Race and Ethnicity There Is Essay

Moreover, the master for indentured servants had an obligation to feed, clothe, and educate them. While indentured servitude was substantially different from slavery, it was sufficiently similar to allow the initial transition to chattel slavery without creating a social uproar. However, historically slavery was different than servitude, in that it was a perpetual and hereditary condition that deprived the slave of his humanity (Jordan, p. 32). It was this notion, that the slave was less than a human being, that led to the utter depravity of the slave system, the horrors of the Jim Crow south, and the continued attitudes of white racial superiority that mar much of American life.

However, it is important to understand that these English attitudes were imported into other wilderness areas as well. When confronted with the Aborigines in Australia, Englishmen treated them in a way that was similar to how African-Americans were treated in America, though there was no mid-Atlantic slave trade compounding the situation. In addition, it was not only Englishmen who took this attitude towards darker-skinned people. For example, the Boers in South Africa enslaved the indigenous people there, and slavery in African colonies was permitted long after slavery in Europe had been outlawed (Ross, p.151).Like the racial attitudes that developed in America, these attitudes have pervasive long-term effects. In Australia, the government operated a program that took children who were a mix of Aborigine and white and removed them from their families to train them for service in white homes, a practice that continued well into the late 20th century. In South Africa, these racial attitudes led to a system of Apartheid, which was similar to the American south in the period following reconstruction, and denied blacks their basic human and political rights. Apartheid officially ended in 1990, though blacks in South Africa were not given the opportunity to vote until 1994. Australia and South Africa are just two examples of other countries that have embraced racial divisions, making it clear that as horrible and pervasive as racism is in the United States, it is hardly a uniquely American phenomenon.

Works Cited

Jordan, Winthrop. The White Man's Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

Ross, Edward Alsworth. The Principles of Sociology. New York:….....