Business 3172-001 Essay Questions
Alena Rodriguez u0702179 Wilson and Loewen have both talked to us about racial hostility and who they think are responsible for the racial discrimination described in their books. Wilson believes that it was the middle and lower class whites who are at fault because they had the most direct competition with the blacks, but more the lower class whites. The motives of the whites were that the blacks were coming in and taking the jobs that they had. The whites would refuse to do a job because the pay was bad, so then the blacks would come in and they were willing to do the job even if they didn’t get paid a lot. “After a brief postwar depression, the economy greatly expanded and northern industries were booming. Immigration laws kept the flow of eastern and southern European immigrants to a mere trickle, thereby forcing the industrialists to tap the industrial reserve of Negroes for unskilled labor” (Wilson 68). In The Mississippi Chinese the Chinese had hostility with the upper class whites. The big problem for the upper class whites was that they felt like if they let one minority into their group, the other minorities would want the same thing and would start making a scene. They think of themselves as exclusive and special and they don’t want anyone else to get the idea that they can be too. “The upper class is more exclusive and more defensive about its position and considers endogamy essential to its continued dominance. Furthermore, its members cannot admit to powerlessness and must occasionally demonstrate their influence when incidents which threaten the etiquette code arise. Hence the upper class is far more discriminatory” (Loewen 129) he then continues on to say “Their actions against the Chinese…were partly based on their exclusiveness, their endogamy, and their social distinctions” (Loewen 131) Some of the forms