Social Rights Dbq

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a push for equality for minorities was in the forefront of America. The obstacles restricting equality amongst all were race, class, and gender prejudices. An example of this can be seen in the Voter's Right act of 1965, which banned racial discrimination in voting. Prior to this act, minorities faced many obstacles including taxes, literacy test, harassment and physical violence. The battle to receive the rights that whites had was a long struggle both physically and mentally, reasons being: first, the laws had to be changed and second, combating the opposition of those who valiantly resisted these changes .The result has been every expansion of civil and political rights in American history.
Resistance

to the expansion of the body of people considered U.S. citizens has been prevalent since the first debate in the Constitutional convention. Since that day on, this has been fueled by several powerfully spirited forces. The first has been prejudice; in particular, race, class, and gender by those who wrote the American laws and government policies. Their class has been made up almost entirely of the first people that have been considered US citizens (property owning white men). Not to generalize, not all land owning white male lawmakers shown to be prejudice, neither have all of those who wrote laws that restricted citizenship rights. one has argued, ” lawmakers who didn’t believe that citizenship should be restricted were affected by ideas about race, gender
and class which limited their policymaking.” In other words, they simply were blind to women, people of color, and the poor while giving out citizenships.
The second major roadblock to the expansion of citizenship & political rights were race, class, and gender blindness.

One of the most key examples of this is the Social Security Act of 1935, that established an adequate provision for the welfare of old aged persons through a system of federal old age benefits that most of us take for granted. Old-age pensions to citizens were based on a person’s history of paid employment. Those who worked most steady over the longest period of time (holding a job) and earned the most were granted the highest pensions; to no surprise, these tended to be white men. On the flip side, employers who employed the majority of women of color (agricultural and domestic labor) had no coverage. The unpaid domestic and reproductive labor of wives also had no coverage, entitling women who did not work outside of their home to a very little pension. The Social Security Act also discriminated against millions of African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Mexican-Americans and new immigrants from Europe who went from job to job, whom all fell at the bottom of the hierarchical scale . The seldom did not maintain the same job long enough to receive coverage by Social Security. When the law was passed, the NAACP protested commenting that the law had made a, “sieve with holes just big enough for most negroes in the U.S. to fall through.” A statement also true for a lot of

women.
Resistance to the expansion of citizenship rights in the US also has been fueled by the belief that when more people are allowed to have citizenship rights, those rights become less valuable.

In all eras that have seen progression toward the extension rights to a group that have been previously without these rights, there have been resistance among those who already enjoy those rights arguing that, the extension to a new group would in some peculiar way, wear away the value of those rights. This same argument was heard recently in the political battle over whether same-sex partners should be allowed to marry. If same-sex partners were allowed to marry, it would devalue heterosexual marriages. This seems to be a recurring phenomenon in

history.
Another argument against the expansion of citizenship and political rights has been that “religious law” should replace any assertions for political rights. For example, women shouldn;t have the right to vote because it’s seen as “abnormal” and against God’s original intentions. Similar arguments have been made more recently against giving marriage and employments rights to homosexual people.
Groups insisting citizenship rights have been seen as greedy. African Americans, gay people and women “apparently” do not deserve equal rights as other groups because they have not achieved this vexatious citizenship status. Resistors see them as “cry babies,” asking for “unique rights” giving them unfair advantages over white people, heterosexuals and men, when in actuality all they’re asking for is equality. This argument has been seen lately in referenda seeking to stop legal regulations banning discrimination on the sole basis of, sexual orientation, race and sex.