How Far Have We Come

Paper #2 Assignment

English 10001

Instructor

Due date: April 4, 2006

"How Far Have We Come"

As a nation, how far have we come in decreasing the gap between the White's and African American's races, in respect to the social conditions in which each lives today? The autobiographical sketch, "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow" by Richard Wright, portray a young African American boy growing up in a pre civil rights era America.

As a young boy Wright, like all Blacks, must learn to live as "Jim Crow" in order to have any chance at all of surviving in a white dominated world. In other words, the Blacks had to eat, sleep, and drink in a way the White population found appropriate, or the Blacks would have to deal with some severe punishment.

The average African American families usually lived in the worst section of town segregated from the Whites. The author, Wright, tells us "Our house stood behind the railroad tracks. It skimpy yard was paved with black cinders. Nothing green ever grew in that yard. The only touch of green we could see was far away, beyond the tracks, over where the white folk lived" (Wright).

The average black workers made far less income and were not allowed to compete for higher paying positions against their white counterparts. In fact the Blacks would be discouraged from doing so, in the form of beatings and harassment until they would get the message to leave. The author, Wright, says "I worked hard, trying to please. For the first month I got along O.K. but one thing was missing. I was not learning anything, and nobody was volunteering to help

me"(Wright). Job opportunities for Blacks were very hard to find, most Blacks were happy to have any type of job at all. At least they appeared this way on the surface.

Most African Americans had little or no education, even those who did, were seldom able to live within the boundaries of the White neighborhoods. Some black families, tired of

their repressed life styles in the South, slowly migrated north in hopes of finding greater opportunities. They were usually greeted with much of the same despair that they left in the South.

The author, Wright, tells us "Negroes who have lived in the South know the dread of being caught alone upon the streets in white neighborhoods after the sun has set. In some simple situations as this the plight of the Negro in America is graphically symbolized. While white strangers may be in these neighborhoods trying to get home, they can pass unmolested. But the color of a Negro's skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target" (Wright). Even by today's standards, Blacks are singled out in white neighborhoods in the form of racial profiling.

For many years, Whites were the primary race in America. Even on the rare occasion that a white man would show some sign of sympathy or kindness towards a Negro, they risked being chastised by others who insisted that the Blacks were lesser people who needed to be kept separated from normal White society.

With little to nothing to work with, no chance of a descent education, and a lack of any form of social legislation, there was little hope of any chance for anyone of the Black race to ever live a life of prosperity, own their own homes, or even to be able to provide an adequate

form of health care for their families. It should be no surprise to learn that in the America of the 1930s to 1950s the life expectancy of African Americans was 12 years less than Whites. As social reform began to take place in the 1960s the black-white gap had fallen to less than six

years apart. The past forty years have seen very little change in the gap, although life expectancy has risen for both groups (African Americans).

The EH.Net Encyclopedia, reports that, "the 1960s, marked a new era in government involvement in the labor market, particularly with regards to racial inequality and discrimination. America was beginning to wake up a bit to the plight of the Black race. During the early 1900s, Negroes were forced to attend schools designated only for Black students. The government provided the bare necessities to provide schools for the Black population. In 1954 the Supreme Court's ruling of Brown v. the Board of Education ruled