For many years black people in the United States have struggled for their rights and their piece of the American dream. Now that the world is moving toward a new global era the African American person, worker and human has been left out of this turn in the century and, the system is letting them hang their selves. Globalization has made it so that anyone with the right equipment and knowledge can chat or do business anywhere in the world with just a few clicks of a couple of buttons. Globalization is making the gap between the races bigger every day, and it seems that no body is slowing down to lend a helping hand. Globalization has placed a new standard on the way we live today. Because now that we have reached the technological revolution, you must have a computer or ready access to one to be considered up to date with the world. There was a time when it was unheard of not to have more than one television in your home. Or if you didn't have cable you must have been poor. Is being poor a new kind of crime, a crime that says if you can't log on you are suppose to be were you are, at the bottom. In "ghettos" across America I bet you can count on your fingers and toes how many people have a computer in their house, and I am not talking about a play-station or dream-cast. Is globalization the new apartheid in the United States? Is this away for our land of the free to keep the hold on the poor and lower middle class minorities? Are black people free in the coming of globalization? In Clarence Lusane's book: Race In The Global Era, he talks of automation and its effect on black workers. Lusane shows us that not all blacks are effected by globalization. For instance Michael Jordan and other ball players that have these big shoe deals. Now these sports super stars have their faces and name all over the product but have no say so in how, where, or who will make the product. The funny thing about it is that some commercial ads are to catch the eye of inner city black youth. I remember when I wanted that new Michael Jordan shoe, but my mother could not afford it. Now the commercials are geared for the black youths but the unemployment rate of blacks is two times higher than white's, working the same job.
Ghettos, low-riders, hip-hop, rap, drugs and crime, it has got to be a Black man right? Saggy pants, unintelligible language, lazy, and the lists continue to both stereotype and describe Blacks. Do Black Americans perpetuate their own discrimination? Are Black Americans creating their own low status in society? Black people around the world have been hypnotized into believing all their failures in life are due to discrimination, but are they correct? Blacks are often their own worst enemies, often the cause of their own disasters, and many don’t see that until it’s too late, if ever. Discrimination and prejudice are imposed upon Blacks, often because the culture they live in is not “acceptable” to the dominant society. On the other hand, an understandable reason for Blacks actions is often due to unattainable opportunities towards the American Dream.
... the future of black business in America. Just from reading this book and seeing the future of business and the commodification of black culture since its first publishing, most of the areas that the book touches upon have given accurate insight to how others have cashed in on black culture and how black business has evolved. An example that is evident is of George Foreman and his promotion of the Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine. Here is a black heavyweight boxer that is using not only his name and his former athletic prowess to endorse a product, but, one can say, also stereotypical blackness, with his affinity to unhealthy foods such as hamburgers and hot dogs, to promote a promote a product for Salton, Inc., a Jewish-founded company. Foreman, like Jordan, amassed a large fortune from his promotion of the grills but at the price of selling black culture.
In her article “From America’s New Working Class”, Kathleen R. Arnold makes clear that welfare/workfare recipients are treated like prisoners or second class citizens. Likewise, In Michelle Alexander’s article “The New Jim Crow” she describes how blacks is made criminals by a corrupt criminal justice system. Alexander also points out in her article “The New Jim Crow” that shackles and chains are not the only form of slavery. Furthermore, Alexander states that although America is thought of as the home of the free, blacks are more likely than any other race to be arrested, unemployed, or denied housing. Freedom is not an absolute value in America, as slavery is more ubiquitous than ever.
Since the election of President Barrack Obama in 2008, many people have started to believe that America is beyond racial inequalities - this is not the reality. Rather, we, as a society, chose to see only what we want to see. Discrimination is still rampant in our nation. Michelle Alexander explains that since the Jim Crow laws were abolished, new forms of racial caste systems have taken their place. Our society and criminal justice system claim to be colorblind, but this is not the actuality. Michelle Alexander explains:
Though social problems affect a wide variety of people from all races, classes, and cultures; minorities, specifically African Americans, encounter social problems on a multi-dimensional basis. Poverty, employment rates, discrimination, and other social problems strike African Americans in such a way that it is nearly impossible to separate them; each individual has different background, socially and physically, that would determine in which order his or her social problems need to be solved. Impoverished blacks in the inner city may have difficulty finding or keeping jobs, while others may have jobs, but face troubles with work discrimination that prevent them from moving upward .Underemployment, workplace inequalities, and unbalanced medical attention are three closely related social problems that, if ameliorated together, could increase upward mobility, decrease poverty levels, and tighten the lifespan gaps for not only blacks, but also other minority groups. The purpose of this paper is to show what effects these three problems have for blacks.
African Americans who came to America to live the golden dream have been plagued with racism, discrimination and segregation throughout a long and complicated history of events that took place in the United States dating back to slavery to the civil rights movements. Today, African American history is celebrated annually in the United States during the month of February which is designated Black History Month. This paper will look back into history beginning in the late 1800’s through modern day America and describe specific events where African Americans have endured discrimination, segregation, racism and have progressively gained rights and freedoms by pushing civil rights movement across America.
Many African Americans were forced to live in poverty, because the events of neo-slavery after Post-Civil War, resulted to seemingly unavoidable poverty, given that their economic and social wellbeing were mostly influenced by the decisions of the whites, rather than the their own decisions. Hence, the many blacks become the stagnant component of the United States society; because even though after they gained freedom they were depicted ‘free people’, in reality they were still the same people not free from slavery, as a result most of them languished in poverty. I believe that this actions of enslaving African Americans through this system is what has led to the present state of things whereby many blacks are still poor because just like in the post-civil war times different forms of enslaving blacks have been put in place for example imprisoning through racial profiling and the concentrating of blacks in inner cities where there are not that many resources such as good schools, social facilities and good jobs which leads to crime and wasting of these people and a criminal justice system that seems to work against black
Prior to World War I there was much social, economic, and political inequality for African Americans. This made it difficult for African Americans to accept their own ethnicity and integrate with the rest of American society. By the end of World War II however African Americans had made great strides towards reaching complete equality, developing their culture, securing basic rights, and incorporating into American society.
This country, especially the southern United States, was built using African slave labor. Africa slaves were not allowed to be educated. All most every African slave could not read or write because it was against the law to educate slaves for over 200 years. The master/slave relationship caused assimilation to be very difficult. Values and convictions were formed during those years and are still evident to this day (Parrillo, 2009).
Many significant figures in black history have believed in communism as a system holding the potential to alleviate the inequalities that the structure of a largely capitalism-based society has imposed on their people. Amongst those figures is Claudia Jones, an influential black activist during the mid 1900’s. Jones’ faith in socialism extended past its ability to correct longstanding traditions and habits of racial discrimination. She believed, as Angela Davis states in her analysis of the position of women in context of their race and class, “that socialism held the only promise of liberation for Black Women, for Black people as a whole and indeed for the multi-racial working class” (Davis 169). For Jones, socialism held every possibility of fulfilling that promise of equality for all peoples, enabling her to remain “a dedicated Communist” (169) for the entirety of her adult life. Jones’ adherence to Communist tenets contributed to her identity as “the radical black female subject” (Davies 1) whom Carol Boyce Davies deems crucial in the advancement of Marxist-Leninist theory to the “critique of class oppression, imperialist aggression, and gender subordination” (2). Jones saw socialism as a way that could correct all of those issues, but specifically she interested herself in the plight of the working-class black woman and in that of all women. In that light, her understanding of Marx’s socialism must be viewed as distinctly feminist.
The United States of America has always had a problems with cohesive cultural values. Due to the fact that it 's a country where cultural values don 't always mean the same for people. It 's a melting pot, no one culture is the same so therefore there is no set cultural value. More than that, it 's a symbol of overcoming and perseverance through times where people were under represented and unequal in the eyes of those who surrounded them. Struggle is no stranger to the African American culture, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments aided in the equality among blacks in whites. Historically, even with these amendments in place, blacks had a long way to go. The black fist, cannot be mentioned without accounting for the black power movement and
Modern American imperialism continues to thrive on the racial domination and national oppression of African Americans, albeit in a different way. The historical relationship between slavery and capitalism is important because the racial context of American capitalism continues to be staggeringly evident in our society today. African Americans can no longer be bought and sold as slaves, but they are the ones most affected by our current economic crisis. They suffer higher unemployment rates, sharp declines in household wealth as well as losses of homes, health services, and pensions. According to The State of Working America, in 2010, 27.4% of African Americans lived in poverty, compared to the overall U.S. poverty rate of 15.1%. In addition
In addition, another response to the growing concern of youth delinquency was with the establishment of the first juvenile court system created in Cook County, Chicago. This act was unique, since it attempted to reduce the stigma of juvenile crime and create a new approach for the process of offenders. They philosophized that children were not to be treated as criminals but in need of encouragement.
In 1960, the American sociologist Paul Goodman published his seminal work, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society. Having observed that, since World War II, there had been an increasing rise in juvenile delinquency – especially amongst white, middle-class, educated males – Goodman set out to study both the source and forms of delinquency. Simply put, he wanted to understand why and how young men were rebelling not just from the previous generation but from society as a whole. Goodman ultimately posited that having been frustrated by an increasingly bureaucratic and corporate culture, the only way for these young men to begin forging their personal identities was to reject the very middle-class culture and values from which they had emerged. Goodman then discovered that many of these young men began to find solace and freedom, to quote Allen Ginsberg, “by dragging themselves through negro hipster streets.” These middle-class young men – or what Goodman would ultimately label as “the white negroes” – found for themselves an entirely new cultural frontier by embracing what they felt to be the only free space available: within the bosom of black culture. The fact middle-class, white males listening to “black music” would hardly raise an eyebrow today only serves as a testament to the enduring power of blackness as a cultural trope. Whether it be jazz in the 1950s or hip-hop at the turn of the century, white youth have continued to find avenues of self-expression and self-formation through what Toni Morrison calls an Africanist presence.
The harmful impact of globalization on South Africa has been apparent , through the financial squeeze and through market- oriented policies that have silent economic and reorganization, in job losses, crisis in schooling, closing of hospitals, make wider loopholes in the social security net, water cut offs, the degeneration housing shortage, and unrelenting starvation and poverty in a perspective of deepening discrimination in what is already the second most disparate nation on the globe.