After coming to America

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After coming to America

All people seem to want the same basic things out of life regardless of race or religion. Universally, people want a good job, a healthy family, and a chance for their children to have a better life than the one they have. Families that already possess these things, whether through their own hard work or merely by way of inheritance, rely on the existing power structures within society to ensure that their future happiness continues . But what do people who do not belong to existing power structures turn to in order to secure these things for their families and children?

During the course of America's lifetime, million upon millions of people left their homes and families in other countries and traveled to America in the hope of securing a better life -- the American Dream. What they often found was an unwillingness on the part of those already established in America to share society's benefits with them. For many segments of our American society, people substituted a reliance on family, or friends, or even faith alone, to secure these benefits for themselves and their children that was denied them by those possessing economic and political power.

Most blacks came to America involuntarily. Sold as slaves in Africa, they were brought to America as laborers. Being slaves, they were legally considered property and thus were excluded from the legal protections that other people living in America were entitled to. Slave marriages were not legally recognized, and parents and children could be separated at the whim of their owners. As Frederick Douglass and countless other narratives by former slaves have shown us, slaves were forced to rely on a network of extended family members and other slaves to ...

... middle of paper ...

...f ethnic communities that make up our cities is a testament to that reliance on friends that supported these groups of immigrants. While relying on friends and community would ensure that their family was both fed and that they had a place to sleep, faith is what kept hope alive in them from day to day. Faith that, one day, society would allow their children to fully participate in this country. And sometimes, as Thomas Aquinas told us, faith is all we have to have.

Works Cited

Boroff, David. "A Little Milk, a Little Honey: Jewish Immigrants in America." 1966. Oates. 87-97.

Burns, James MacGregor. "Reconstruction: The Revolution that Failed." 1981. Oates. 20-29.

Foner, Eric. "From Slavery to Freedom: The Birth of the Modern Black Community. 1990.

Oates. 4-16.

Oates, Stephen B., Ed. Portrait of America. Sixth Ed. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1995.

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