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impacts of racial discrimination
impacts of racial discrimination
effects of discrimination on african americans
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Moynihan perceives the inclusive problem amongst the black family to be its structure. This is a product of disintegration of nativism in the black community. The “racist virus” still flowing through the veins of American society hinders, in virtually all aspects, the progression of the Negro family. Moynihan discusses the normativity of the American family as a reason that people overlook the problems that occur in Negro and nonwhite families. He emphasizes the significance of family structure by stating “The family is the basic social unit of American life; it is the basic socializing unit.” (Moynihan, II 4). This assertion implies that due to the instability within the black family, socially, the Negro family would be unable to prosper. …show more content…
These two categories outline the entirety of Moynihan’s description of the black woman. In the article the idea of a black woman being the head of the Negro family is heavily pressed upon. Moynihan uses a study that states, “Negro husbands have usually low power” (Moynihan, III 2). This statement associates with idea that men should have more power in a relationship. Frances Beale states “America has defined the roles to which each individual should subscribe. It has defined “manhood” in terms of it’s own interest and “femininity” likewise” (Beale, 146). Because gender roles in American society are so skewed it is viewed with negative connotation if the women is “dominant” in a relationship. Men should, in the eyes of society, be more powerful than the woman. Moynihan connects the lack of dominance in the black male with economic and educational downfall. Educational advancement among black woman is substantially higher than the black man. This displays the inter-relatedness of the problems in the Negro family. The term “knowledge is power” coined by Maria Stewart literally connects to Moynihan’s …show more content…
Personally, these solutions merely scratch the surface for solving what Moynihan feels is the overall problem in the Negro family. He acknowledges the severity of the issue but one-sidedly offers solutions to fix them. In the conclusion of the report Moynihan fails to recognize that the White community is also at fault for the downhill plunge of the black family. In 1965 civil rights were at its peak, and he slightly brushes across the impact racism has on black individuals. Trying to be unbiased in critiquing his solutions proved to be challenging because of the bias incorporated in his argument. Practically, his solutions are sensible, but they ignore the impact basic human interaction has. It is quite impossible to try and solve an issue as an outside source. Daniel Moynihan was a white male with an objective view of the Negro family. He centers the solutions on a governmental structure that is historically responsible for the situation African Americans are in. Though legislatively there were many strides in civil rights, only depending on the government to solve the black family’s problems is
*Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. "African American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race" in Feminism and History, ed. Joan Wallach Scott (NY: Oxford University Press, 1996), 201.
Daniel Moynihan’s controversial and needed report opened my and many others’ eyes to the societal issues that African American families face. He claims that the African American condition is caused by the fall of the family. In the Tangle of Pathology he addresses several concerns such as welfare dependence, crime, gaps in educational achievement, and children born to single-mothers as the effects of the demasculinization of Black men and the shift of the matriarchal household. Using historical context, sociology, and psychology he centers his thesis around that the matriarchy in Black families is the main issue compared to patriarchy in White households. In this report, Moynihan shed light on several studies that concluded him to assume
Moynihan, born to a broken family in the great depression era, entered politics and developed to become an important political figure in the labor department during the 1960’s. The principal belief of Moynihan was that unemployment was destructive to the potential social mobility of the poor, a lynchpin of the American dream. Once the civil rights movement gained momentum, Moynihan gained interest on how his theory affects black families specifically and began to research this topic. The results of his research showed just how devastating the effects of three hundred of years of slavery and institutionalized racism were on black families and how much worse off they were than white families in general. These findings led Moynihan to draft and publish a government report titled “The Negro Family.” “The Negro Family” illustrated how debilitating the present society was for black families but offered no possible policies to address the problem, something very peculiar for a government report. The reason for the lack of policies is stated by Moynihan, “It would have got in the way of the attention-arousing argument that a crisis was coming and that family stability was the best measure of success or failure in dealing with it.” (The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration, “Lower-class Behavior in our Cities is Shaking Them Apart”) President Johnson had
Historically, the job of women in society is to care for the husband, the home, and the children. As a homemaker, it has been up to the woman to support the husband and care for the house; as a mother, the role was to care for the children and pass along cultural traditions and values to the children. These roles are no different in the African-American community, except for the fact that they are magnified to even larger proportions. The image of the mother in African-American culture is one of guidance, love, and wisdom; quite often the mother is the shaping and driving force of African-American children. This is reflected in the literature of the African-American as a special bond of love and loyalty to the mother figure. Just as the role of motherhood in African-American culture is magnified and elevated, so is the role of the wife. The literature reflects this by showing the African-American man struggling to make a living for himself and his family with his wife either being emotionally or physically submissive. Understanding the role of women in the African-American community starts by examining the roles of women in African-American literature. Because literature is a reflection of the community from which it comes, the portrayal of women in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and James Baldwin's Go Tell it on the Mountain (1952) is consistent with the roles mentioned above.
Collins, Patricia. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York, NY: Routledge, 2000
The Author of this book (On our own terms: race, class, and gender in the lives of African American Women) Leith Mullings seeks to explore the modern and historical lives of African American women on the issues of race, class and gender. Mullings does this in a very analytical way using a collection of essays written and collected over a twenty five year period. The author’s systematic format best explains her point of view. The book explores issues such as family, work and health comparing and contrasting between white and black women as well as between men and women of both races.
In the weekly readings for week five we see two readings that talk about the connections between women’s suffrage and black women’s identities. In Rosalyn Terborg-Penn’s Discontented Black Feminists: Prelude and Postscript to the Passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, we see the ways that black women’s identities were marginalized either through their sex or by their race. These identities were oppressed through social groups, laws, and voting rights. Discontented Black Feminists talks about the journey black feminists took to combat the sexism as well as the racism such as forming independent social clubs, sororities, in addition to appealing to the government through courts and petitions. These women formed an independent branch of feminism in which began to prioritize not one identity over another, but to look at each identity as a whole. This paved the way for future feminists to introduce the concept of intersectionality.
In her book, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, Annette Lareau argues out that the influences of social class, as well as, race result in unequal childhoods (Lareau 1). However, one could query the inequality of childhood. To understand this, it is necessary to infer from the book and assess the manner in which race and social class tend to shape the life of a family. As the scholar demonstrates, each race and social class usually has its own unique way of child upbringing based on circumstances. To affirm this, the different examples that the scholar presents in the book could be used. Foremost, citing the case of both the White and the African American families, the scholar advances that the broader economics of racial inequality has continued to hamper the educational advancement and blocks access to high-paying jobs with regard to the Blacks as opposed to the Whites. Other researchers have affirmed this where they indicate that the rate of unemployment among the African Americans is twice that of the White Americans. Research further advances that, in contrast to the Whites, for those African Americans who are employed, there is usually a greater chance that they have been underemployed, receive lower wages, as well as, inconsistent employment. This is how the case of unequal childhood based on race comes about; children from the Black families will continue residing in poverty as opposed to those from the white families.
Historians Mary Dudziack, Micheal Krenn, and Thomas Borstlemann have been credited in this work for their contribution to the struggle for Black equality in that their scholarly contributions share the same historiography as Carol Andersons Eyes off the Prize. Author Carol Anderson uses their works to build upon her own thesis.
Collins, Patricia Hill. THE MEANING OF MOTHERHOOD IN BLACK MOTHER-DAUGHTER RELATIONSHIP. Boston: Beacon Press books, 1991. Print.
On Being Young-A Woman-and Colored an essay by Marita Bonner addresses what it means to be black women in a world of white privilege. Bonner reflects about a time when she was younger, how simple her life was, but as she grows older she is forced to work hard to live a life better than those around her. Ultimately, she is a woman living with the roles that women of all colors have been constrained to. Critics, within the last 20 years, believe that Marita Bonners’ essay primarily focuses on the double consciousness ; while others believe that she is focusing on gender , class , “economic hardships, and discrimination” . I argue that Bonner is writing her essay about the historical context of oppression forcing women into intersectional oppression by explaining the naturality of racial discrimination between black and white, how time and money equate to the American Dream, and lastly how gender discrimination silences women, specifically black women.
In A raisin in the sun author Lorraine Hansberry was keen on enlighten her audience on woman’s rights and feminism in the African American community. The play takes place after World War 2 where both black and white men fought together for equality however back home in the United States it was not the case. After the war, whites were still considered the superior race to African Americans but as an African American woman, they were at an even lower class than the African American men. As an African American woman in the 1950’s and 1960’s they were not only fighting for their rights as a race but were oppressed by class, and gender. African American feminism or “black feminism if you will, is known as a school of thought which argues that sexism, class oppression, and racism are inextricably bound together.”
Family is a basic unit in every society. However, the makeup of a family is more complex to define. There are so many types of families that it is impossible to have one distinct definition in trying to explain how a true family is defined. For example, there are married couples with or without children, single-parent families, and even families headed by gay men or lesbians. These may not have been considered families not too long ago, but now must be recognized because we live in such a diverse society. What I want to focus on is the African-American family, in terms of what they had to go through before, during, and after slavery. As well as, where they are now and where it’s going in the future.
Ayalew 1Ruth AyalewCrawfordHonors American Literature30 March 2018Ain’t I a Woman?Sex abuse, domestic violence, systematic brain draining, and oppression; these are allobstacles that plagued the African American community post-emancipation. Black women, inparticular, carried a larger sum of this burden. After the civil war, freed slaves had nowhere to goin the South. Unemployment is rampant, former slaves were poverty-stricken and most werehomeless. Black women today face the aftermath from these problems, as well as sexism and sexcrimes. This, combined with lack of education, lack of access to jobs and financial instability,left American black women behind. It is no secret that black women are at the very bottom of thesocial hierarchy as a
Smith, Barbara. "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism." JSTOR. University of Illinois Press, Mar. 1978. Web. 27 Aug. 2013.