The Problem of the Color Line

The Spanish destroyed correct civilizations in the New World and killed Indians, burned villages, and murdered men, women, and children in order to assert their superiority and their greater rights to land and resources. The management history has been written, says Zinn, does not vindicate what was actually done:

thus far allowing for the imperfection of myths, it is enough to make us question, for that time and ours, the excuse of progress in the annihilation of races, and the telling of history from the outdoor stage of the conquerors and leaders of Western civilization (Zinn 22).

Zinn also addresses what happened in the period of slavery and finds that "Everything in the experience of the first white settlers acted as a pressure for the enslavement of fatefuls" (zinn 24). The whites had a need for confinement just to survive, and there were economic forces pressuring the settlers to adapt through slavery. Zinn notes that the black societies of Africa were as advanced as European society in many ways however that the blacks did not get down a strong military system. They were thus vulnerable, but Zinn further notes that African society was in no other way insufficient to white society, "except that cultures that are different are

often taken as inferior, especially when much(prenominal) a judgment is practical and profitable" (Zinn 26).

I grew up on the one hand feeling positive intimately being a West Indian and Black; but on the other hand, I had to grapple with the negative resource of being a Black child in the joined Stats, not wanting to identity with people who were slaves and who behaved in a Steppin Fetchit, Rochester model. Everytime one of those movies was shown, we had to fight the next day in rail because someone would come up and mock you (King 10).

Matsumoto interviews many of the women in these camps and notes differences in attitude between Issei and Nisei.

She notes how the camps came into being with Executive invest 9066, signed in 1942 by President Roosevelt to give chest to the War Department to define military areas in the horse opera states and to exclude anyone who might be seen as threatening the contend effort:

The rapidity of evacuation left many Nipponese Americans numb; one Nisei noted that "a queer bump came to my throat. Nothing else came to my mind, it was just blank. Everything happened too soon, I guess" (Matsumoto 375).

For blacks in the United States, there was the memory of slavery, and after that of segregation, lynching, humiliation. And it was not just a memory but a living presence--part of the periodical lives of blacks in generation after generation (Zinn 435).

The color line is not the only dividing line in American life, of course, and sexuality has also been a problem throughout this century. Black women have a double disadvantage in the social and economic realms (though it is interesting that Matsumoto finds that Japanese American women actually managed to improve their economic lot because of the internment and entered the workforce in larger verse once released). Jacqueline Jones notes the importance of class as a percentage point in American life as healthful and seems to downplay the role of the color line, noting that there are much poor whites tha
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