Prejudice And Discrimination In A Different Mirror By Ronald Takaki

As a young country, the United States was a land of prejudice and discrimination. Wanting to grow their country, white Americans did what they had to in order to make sure that they were always on top, and that they were always the superior race. It did not matter who got hurt along the way because everything that they did was eventually justified by their thinking that all other races were inferior to them. A Different Mirror by Ronald Takaki describes the prejudice and discrimination against African Americans and Native Americans in the early history of the United States. We see how the leaders of this country, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, had prejudice thoughts about these two different ethnic groups, how prejudice was built into society and the

Institutional discrimination is when laws favor a dominant group while minority groups are not favored, and this thought process is embedded into the norms of society. The pattern that we see in the history of Native American and African Americans is that white Americans always believed that they were the dominant race and all laws that were created, were made to favor only themselves. One idea that white Americans shared was that both ethnic groups previously mentioned were inferior and that these groups were not capable of coexisting with them. These thoughts were embedded into society early on and were the main justification for both slavery and Indian removal. The main difference that we see between both racial ethnic groups is that white Americans believed that they could strip Native Americans from their culture and civilize them while “nurture could not improve the nature of blacks” (67). Although some Native Americans did try to live under the laws of white Americans, they were eventually betrayed and forced to leave the