The Story we Tell :: essays research papers

America and Race have a long and abstruse history. The concept of Race, like America is a recent invention. Race is an supposition constructed by society to further political and economic goals. Race was never just a matter of how you look, its about how passel assign importee toward how you look. It is ironic that a nation that takes great pride in bingle the foundation All men are created Equal can at the same time portray the idea of Race in such(prenominal) a scale that would repress and kill so many people. In this essay I will address what necessitated the creation of the story of airstream in American history. In the beginning of colonial America people used religion and wealth to define status. As the years progressed less people migrated to America. This resulted in a labor shortage of indentured servants. Farmers dark to the transatlantic slave trade, and started replacing indentured servants with African slaves. African slaves worked for nothing, could be easily id entified by their skin separating them from indentured servants, and were valued for their agriculture skill. Plantation owners found what they an ideal and endless labor supply and actual the first slave system where all slaves shared a public appearance and ancestry. The abundance of this freshly labor source brought poor white-hots new rights, opportunities, and a sense of superiority for whiteness. Many were elevated to managers plantations and bounty hunters. White societies for the first time started to identify themselves with each opposite not based on wealth or status because they were white. As slave labor increased, slavery became inherently identified with blackness. This perpetuated white Americans opinion that Africans were a different kind of person and stimulated the theory that Africans maintain a "natural" inferiority. This theory of "natural" inferiority rationalized for many white Americans the stealing of Indian lands. Indians, another ra cially inferior group, were initially viewed as naturally white. They explained they were tan because of exposure to the sun. Many felt that they were good gracious material, and the problem was not race but culture, that the Indians were primitive but they could be civilized. Whites sought to civilize Indians though English education and Christian religion, bit hunters into farmers and businessmen. They tried to assimilate them into American culture. The "civilization" process and way of manner began to be seen as the only way for Indians to live in quietude with whites.