Race and Power Essay

The average person looks at race as being the physical differences, characteristics or maybe even the status we uphold as an individual. This only contributes to the racial inequality, humility, insults, and assumptions that we as Americans have its origins of creating. This is partly due to 1619, the first Africans who arrived to Jamestown as slaves, and all the attempts from 1783-1918 to conquest the Native Indians. These are two of the many crucial building blocks in our history, for they are the moments that Americans felt power, used dictatorship, and saw wealth. These are also moments in American history when certain laws created race as a whole, not the genetic and biological difference. Families were taught and children were trained at a very young age to compare and socialize with common folks. This rose for an advantage in opportunities for those classified as white, and the rest were left to fit in their society. Whiteness was considered more than just a skin color it was a privilege. From 1880-1920, twenty-three million immigrants came here to America for freedom and the pursuit of happiness, but were left with the slums, an industrialized area where the hardest, most dangerous, yet least paying jobs were available to them and all the other inferior races. New established laws like Aliens Land Act only proved this inequality by raping and prohibiting land ownership, then to only sell this same land to the whites for their own profit and pleasure. Another law that followed was the Federal Housing Act, this law was established in 1934, soldiers/veterans were back from war and ready to start families, and had no home to do this in. Once again though only whites were granted with these amenities, required little money