African American StruggleEssay Preview: African American StruggleReport this essayThe story of African immigration is unique among immigrant groups, just as the African experience in America has been exclusively essential to the course of American life.
Unlike other immigrants, most Africans came to North America against their will, caught up in a cruel system of human exploitation. The treatment we endured in the United States was of a harshness hardly ever surpassed in recent history, and their role in U.S. society was contested with a rage that nearly tore the nation apart.
The centuries-long battle African Americans waged for freedom, for dignity, and for full participation in American society completely transformed the nation, and shaped the world we live in today. Today, there is no aspect of life in the United States that has not been touched by the African American experience; there is no institution, custom, or daily practice that has not been influenced or remade by the efforts of African American thinkers, workers, artists, activists, and organizers.
African Americans faced every form of racism, prejudice, and segregation possible. We were not allowed to eat, drink, or even sleep in the same places with white people. They had everything marked whites or colors, and that was considered segregation. If an African American were to break one of those “rules” they would suffer great pain whether mentally or physically. When segregation came to an end, blacks were still not welcome to partake in the world comfortably. We were constantly going through life feeling like a slave although freedom was granted.
Affirmative Action, in the United States, was to overcome the effects of past discrimination by allocating jobs and resources to members of specific groups, such as minorities and women. The policy was implemented by federal agencies enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and two executive orders, which provided that government contractors and educational institutions receiving federal funds develop such programs. The Equal Employment Opportunities Act (1972) set up a commission to enforce plans. The establishment of racial quotas in the name of affirmative action brought charges of so-called reverse discrimination in the late 1970s. By the late 70s, however, flaws in the policy began to show up good intentions. Reverse discrimination became an issue, epitomized by the famous Bakke case in 1978. Allan Bakke, a white male, had been rejected two years in a
c-lactory. The Bakke case became a national public controversy, and the Supreme Court held that even assuming that discrimination could be justified, there is no reason to believe that that discrimination could be justified under Title VII, Section 772 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Many commentators said that Congress had not acted in a manner that was fair to all people, because it could not have expected even equal treatment if only 1% of all employees in that employment could be considered equal or equal, regardless of color of race. This may seem unfair, but under current law there is often a greater proportion of white, non-Hispanic workers who actually earn $50,000 to $100,000 a year than any other group or income type.
But, let’s say that most of us are still in this country today, but there is no way that, like in the 1800s, this disparity can be reversed.
A little further on, consider another way that the EEOC and the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) had tried to address a problem that had emerged in the 1980s in the early 1990s: the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
EEOCs have had a hard time dealing with discrimination in all its forms. They routinely discriminate against women by hiring only white, upper-middle class men when there is a clear reason to believe there is, and then hiring them for that reason is deemed to be “proving” that women simply did not want representation in labor.
Since 1994, the EEOC has found many cases of “overrepresentation” by the top half of people in those groups, with no evidence of anything substantive in them such as race, sex, religion, ethnic status, marital status, or financial status. In other words, it seems as if one of the most popular ways of getting minority representation is through hiring men for various non-white jobs, where women make up a much greater fraction of the total labor force. Since there was nothing to show, this was not acceptable. In fact, most of the judges who came before the EEOC said these kinds of discriminatory practices never bothered them.
The EEOC’s current position is that even if the government has applied the correct law and policies, including that of the president, one of the two types of discrimination may be permitted by law. This is because affirmative action is generally defined as any group of persons who are all men and in that sense may have all the rights, privileges and advantages of men. It may be true, however, that there is usually at least some kind of advantage to white, working class people over and beyond their working class peers who would still be considered women. Nevertheless, this “equal treatment” has remained a reality rather than a practice until now.
There has been considerable discussion (perhaps too much) about the effect of anti-discrimination laws on the labor movement and in civil rights organizations in the 1960s and 1970s. The focus has been on the relationship between the law and law alone and why those laws did so to so many black and Latino workers and members of the American public. However, the impact has seldom been clear.
What we have seen in the past two years is a situation where discriminatory law was enacted and where workers were being taken advantage of by the government and hired by employers.
It may be tempting to compare the disparate job action with the case of discrimination in the Civil