A Survey of Major English Speaking Countries 11

• Asians Americans are often viewed as the “model minority”. Why? • What is “yellow peril” stereotype? How do Asian Americans experience discrimination from other minorities and whites?
Latinos/Hispanics
• The 3 major groups in the American Latino population: Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Cuba.
• 14.4 percent of the total population in the U.S. as of 2005.
Europeans
• 67% of all American citizens are either descended wholly and directly from people born in Europe or themselves born in Europe. • Mass migration from Europe began in the 19th century. • Over the past 90 years, there’s a low level of immigrants from Europe.
Black Americans
• 12.8% of the total population in 2005.
• No longer the largest minority group in the United States today.
• Africans were brought to the American South in the early 1600s as indentured servants first. • By the late 1600s, hereditary slavery had become the rule and blacks were degraded to the status of property. • By the 1800s, the southern states had stopped the slave trade. • Southern slavery was ended only with the victory of the northern states in the Civil War of 1861-1865.
• Racial prejudice and economic discrimination in many areas. • Increasingly, Latinos are seen as a threat to some people, why?
• Chicanos (Mexican Americans) are at the bottom of the Latino population, whereas Cubans are at the top and Puerto Ricans somewhere in between. Why?
Latino Communities
• Mexican Americans mostly in the southwestern states or laChicago.
• Puerto Ricans, mostly in New York, Philadelphia, and Cleveland. • Cubans, tend to concentrate in such areas as Miami and New Orleans.
• 3.6% of the total population
• The first Asians to arrive in the U.S. in great numbers were the Chinese. • Between the 1880s and 1908s, a sizable number of Japanese arrived. • Small groups of Koreans and East Indians, Filipinos…
Immigrants
• Early immigrants, mainly from Britain • Old immigrants, mainly from northern and western Europe • New immigrants, mainly from eastern and southern Europe • Over the past 35 years, the largest share of immigrants has come not from Europe, but from Latin America and Asia.
Native Americans
• Simple life before the Europeans came.
• Indian inhabitants were overpowered by Europeans, had lost their familiar land, and were compelled to move to federally designated area of land know as “Indian Reservations”.
• Long after 1865, the dominant whites in most of the South were still finding ways of excluding black citizens from real equality.
• E.g. voting rights, schools, bus seats, hospital car parks, whites-only signs in public facilities
• Many of them live by farming, or by making jewelry and ornaments which they sell to tourists.
• U.S. federal and state governments have spent considerable amount of money to provide Native Americans living on reservations with health, social and educational services, encouraging them to engage in various enterprises. • Native Americans on the reservations remain outside the mainstream of economic development, and are often unable to make their living standard match that of other Americans. • Native Americans remain the poorest in the United States.
A Survey of Major English Speaking Countries
11. The American Identity
Why is the US often called “a nation of immigrants”?
• First, the country was settled, built, and developed by generations of immigrants and their children.
Black Opposition
• National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People • Martin Luther King, the leader of the Civil Rights Movement in 1950s and 1960s. • By the 1970s, Blacks were registered as voters in the South, and many Blacks were elected to important offices in Southern states.
• Discrimination against Blacks, both in admission to all public places and in employment, is now illegal.
• While formal discrimination has decreased and old forms of segregation have been dismantled, subtle patterns of informal discrimination in housing, employment, education and virtually every social sphere still persists.
• The great majority of Americans are Caucasian, and the mainstream culture of the United States is primarily WASP in character.
• What does the term WASP mean?
• Half have no consciousness of being connected by descent with any particular country.
• The largest single ethnic group feel “British”. • British, German, Swedish, Dutch, and other Scandinavian descents account fro a quarter of the whole population identified with the mainly Protestant countries of northwestern Europe.
• American Indians have resisted assimilation, and have preferred to keep themselves separate, with their distinct way of life modified by access to electricity, television, the automobile, and recently, the Internet.
Asian Americans
• A convenient term that lumps together a diverse collection of immigrants and American-born population groups.
• • • • E.g. The boat people – Who are they? Professional immigrants from India The descendants of Chinese “Gold Rush”ers.
• Secondly, even today, American continues to take in more immigrants than any other country in the world.
Major Racial and Ethnic Groups
• American-Indians 1% • ”Anglo-Saxon” Americans (WASPs) (45%) 80.2% Non-WASP Whites • African-Americans (Blacks) 12% • Hispanics (Spanish-speaking immigrants) 9% • Asians 3.6 %