How Far Have We Come
Paper #2 Assignment
English 10001
Instructor
Due date: April 4, 2006
"How Far Have We Come"
As a nation, how far have we come in decreasing the gap between the White's and African American's races, in respect to the social conditions in which each lives today? The autobiographical sketch, "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow" by Richard Wright, portray a young African American boy growing up in a pre civil rights era America.
As a young boy Wright, like all Blacks, must learn to live as "Jim Crow" in order to have any chance at all of surviving in a white dominated world. In other words, the Blacks had to eat, sleep, and drink in a way the White population found appropriate, or the Blacks would have to deal with some severe punishment.
The average African American families usually lived in the worst section of town segregated from the Whites. The author, Wright, tells us "Our house stood behind the railroad tracks. It skimpy yard was paved with black cinders. Nothing green ever grew in that yard. The only touch of green we could see was far away, beyond the tracks, over where the white folk lived" (Wright).
The average black workers made far less income and were not allowed to compete for higher paying positions against their white counterparts. In fact the Blacks would be discouraged from doing so, in the form of beatings and harassment until they would get the message to leave. The author, Wright, says "I worked hard, trying to please. For the first month I got along O.K. but one thing was missing. I was not learning anything, and nobody was volunteering to help
me"(Wright). Job opportunities for Blacks were very hard to find, most Blacks were happy to have any type of job at all. At least they appeared this way on the surface.
Most African Americans had little or no education, even those who did, were seldom able to live within the boundaries of the White neighborhoods. Some...
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