Summary
The concept of race has always been and is likely to remain for a while one of the most complicated social issues in the American community. Taking retrospect into the era of the American community foundation, one will notice that oppression remained ubiquitous and equally horrifying for all ethnic minority groups, including Native Americans, Spanish missionaries, and Mexicans. Due to the presence of deeply-seated racism and colonialist attitudes, the challenge faced by ethnic minorities mostly implied overcoming racism, as well as social and legal injustice.
Among the groups that have been affected by the systemic racism shown by the descendants of European colonists, one must mention Native Americans. The challenges of fighting systemic racism and ethnic prejudices were particularly strong for the specified group, whose culture and livelihood was virtually eradicated at the very beginning of the colonization process. Having been affected by the European system of gender roles and subjugated into complying with gender-based prejudices, Native Americans were forced into complying with the narrow interpretation of gender (Hurtado 117). Moreover, the specified attitudes and behaviors of white Americans toward Native Americans have resulted in assaults on Native American women (Stepanikova and Oates S88).
Furthermore, the relationships between the descendants of Europeans in America and its Mexican residents were soured significantly by the results of the Mexican-American War, which led to devastation for the American troops. However, even though the hatred toward Mexican residents among American citizens was fuelled significantly by political issues, racism must be named as the main culprit in the development of resentment and disdain among European Americans toward Mexicans. Thus, systemic racism and oppression could be regarded as the main challenges that the Mexican community was experiencing in the specified time slot.
Remarkably, despite the fact that each of the ethnic minority groups mentioned above faced unique challenges in overcoming their oppression by the white population at the beginning of the 20th century, all of the specified cases of oppression had one thing in common, namely, the presence of prejudices born from an uninformed and uneducated perspective of the colonists. Indeed, when considering the history of the relationships between European colonists, whose descendants would become the white population of the U.S., and the rest of the ethnicities populating the country, one will notice the presence of a clear axis of oppression delineated by race. Tracking down the roots of the specified despicable attitudes toward people from minority ethnic backgrounds, one will realize that they stem from the very conception of the relationships between white and minority groups. Specifically, Hurtado explains that Beeckman, as one of the promoters of the abolitionist movement, was still heavily prejudiced against Brazilian people, specifically, women:
In Beeckman’s mind, race and gender relations were among Brazil’s strangest and most disconcerting conditions. When he looked at sixteen- or seventeen-year-old young women, they appeared to him ‘to have reached the meridian of life, not one less than thirty-five, with faces sallow and wrinkled, forbidden and repulsive.’ (Hurtado 49)
Therefore, apart from the obvious race-based oppression, the struggles that ethnic minorities, specifically Mexican and Latin American populations, in general, were facing in the specified time slot also included unadulterated sexism. Overall, sexism has also shaped the lives of women belonging to ethnically diverse groups in the U.S., particularly in the early 20th century. Therefore, indigenous groups in the early 20th century U.S., as well as the representatives of ethnic minorities, had to deal with rigid stereotypes based on the European ideas of gender roles and the relationships between men and women.
References
Horst, Megan, and Amy Marion. “Racial, Ethnic and Gender Inequities in Farmland Ownership and Farming in the US.” Agriculture and Human Values, vol. 36, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1-16.
Hurtado, Albert L. Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California. UNM Press, 1999.
Stepanikova, Irena, and Gabriela R. Oates. “Perceived Discrimination and Privilege in Health Care: The Role of Socioeconomic Status and Race.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine, vol. 52, no. 1, 2017, S86-S94.