Ethic_Groups_and_Discrimination

Ethnic Groups and Discrimination University of Phoenix February 6, 2010 Pamela A. Chandler Instructor: Ms. Natasha Evens From the beginning of time, people have had to face some sort of racialism and discrimination. Some races more than others. My father and my grandfather traveled across Europe to England and then on to New York. They walked for five years shooting for their dream of coming to the United States. They wanted their freedom no matter what the cost. It was a dream comes true for them when they hit the coast of New York City. This was only the beginning for them in a new life, but sometimes the old life never leaves you. The prejudices and discrimination never change as they will soon find out. I come from a long line of Russian Jews. My family immigrated to America back in 1922. This is when my grandfather decided to leave Russia for a better life, for him and his family, in the United States. Back in that time, it was quite normal for Russian Jews to want to leave Russia and immigrate to America. The first Russian Jews started immigrating to the United States, in 1880. They actually, arrived from Germany and spoke German (not Yiddish) proceeding to live in almost every state. They started opening stores in just about every major city in America. The originally came from Russia (modern Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, and the Russian-controlled portions of Poland. The number of Jews that arrived to the United States in 1880 was 250,000. This was in the 19th century. My grandfather decided to leave Russia, once and for all, and get a better life in America, for him and his family. He left a small town, about 90 miles south of Moscow, with my grandmother, my father, and his two sisters. It was going to be an extremely difficult and very long journey for all of them. They didn’t know, at that time, the problems of discrimination and racism, they would face when they arrived in America. When they left their small town, he knew that they had to get to England to get on a ship to New York City. The only way they could get to England, was by walking, which they did. They walked every step of the way and it took them five long years to walk from Russia and across Europe, to get to England. Those were very hard times. Once they arrived in New York City, they realized that living there would be harder than they thought. There was conflict between blacks and selected white Ethnic groups (Catholic immigrants, Jew), (Cummings, S., (1978). This was competition for jobs for the secondary labor market. Jobs were scarce back then, as they are now. As the minority of Russian Jews settled down over the years, they decided that they wanted more and better education. When asked of most men as to what class immigrants they considered the least desirable, they answered, the Russian Jews. In 1893, people had a preconceived idea that because most of the Russian Jews were dirty, could not speak the English language, and lived in closely crowded in unwholesome, ill-smelling tenement quarters; they therefore form an objectionable part of our population. (Van Etten, I.M., (1893) pp. 172-182) My father was greatly discriminated against, no matter where he went to school. Everywhere he went; there was discrimination against Russian Jews. He decided that to get a good education, he would have to lie about his ethics and his race. He found a decent school that he was accepted to; he enrolled, and never told anyone that he was Jewish. He was treated with the utmost respect and was in the top of his class. His friends all treated him as their equal. Then one day, out of nowhere, someone started spreading a rumor that he was a Russian Jew. That baffled my father so much as he wondered who would do that to him. It turned out to be a jealous student who dislike my father and wanted him to leave the school. Well, it definitely worked. The irony is that my father ended up opening his own business and made more money than he would have if he had finished school. Well, the plan of the young man that reported my father definitely worked; in my father’s favor. Jews, blacks, and Irish, among others, have been discriminated against since the beginning of time. Around 1930, a thing called redlining was happening to all of the minorities. Redlining is the practice of denying, or increasing the cost of, services such as banking, insurance, access to jobs, access to healthcare, or even supermarket to residents in certain, often racially determined, areas, Wikipedia, (2007). Redlining paralyzed the housing market, lowered property values and further encouraged landlord abandonment. Racialism has been around for a very long time and I believe that it will never go away. The only way to stop discriminating is start right at home and stop doing yourself. One person at a time will help eliminate racialism and discrimination.