Compare And Contrast People Of Color In The 1900s

People of Color in the 1900s African Americans and Native Americans throughout history have suffered many unmentionable atrocities at the hands of the ‘whites’, whether from eviction of their ancestral lands to the evils of slavery. In Morrison’s Song of Solomon, the Dead family inherited their surname through the ignorance of a ‘white’ man and lost their patriarch at the hands of another ‘white’ man. In contrast to Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Silko’s The Ceremony, Tayo’s people have been forced to evolve due to the invasion of ‘whites’ on their ancestral lands and infiltration into their culture. Consequently, Morrison and Silko reveal through their protagonist that change occurs most conveniently when it has been beneficial to the ‘whites’.
“After their first year of boarding school in Albuquerque, Tayo saw how Rocky deliberately avoided the old-time ways…Old Grandma shook her head at him, but he called it superstition, and he opened his books to show her,” elaborates that this institutionalize oppression of people of color in the novel irreversibly altered the minds of those who were educated through the ‘white’ man system (Silko, 51). This resulted in them looking down on traditional beliefs and people because they have been subjected to the ‘white’ man’s way of life and culture. Consequently, this has been a result of interest convergence that transpired in The Ceremony because through the education of the Native Americans, the ‘whites’ have been able to benefit from plundering the Natives land by stealing it and in Tayo’s and Rocky’s case use their able hands to fight in the
In his 1492 voyage to the Americas, Columbus came across Native Americans that inhabited the lands he intended to exploit for wealth. However, Columbus not only exploited the natives land but the Native Americas as well in his greedy quest for wealth. According to Zinn, the Spanish exploited the Native Americans and in a documented account, the Native Americans and people of color (Haitians) were taken off their lands and displayed like cattle for sale in Spain to be sold for sex and