Myne Owne Ground - Essay Example

Introduction The African American culture has been of great interest to a large number of studies. This is due to the unique and fascinating character and personality of its people. African Americans have a history and life experience that they alone fully understand (Vaughan, 1995). The civilization they experienced and the current social and economic pressures they endure are largely different from the more popular and highly researched lives of the Caucasians and Asians. As a race, these people have suffered greatly in the long story of their existence, and until these days, it is still evident in the low treatment of the racist and narrow-minded groups of people that, for some people, is inevitable in the global community that is now shared all over the world. This is evident in the calls that concerned individuals and private institutions, foundations and sectors that address anti-racism and anti-discrimination in the national and international setting. The book "Myne Owne Ground" showed, racism was once blatant in the US. Slavery, especially in Virginia was all highly visible manifestations of racism committed with the sanction or even active participation of the authorities. Although overt manifestations of racism today would be unacceptable to the majority of US citizens, the country is still struggling with ongoing racial and ethnic divisions . (Vaughan, 1995) Major steps taken over the past 50 years to end institutionalized racism have not eliminated the inequalities which many members of racial minorities continue to face in daily life. The black-white divide on racial matters is one of the most profound and enduring in American society. For decades, public opinion polls have shown that blacks and whites differ fundamentally as to what constitutes the race problem, how severe it is, and what to do about it. Historical Review The segregation and discrimination of the black urban community is the result of politics and economy in the mainstream history of the United States. Millions of Africans were brought to the Americas and traded there as slaves (Vaughan, 1995). This mass movement of people led to a new social and economic system; with the color of the skin as a determining factor whether one would live as a slave or as a free citizen. By the 1640s and 1650s, England thus had five substantial areas of overseas settlements--the Irish plantations of Ulster and Munster; the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland; Bermuda; the New England colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Haven; and the West Indian colonies of Barbados and the Leeward Islands. The predominantly English people who went to these areas all intended to one degree or another for the new societies they were creating to be fundamentally and recognizably English. Yet the new research into the cultural dynamics and socioeconomic and demographic configurations of the two major centers of English settlement on the North American continent has made it clearer than ever before that during these early years of settlement the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland differed profoundly from the principal New England colonies of Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut. Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine how any two fragments from the same metropolitan culture could have been any more different (Vaughan, 1995). About the only characteristics they had in common were their ethnic homogeneity, their ruralness, their primitive material conditions, their remoteness from England, and, after their first few years, an abundant local food supply. In virtually every other respect, they seem to have been diametric opposites. Along with the strong cohesive force exerted by the church, village, family, schools, and visible and authoritative leadership structures that characterized the New England villages, the absence of exceptional economic opportunities inhibited the urge to scatter that was so powerful among the settlers in the Chesapeake (Vaughan, 1995). The initial colonists moved fairly often during the first two decades of settlement, and people who either had tenuous ties to the community or lived in the economically most active areas tended to be highly mobile. But those with close economic, family, political, and religious involvement seem to have developed a deep emotional attachment to their communities, which in turn seems to have fostered a persistence and spatial immobility that may have been greater even than in most established village populations in England. These same conditions also helped to produce several decades of "relative social peace." Notwithstanding the well-known theological controversies between Bay Colony magistrates and religious rebels such as Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, the challenges presented by the arrival of the Quakers in the mid-1650s, and the presence of considerable controversy in the churches and contention in the courts, major social discord was rare and conflict restrained throughout most of the seventeenth century (Vaughan, 1995). As Timothy Breen and Stephen Foster have aptly observed in regard to Massachusetts, the harmony of New England society placed it in contrast not only to the Chesapeake but to virtually the whole of the contemporary civilized world and constituted perhaps the single "most startling accomplishment" of the orthodox puritan colonies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Haven. BETWEEN 1607 and 1660, the English emigration to America thus had produced on the eastern coastline of continental North America two simplified expressions of contemporary English society. But they were extremely different from each other. Chesapeake society was highly materialistic, infinitely more secular, competitive, exploitive, and very heavily devoted to commercial agricultural production for an export market. Its high demand for labor and high mortality rates combined to produce a population that was disproportionately male, young, single, immigrant, and mobile. The process of family formation was slow. Social institutions were weak, authority was tenuous, and individualism was strong. With only a slowly developing sense of community, the Chesapeake exhibited a marked proclivity toward public discord (Vaughan, 1995). By 1750, both the free and enslaved black people showed an intense attachment to America. After 1750, many African-Americans already found their freedom. In 1830, Philadelphia held the first meeting of the American Society of Free Persons of Color (later became the National Negro Convention). This organization for the black people was created to establish a black community and seek true freedom. Many societies were founded by the blacks. Anthony Johnson as a Free Black The benign situation of free blacks ended soon after Bacon's Rebellion. The sharp increase in slave imports, especially of non-acculturated Africans, "exacerbated racial tensions"-tensions whose existence the authors had heretofore largely denied. Whites began for the first time to discuss black inferiority because the importations "generated racist ideas or brought to the surface latent racist assumptions." Free blacks suffered as much as the newly imported slaves (Vaughan, 1995). Some black farmers moved to Maryland in search of better land. Those who stayed in Virginia faced declining prosperity, and "increasingly, their white neighbours treated them with distrust and disdain." In 1699 the legislature ordered free blacks to depart the colony within six months. The thoughts of Virginia's free blacks, wholly unrecorded, are pure speculation. Is it not more plausible to suppose that Johnson and Payne wondered why, if race relations were "not affected by the color of a man's skin," nearly three-quarters of the county's blacks but none of its whites were held in permanent slavery during the period of relative racial harmony Did Johnson and Payne not wonder why, if ethnicity rather than race was critical, African-Americans were designated by a color term-even if born and bred in Virginia--never by such national labels as "Angolan" or "Yoruban" or "Ashanti"--not even "African" Did Johnson and Payne not wonder why, if skin color was unimportant, laws were passed in 1662 against a child inheriting its father's status, as English common law prescribed, if its mother happened to be "a negro woman"; why a law in 1667 denied that baptism could bring freedom to "slaves by birth," that is, blacks alone; why a law in 1668 decreed that free black women (but not white women) were tithable; why a law in 1670 prohibited free blacks, even if Christians themselves, from buying Christian servants Surely these laws reveal prejudice exclusively against blacks several decades before Africans became either numerous or outstandingly "foreign" in language and customs. In sum, although Breen and Innes contribute much useful insight into the lives of free blacks in one seventeenth-century Virginia county, they seriously distort, the overall picture of early black-white relations and especially its connection to incipient American racism . (Vaughan, 1995) The evidence on Anthony Johnson in particular and racial attitudes in general; Lorena Walsh pointed out the non-representation of Northampton County's thirteen black heads of family among Virginia's black population. Although the explanations is more economic rather than racial explanations of slavery, turned Myne Owne Ground into an anachronistic scenario for the genesis of American racism: after Bacon's Rebellion, "the number of blacks became relatively so great that they created fear; fear led to repression; repression led to legal discrimination and personal degradation; degradation led to racial prejudices (Vaughan, 1995). Works Cited Vaughan, Alden T. Roots of American Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Read More