The American Experience and Ethnic Groups
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Different ethnic groups have reacted differently to the American experience, and indeed that experience has been different for people with different origins. An examination of the experience of three groups shows their idea of America and the experience that tested or shaped that idea. These concepts are reflected in writings by individuals who themselves experienced the America of their ethnic group. The Autobiography of Malcolm X reflects the experience and attitudes of black people in this century but relates this experience back to the reality of slavery and to the underlying racist attitudes that developed in American society. Mario Puzo in The Godfather tells the story of one particular Italian family, and in so doing he reflects aspects of the Italian experience in America. Oscar Hijuelos tells the story of a Cuban family in New York City and details the Latino experience of America. The idea of America is similar for the Italian and Cuban immigrants who populate the novels by Puzo and Hijuelos, at least in the beginning--America is the land of freedom and opportunity. The idea of America is quite different for the black population, the one ethic population that did not come to America willingly and was not seeking any betterment in their lives by doing so. Basil Davidson traces the development of attitudes on the part of European settlers not only toward black slaves but toward the Indian encountered on the frontier. The slave trade developed at the same
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applied to other young black men as well.
The attitudes that had been engendered in the young man were taken with him into prison and would be broken only when he read widely and learned the truth:
I hate to admit a sad, shameful fact. I had so loved being around the white man that in prison I really disliked how Negro convicts stuck together so much (Haley 182).
This is part of the problem of black identity that he sees as being imposed on blacks by white society. Blacks are made ashamed of themselves, their people, their history, their culture. They act out fantasies set by the white and participate in their own virtual slavery to false ideas and a false identity. Malcolm X was able to break this cycle with his reading, but the formal education he received in school had not broken it--it had created it.
One result of Malcolm X's learning about this as he did was to awaken feelings of anger against white society that had been building but that had not yet fully developed. He came to embody this sense of anger for an entire generation, standing in contrast to the message of Martin Luther King and thus representing one of the two major strands of black political philosophy to this day. On the one side was King's v
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Approximate Word count = 2793
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)
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