the United States,
and they have maintained this control, to a greater or lesser degree, ever since.
Successive waves of immigrants from other parts of Europe and elsewhere in the world have
had to struggle long and hard to become assimilated into mainstream of American life. Some
have succeeded and have shared in the "American dream"; others - notably those whose
ethnic or racial characteristics differ most markedly from those of dominant groups - have
been excluded by formal and informal barriers from full participation in American life.
The result of this discrimination has been a severe and continuing racial tension in the
United States that has periodically erupted into outright violence. Particularly since the
civil rights demonstrations, ghetto riots, and other unrest in 1960s, race and ethnic
relations have been a major preoccupation of social scientists, politicians and the
general public.
In the United States, any group other than the dominant white Anglo-Saxon Protestant
majority is a minority group in American society. These racial and ethnic minorities
mainly refer to the blacks, Native Americans or American Indians, the Hispanics, and Asian
Americans. The social and economic conditions of Native American are probably worse
than those of any other minority groups. All these racial groups including Asian Americans
are still suffering from racial discrimination and injustice. But here we look more
closely at one of them whose problems have attracted the most public attention: the blacks
or Afro-Americans.
The Afro-Americans used to be the latest of the racial and ethnic minorities in the United
States. But recent census shows that they are now the second largest, after the Hispanics,
and account for 12.3% of the population in 2004. The second largest of the racial and
ethnic minorities in the United States is the blacks, who number over 25.2 million, or
11.7% of the population. Their history in the United States has been one of sustained
oppression, discrimination, and denial of basic civil rights and liberties.
The first Africans were brought to North America in 1619. Within a few decades the demand
for their cheap labor led to a massive slave trade that ultimately transported some 400000
men and women to this continent. Captured by neighboring tribes in their native villages
and then sold to white traders, the slaves were shipped in wretchedly crowded conditions
to the Caribbean and then to the United States, where they were sold like cattle at
auctions. The whip or the lynch mob served to assert social control over slaves who
challenged the established order.
The Northern states had all outlawed slavery by 1830, but the Southern states, in which
slaves had become the backbone of the economy, maintained the institution until it was
finally ended by the Civil War, Lincoln's emancipation of slaves in 1863, and the 13th
Amendment to the Constitution in 1865. But even after the abolition of slavery, wholesale
discrimination was practiced against black Americans. Many states passed segregation laws
to keep the races apart in schools, housing, restaurants, and other public facilities,
while institutionalized discrimination kept blacks in the lowest-paid jobs. A variety of
methods, such as rigged "literacy" tests, were used to keep blacks off voters' rolls and
thus prevent them from exercising their political rights. Segregation laws continued to
be enforced in Southern states until the 1950s; in the North informal methods were used -
often just as effectively.
The 1960s saw the great civil rights movement whose goals were to end segregation laws
completely and fight for equal rights for the colored people. Many Afro- Americans began
to have a new mood. They had feelings of pride; they declared that "black is beautiful";
and the black community showed signs of unprecedented self-confidence. Equally important,
many black leaders began to disclaim full integration into the American mainstream as the
goal of the black minority. In stead, they argued, blacks ought to coexist with other
groups in a plural society containing different and distinctive communities living in
mutual respect.
The current status of Afro-American presents a mixed picture. The elimination of legal
barrier to their advancement has been a major gain. but institutionalized discrimination
is still rife. Housing in particular, remains highly segregated: the great majority of
Afro-Americans continue to live in neighborhoods that are overwhelmingly white. Busing
and other programs aimed at integrating the schools have had some impact in inner-city
areas but have made virtually no difference to segregation that exists between
predominantly black urban centers and the predominantly white suburbs and small towns
that surround them. Black have achieved considerable educational gains; black enrollment
in the colleges rose spectacularly between 1966, when 4.6% of college students were black,
and 1976, when 10.7% were black. Median family income of blacks rose from $3230 in 1960
to $10142 in 1977, but the median income of white families rose at least as fast, and the
income gap between the two groups has widened in recent years.
There is also great disparity in the earning of women, who receive 76 for every dollar
earned by men in the same of this differential is the fact that blacks tend to be barred
from positions of authority over other workers, and are restricted instead to lower-paying
jobs further down the work-place hierarchy. This factor alone accounts for about a third
of the total black-white income gap. The political influence of blacks in increasing, both
in the South, where they are voting in unprecedented numbers, and in the major cities of
the North, Midwest, and West, where they are a major voting bloc and, in some cases, a
majority. By 2010, after Barack Obama became the first Afro-American President of the
United States, an increasing number of well-educated African-Americans had already moved
into important positions in local and national government, the business world and in the
media.
Race relations between black and white still leave much to be desired, although there is
unmistakable evidence of some improvements in attitudes. However, there is a sharp
divergence between the races on the question of how much progress has been made in
ending discrimination. The majority of whites believe that there has been a lot of
progress in getting rid of discrimination, but more than half of the blacks felt that
there has not been much real change. Only less than 20% of the whites believe that many
blacks miss out on jobs and promotion in their city because of discrimination. Many blacks
are still pessimistic about progress in race relations. A Pew Research Center study
published on January 12, 2010, however, indicated that just over half of non-Hispanic
blacks do not think discrimination is responsible for keeping blacks from getting ahead in
society.
One reason for the difference in perceptions of the two groups may be that blacks are more
acutely aware that a great many of their members have failed to share in the more general
gains made by blacks since the 1960s. Many blacks, perhaps as many one-third, have worked
their way into the middle class, in the process often moving from to the ghetto to the
suburbs or to better housing within the cities. But other blacks have been left behind,
and urban ghettos contain a permanently impoverished "underclass" of habitually unemployed
or underemployed black people. Many members of this "underclass" are young and unskilled.
They live in cities where the unemployment rate for teenage black workers runs at high as
50%, or about 8 times the rate for the American work force as a whole. This "underclass"
could continue to persist, even in the absence of racial discrimination, in much the same
way as other pockets of poverty persist - that is, for reasons of social-class inequality.
In any event, such progress as has been made in the past decade has brought little benefit
to the black "underclass". Living in an environment of poverty, decay, crime, drug
addiction, joblessness, and hopelessness, this ghetto underclass offers the potential to
explode the future.