Most African Americans are descended from Africans forced to migrate to the Western Hemisphere as slaves during the eighteenth century.
Most Asian Americans and Hispanics are descended from voluntary immigrants to the United States during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Forced Migration from Africa
Different European countries acquired slaves from various regions of Africa, then sent them to the Americas.
Examples
Portuguese shipped slaves from their colonies in Angola and Mozambique to their American colony, Brazil.
Other European countries took slaves primarily from a coastal strip of West Africa between Liberia and the Congo, then sent them to the Caribbean islands and Central and South America.
Immigration from Mexico and Puerto Rico fueled rapid growth of Hispanics in the United States beginning in the 1970s.
Third largest group of Hispanics came to United States from Cuba.
Asia
Ranking of sending countries
1) China 2) India 3) Philippines 4) Korea 5) Vietnam
Internal Migration of African Americans
African Americans have displayed two distinct internal migration patterns in the United States during the twentieth century.
Interregional migration from the U.S. South to northern cities during the first half of the twentieth century
Intraregional migration from inner-city ghettos to outer city and inner suburban neighborhoods during the second half of the twentieth century
Interregional Migration
Freed as slaves, most African Americans remained in the rural South during the late nineteenth century, working as sharecroppers—works fields rented from a landowner and pays rent by turning over a share of the crops to him or her.
Mechanization of agriculture served as a push factor, while manufacturing jobs in the north acted as a pull factor that encouraged African Americans to migrate to the northern cities.
Traveled by bus and car along the major two-lane long-distance U.S. roads
African Americans arriving at northern cities clustered in neighborhoods where existing African Americans already lived.
Areas came to be known as ghettos.
Over time, ghettos grew outward typically along major avenues that radiated out from the center of city.
Many whites fled their neighborhoods when blacks began moving in nearby.
Ex. Detroit’s white population dropped by 1.5 million from 1950 to 2000.
Segregation by Ethnicity and Race
U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Louisiana law that required blacks and whites to ride in separate railway cars.
Plessy v. Ferguson, states that the law was constitutional, because it provided separate, but equal, treatment of blacks and whites.
Southern states enacted a set of laws commonly referred to as the “Jim Crow” laws to segregate black from whites.
Ex: Blacks had to sit in the backs of buses, and shops, restaurants, and hotels could choose to serve only whites.
Why Do Ethnicities Have Distinctive Distributions?
Most Iraqis have stronger loyalty to a tribe or clan than to a nationality or major ethnicity.
Iran
Most numerous ethnicity is Persian.
Adheres to Shiite Islam
Afghanistan
Most numerous ethnicities include Pashtun, Tajik, and Hazara.
Faction of Pashtun called the Taliban (meaning “religious students”) gained control over most of the country in 1995 and proceeded to rule with policies based on Islamic fundamentalism.
Pakistan
Most numerous ethnicity is Punjabi.
7.4 Why Do Ethnicities Engage in Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide?
Ethnic cleansing is a process in which a more powerful ethnic group forcibly removes a less powerful one in order to create an ethnically homogeneous region.
Motivation is not to simply defeat an enemy or to subjugate them, instead it is to remove each member of the less powerful ethnicity, including men, women, children, and the elderly.
Ex: Forced migration associated with WWII that included the deportation of millions of Jews, gypsies, and other ethnic groups to concentration camps where most were exterminated
In recent years, ethnic cleansing has occurred in portions of former Yugoslavia.
Bosnia
Serbs and Croats fought to not be part of a multiethnic state with a Muslim plurality.
Motivated to perform ethnic cleansing on Bosnian Muslims to reduce their numbers and to offer an ethnically homogenous group of people to be better candidates for union with Serbia and Croatia.
Ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims created one continuous area of Bosnia Serb domination rather than several discontinuous ones.
Ethnic Cleansing in the Balkans
Balkanized was a term widely used to describe a small geographic area that could not successfully be organized into one or more stable states, because it was inhabited by multiple, longstanding ethnicities with animosity towards each other.
Balkanization is the process by which a state breaks down through conflicts among its ethnicities.
If peace comes to the Balkans, it will be because ethnic cleansing “worked” tragically.
Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide in Sub-Saharan Africa
Genocide is the mass killing of a group of people in an attempt to eliminate the entire group from existence.
Ex. Darfur
Darfur’s black Africans launched a rebellion in 2003 because of discrimination experienced.
Sudanese government, with help of marauding Arab nomads, crushed the rebellion.
480,000 have been killed.
2.8 million live in refugee camps in harsh conditions.
Many countries have termed the actions of the Sudanese government as genocide.
Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide in Central Africa
Rwanda
Genocide involving Hutus murdering hundreds of thousands of Tutsis began in 1994.
Congo
Conflict between Hutus and Tutsis spilled into neighboring countries.
Ethnic conflict is widespread in Africa largely because the present-day boundaries of countries do not match the boundaries of ethnic groups.
During nineteenth and twentieth centuries, European countries carved up the continent in to a collection of colonies, with little regard for the distribution of ethnicities.
When colonies became states, some tribes were divided among more than one modern state, and others were grouped with dissimilar tribes.
