2. After reading the documents associated with the Civil Rights movement, what do you learn about American attitudes with regard to race prior to that Civil Rights movement? How do Americans strive to justify those negative attitudes? It’s clear from the readings that most men looked upon a very specific race as superior, particularly specific European races (because even back then there were still certain “white” races that were deemed inferior). To be general about it, however, we can just say that they believed the white man to be superior to basically every other race. Although their ideas were wrong, they saw themselves doing the blacks a favor because they believed that blacks needed someone to rule over them so as they wouldn’t eventually die out, or even suffer a worse fate somewhere else at the hand of other races. This attitude stretched to more races than just the blacks, as exemplified by the many laws that put quotas (or even complete haults) to immigrants of particular heritage entering the country. And that’s how they justified it. They preached the ideas that whites were smarter, more mature, more fit to govern and that this was all inherit and there was nothing that they could really do to change it.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 15:09:50 +0000
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