Ethnicity in America - Essay Example

Since the United States had recently undergone a relatively large wave of immigration, people were not entirely sure of whether people of Japanese descent would owe allegiance to their former country. This practice, however, was based on racist notions, and I believe would not be repeated again. On Sept. 11, 2001, America faced a similar attack perpetrated by people legally in the United States of Arab descent, yet, thankfully, did not over-react and attempt to put Arab people in internment camps. 2. Intermarriage between people of different races have long been viewed with scrutiny, being illegal in the United States until the 1960s in some places.

Yet intermarriage within the Jewish community receives special attention. There are several reasons for this, but I believe that the fundamental one is that the Jewish people have a justified cultural fear of eradication. This is understandable, considering the multiple historical slaughters, massacres and attempted genocides, most recently the holocaust, which they have been subjected to. This instills a strict idea of the necessity of working to keep Jewish culture and heritage alive – because Jews know that it will not necessarily “just happen” – that it is something that needs to be fought for.

Jews thus also understand that it is very easy to become wiped out culturally by a larger ethnic group simply by weight of numbers – and that marriage to someone from that ethnic group could lead to erosion of the importance of being a Jew to the other person in a relationship, and possibly their children. Imagine if every Jew married a non-Jew, within a few generations it would be very easy for the whole culture to be wiped out. I believe that this is certainly an understandable fear, but not necessarily an incredibly justified one.

The importance of one’s culture and religion does not necessarily have to diminish when one is in a relationship with someone that is not of that culture, and it is possible to raise children as Jewish, regardless of who their parents are. 3. Women of subordinate racial and ethnic groups face myriad problems. Firstly, there is simply a double whammy of discrimination: they fall into two groups who frequently face oppression, and thus they face more types of oppression than people who fell into just one.

A black woman, for instance, could be hurt and made to feel lesser through a racist joke and a chauvinistic joke, while a black man would only face oppression from one. But there are more complex problems than that as well. Some of those centre around the evolution of modern feminist movements, which, while supposedly representing all women, often consciously or unconsciously exclude black ones both in thought and in organization (). Such white feminists do not understand that a black woman may feel more fellowship with her black brother than with her white sister, and might understand racism to be a more central oppression to their life than gender (hooks 1981).

Furthermore, the goals of white feminists, to earn higher wages, for instance, while working professional settings, often do nothing for black women, who cannot access those jobs in the