Prejudice :: essays papers

Prejudice Immigrants entering our country have always experienced discrimination due to many different prejudices. ^How they would not rent to Negroes or Puerto Ricans. How Negroes and Puerto Ricans were given the pink slips first at work^ (Colon 243). Prejudice impacted various aspects of the lives of immigrants including where they lived, their success, and their careers. The lives of immigrants were impacted everyday due to the prejudices they encountered. For instance, in the story ^Blues Ain^t no Mockingbird^, a black family was impacted by the harassment of white men because the black family was assumed to be on welfare, therefore; they were videotaped against their will (Bambara 119-124). Another more extreme example that Houston illustrates would be the case of the Japanese-Americans who were thrown into detention camps during the war. Their loyalty for the country was questioned and they had to leave many of their possessions behind because of their nationality and the hatred of the enemy during the war (111-116). These immigrants encountered prejudices by the way they looked and their race. In the selection ^To Be a Slave^, it is said that: It is estimated that some fifty million people were taken from the continent during the years of the slave trade. These fifty million were, of course, the youngest, the strongest, those most capable of bringing great profit, first to the slave trader, and later to the slave owner. (Lester 84) Lester^s illustration shows that many African people were taken because they were black indeed. If the people who resided in Africa were white, or the same as Americans or Europeans, there probably would not have been much of a problem. Success was stressed on the lives of immigrants. Immigrants had to try harder then other people. In the story ^The Fat of the Land^, Yezierska points out that success was extremely stressed. Hanneh Breineh, a polish immigrant, stressed the importance of becoming successful. She did not want her children to have it as bad as she did. She desperately wanted them to become American. By the end of the story, all of her children are successful and rich in some way (33-49). ^^What did I tell you? In America, children are like money in the bank^^(Yezierska 42). Success is also a key point in the story ^Two Kinds^ by Amy Tan. In this story, a Chinese mother and daughter immigrate to California after losing what they had in China. The mother believed ^you can be anything you wanted to be in America.^ Therefore, her mother tries to make the little girl a prodigy.