Indentured Servitude and Removing the “Indians”
Although it was true that the Christian belief that all men were possibly “breathen in the family of God,” it was not always enough to keep Europeans from differentiating themselves from the people they encountered. The origins of American “race” relations, Bulmer examined, appeared as a result of three highly significant events in history, which he said were “the conquest of the Indians, the forced importation of Africans, [and] the more or less solicited coming of Europeans, Asians, and Latinos” (Lyman 1977:25-37).
In the early colonial period, indentured servitude was the dominant practice. Under this system of cheap labor, demand increased greatly as plantation farming expanded. The
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Drawing from colonialism to debates and theories of racism, white supremacy is an important and under theorized concept. The term white, as applied to human inhabitants of North America, can be dated back into the 17th century. Since then and throughout U.S. history, the term “white” has been associated with preferential treatment. Although artificial, the term served highly political purposes as it separated those who were oppressed on the basis of skin color. For instance, the original Constitution acknowledged both slavery as well as political and economic rights to whites. Although the words Slave and Negro were never used in the document, slaves were defined as three fifths of a …show more content…
The Enduring Effect
“Most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others, one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action” (Bandura). In other words, the social learning theory explains human behavior in terms of continuous reciprocal interaction between cognitive, behavioral, and environmental influences. However, to effectively explain how the continuous negative portrayal of Native Americans impacted the development of a dominant and superior American culture upon minorities today. Bandura believed in “reciprocal determinism”, that is, the world and a person’s behavior cause each other.