Favoritism In The 1800s

When you think about favoritism, what comes to mind? Examples like a teacher’s pet in school or the yes-man adored by an employer could quite likely be a popular answer. But this means different things to different people, and these varying answers can turn into a search for power. For instance, the human mind is set up to think about pleasure. People want to get as much as they can have without to doing an over abundant amount of work for it (5). If they can’t get success by themselves, they make sure that they get it due to other’s efforts. This way of thinking leads down a path that has disrupted the world’s peace since early civilization: exploitation.
The history of enslavement goes thousands of years back into the Neolithic Era. In

6800 B.C., residents of the world’s first established city of Mesopotamia had the want for more land and the latest technology. This consequently created war, and drove the beginning slavery and forced labor. In Egypt, temple art was made out to celebrate the capturing of slaves for battle. Egyptians went on expeditions on the Nile River searching for captives. Cyrus the Great finally declared that all slaves were free after conquering Babylon in 539 B.C. His words were eventually documented on a tablet called the Cyrus Cylinder, which went into detail about his progressive intentions (10). In the 1500’s Spanish explorers brought the first slaves from the Middle East and North Africa to what would become the United States of America. Eventually, European countries started to ban the African slave trade, whilst it was still growing in the U.S. Even after President Abraham Lincoln issued The Emancipation Proclamation, and the 13th Amendment was passed in the 1860’s, hundreds of thousands of African American were re-enslaved after the American Civil War (12). In 1948, the United Nations created the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (12), and slavery in lawfully abolished in article 4: “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.” (8).
Due to the formation of slavery, there came other types of exploitation.

These included racial and religious segregation. When more settlers came to America, the native Indians were treated extremely unfairly. In 1838, when Europeans wanted too much, more than 18,000 Cherokee were moved across the Mississippi on the “Trail of Tears” (14). At the same time, individuals coming from Africa, Mexico, and Asia became focal points of racial oppression. Throughout the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, civil rights became an overwhelmingly apparent issue. The Ku Klux Klan was formed, and between 1886-1900, there were more than 2,500 lynchings in the U.S. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which restricted the immigration of Chinese workers for 10 years, and it was extended for another 10 in 1892. When African American rights turned violent, many people spoke out. Famous activists like Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and Thurgood Marshall all played major roles in the fight for equal treatment. More recently, people of religious backgrounds have been targets of discrimination. One of the most famous events of religious bias was the Nazi Holocaust, in which over half of the Jewish population of earth was exterminated through the orders of Adolf Hitler (10). Following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, some Americans have been skeptical about people of Middle Eastern descent. With the development of ISIS, there have been thousands who have been killed due to

their ethnicity. Multiple religions have been singled out for their religious heritage, including Muslims, Islamics, and Jews. These groups cannot help who they are born as and should not have to suffer because of it.
Gender, human trafficking, and sexuality have been major matters of exploitation over the last century.

Before 1848, there had been no national way for women to make a statement about their thoughts on their rights. That year, the first women’s rights convention was held in Seneca falls, N.Y., where Elizabeth Cady Stanton made her voice heard about women’s right to vote. In 1920, women’s prayers were finally answered with the passing of the 19th amendment, giving them the right to vote (14). Women can also be rendered helpless by human trafficking, which can affect men and children as well. In 2012, there were over 21 million people in forced labor situations across the word, whether that be sex slavery or forced service (6). Gay marriage has also been a point of discussion for the last 25 years. After the Defense of Marriage Act was passed in 1996, 25 states banned gay marriage. Succeeding that, and after much uproar, many states took on the role of legalizing it on their own. On June 26, 2015, gay marriage was officially legalized in the entire United States (15). The United States has made progress towards respecting individuality, but still has a ways to

go.
Despite not knowing how exploitation will affect our world in the future, we know what it has done to countries and communities in the past. It has caused so much conflict that human rights have nearly been ignored. People need to start realizing that discrimination is not going to get us anywhere as a human race, but is only to limit the progress that we can achieve. Human exploitation has been an issue for thousands of years, and it’s important that we don’t let it be a determining factor for our society in the following thousands of years. This cannot dictate what we become as individuals, and we need to start expanding on the actions of people that came before us.