Issues faced by African Americans in United States

Issues faced by African Americans in United States

Introduction

African Americans in United States are always referred as a bottom tread since their arrival in this hemisphere. Despite of an end to the slavery, many southern states of US placed new legal barriers to halt the social mobility of recently liberated slaves. Whites have always relegated African Americans to the detested part of the society kept for those who are supposed to be incompetent and cold. By using various negative and positive reinforcements, whites always hold the top place such as using intimidation against people who struggled to mount above their equitable place and appreciating those obeyed them.

Discussion

Social Stratification

Methods of social stratification need the definite description of an out-group to be expelled that can be subjugated. Historically in the United States African Americans has been the focus of an organized process of racial pattern to define them vulnerable and exploitable as to out-group.  As a result, over the past decade African Americans are gradually wiggled away from their core position in the hierarchy and economics to the configuration of an underclass. By whites, African Americans in the Jim Crow South were seemed as people who were neither capable nor affectionate. They were tagged as socially mediocre, even subhuman, and that is why they could be segregated, oppressed, disgraced and even killed without regret and repentance.

Majority and Minority

African Americans make the largest racial minority in the United States. The many studies on African Americans and the racism against them present the African Americans as a commodity and an object for people to study. When the world thinks of Americans, they think of whites. This is the general attitude although African Americans make up an essential part of the American community. Moreover, America has produced many notable and celebrities that have their racial background in the African American culture. True empowerment of the minority group comes from proportional representation. Empowerment is not something that people can get just by sitting. It is something that any minority group has to fight for. More and more attention is being paid to the rights of minority groups in the US, in particular to the rights of African Americans. Not only the government but also the private organizations are working in this regard.

Discrimination

Although evident discrimination is not legal anymore, the working old system has permitted the fortunate upper class to keep practicing discrimination on less apparent ground (Fox & Stallworth, 2005). African Americans continued to suffer discrimination, but found a great beacon of hope in Martin Luther King. Over the years, especially during elections the political class tried to capture those votes and recalled the image of Luther King. Even after years of freedom, African American community in US faces discrimination at every stage of their life. It can be identified during their hiring as they are from poor neighborhood and possess particular accent that is why many studies have shown that those who sounds white have more chances to get a call back ...