ONLINE AMH 2091 UNIT REFLECTIONS

Africans to Americans

3 February 2019

The transition of the African race to the Americas has been a difficult one. Even though it has a well known reputation as the "melting pot," America's history has it's dark spots. Africans were traded to the Europeans who set out through the middle passage in a horrifying voyage for these people to be made into slaves. As stated in Chapter Two, Venture Smith and Olauduh Equiano were stripped from their homes and taken to America. They wrote about these stories when they got older, intending to educate about their unnatural experiences. These slaves were intended to be used to do the things both the Europeans and Native Americans couldn't do through their indentured servitude and pre-existing slavery.
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By this time, early America was considered a society with slaves. This is that they are a country that has slaves of different ethnicities such as Asian, African,  from South America, and even indentured servants. These groups would all commit to the hard labor that it took for this developing country of America. Whether voluntarily or involuntarily, these people would work to only get more and more screwed as the owners would take more control and power over these individuals. Author Ira Berlin is famous for his quote of stating that  America went from a "Society with Slaves to a Slave Society." As I stated, America was a society with slaves. The difference being, it becoming a Slave Society, is that more power was gained to enforce slavery, and it was becoming more race based. Instead of using the Asians, Native Americans, and Indentured Servants, Africans were becoming most 'go-to' race. Laws became more strict on this function and African slaves became the structure of support of the entire African slave society, hence Slave Society (Chapter 4).
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Representations of Africans in Western Media 

After the abolishment of slavery, African Americans and other ethnicities slowly became a part of a normal cooperative society. Things have come a long way but there are still things that can easily remind us of the dark past. The link to this video exposes Western media in the fact that Africa is portrays as some awful country that is really poor and can't take care of itself, and  that we should feel bad for them for the current state that they're in when that's really just not true. In truth, Africa is an advanced society with it's ups and downs just like America. One country or race should never look down on one another and that's a more modernized struggle that Americans face today especially with Africans and African Americans (Chapter 1).