In American Studies, we spent a lot of time these past few days talking about the way African Americans are treated and given attention in the book, Huckleberry Finn, as well as common stereotypes about them in modern culture. However, by listening to our discussions, it seems like stereotypes only exist toward African-Americans. Throughout the existence of the United States, there have been movements and racist views against many different people groups including: Japanese, Chinese, African, Italian, German, Irish, Jewish, and Latin Americans.
HERE is an article from Wikipedia about the history of racism in the United States. It shows some cartoons that promoted racism, and an explanation of each era in which racism was applied to each people group.
So if all of these races have stereotypes, cartoons, and jokes about them, why do we only discuss racism against African Americans? Clearly none of the other people groups were slaves, but currently Latin Americans and Middle Eastern Americans (among possibly some others) are also thought poorly of by some other Americans. All of these peoples are portrayed differently by the media, and we could analyze any of them. Cartoons about Asian Americans are abundant from the 1890s as well as during World War Two. So why just analyze one group?
Because there are so many different groups, as you pointed out, I think it would be too difficult to discuss more than one group at a time. It's certainly very important to understand and analyze the stereotypes of other races, but trying to focus on multiple groups at once would be far too much information. Perhaps in the future, after our class has finished discussing African Americans, we should focus on another group, and then another one after that, so that we can learn about racism toward other groups.
ReplyDelete