Descriminationn Against Irish-American Immigrants and Native Americans

Descriminationn Against Irish-American Immigrants and Native Americans Racism is a problem with roots reaching as far back as biblical times, and it is questionable as to whether or not racial discrimination will ever vanish. Many different groups of people have been subject to racism over time. Two historical examples of people who were discriminated against because of their nationality are Native Americans and Irish-American immigrants. Although the situations they faced are not quite identical, they have an abundance of similarities. The Native Americans and the Irish citizens who immigrated to the United States suffered a similar plight in the sense that both peoples were persecuted for their cultural differences as well as exiled from their own homelands. Before all others, varying tribes of Native Americans inhabited North America. The eleventh-century Norse seaman Leif Eriksson glimpsed very small portions of the continent, yet his discoveries never became public knowledge.(Brinkley, 8) It was not until Christopher Columbus’s â€Å"discovery† of North America that Europeans began to develop an interest in the so-called New World. British, French, and Spanish colonies sprouted up along the eastern coast of America soon after Columbus’s expedition. Once the colonies declared their independence from Great Britain and formed the United States of America in 1776, the westward expansion of the white settlers inflated tremendously. This intrusion upon the lands of the Native Americans produced many conflicts between the two groups. The Americans began to repeatedly intrude upon Native American property, and force the Indians off of their rightfully owned land. One person who is often associated with the poor treat... ...persecuted horribly and viewed as inferior, and as belonging to a lower level in the social order. The Irish’s subservience was influenced mainly by ideological apparatuses, while the Indians were restrained mostly by repressive forces, such as military action. Yet, both methods were effective in lowering the people in the social rankings, so that they were frequently overlooked and wronged morally and legally. While we can not take back what has happened, we can use what has happened in the past to try to prevent such injustices in the future. The first step in the solution to racism is understanding one another. Bibliography: Brinkley, Alan. The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People, 3rd ed. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill, 2000. Takaki, Ronald. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, Boston, MA: Bay Back Books, 1993.