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Summary Of Alex Haley's Roots

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Roots is a television miniseries that first aired in 1977. It was based on the very popular book written and released by Alex Haley in 1976. It’s the story about his family tree going all the way down to his African roots. The story begins with a young boy named Kunta Kinte who was born in Gambia in west Africa. As a teenager Kunta gets captured and thus begins his long journey into the depth of slavery in the US for many generations of Haley’s family. This miniseries has been one of the most popular and watched shows of all time. The visual representation of slavery shown is both eye-opening and disturbing. The three most important lessons I’ve learned about slavery from Roots are, slaves had really tough lives, white people used to refer …show more content…

This is still used as a racist term for black people from some. Take the Ku Klux Klan for an example, they are people who claim to hate every race except for white. In Roots, there's a scene of the KKK being formed by Evan Brent. Him and a bunch of other people go to Kunta’s descendants plantation and terrorized his grandchildren. The “n” word should stop being used because it is an ugly, mean and hurtful word towards African Americans. Lastly, African Americans were considered as savages to the whites. The way that the Africans lived before they were slaves was very different than how the whites would act. When the whites would see how the African Americans acted they considered them as savages because of different they did things. Like their teachings and beliefs were very different from the whites. In conclusion, slavery was one of the worst things to ever happen in America. It is a topic that we choose not to talk about because what we put African Americans through was so terrible. I feel that it is good to know about it because we do not want something like this to ever happen again. Alex Haley’s story is empowering and teaches us what slavery was really like. It is a huge part of American history and how America was formed, but it should never happen

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Martin Luther King once said: “We are not makers of history, we are made of history.” We all can connect with this quote to a certain degree. A lot has happened in our history and as a result of that we are who we are today, even though sometimes history is not in our own hands to chose. The book, Soul by Soul by Walter Johnson tells the readers story of slavery that's took place on nineteenth-century, before the civil war on America by going away from the cotton plantations into the slave market itself which was the heart of the domestic slave trade. The story takes place on New Orleans.

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(Yetman 32). This shows how some slaves were viewed as family because after being freed their former owners came looking for them telling them to come back home and live with them and some were very happy to go back. This also gives insight on how whites treated their slaves and how African Americans viewed their owners. Though this shows a more or less “bright” outcome there are many dark outcomes as to be expected from slavery. Overall VOICES FROM SLAVERY shows how not all African Americans hated slavery but they greatly depended on the owner.

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African Americans were perceived as slaves and “minorities”, and the rest of society treated them inhumane during the

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According to Matt Seitz, the word “Negro” started to fall out forty years ago. He mentions that “the word negro was easier for people

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The times of slavery had only brought sadness and despair for all African-Americans in the United States during the times of the Civil War. People were treated as property, denied a proper education, and overall treated as expendable and inconsequential pieces of trash. The one thing that was done so that we could understand the pain that these slaves had gone through was the slaves explaining their experiences through writing to be studied throughout history. However, there are very distinct differences between the writings in how they are made and written.

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The words, “nigger” and “faggot,” I feel are being used more often as a counter to the malediction that was placed on this words; either it be during the civil war in the nineteenth century or the modern day. George Carlin said that there are only bad thoughts and intentions that turn the words that we use into ones that may inflict pain: Both nigger and faggot are degrading terms that by themselves have no power, but when there is a meaning behind them that is intended to inflict agony upon the receiver of the word, only then does the word take on its true form. Nigger, was used commonly in the South part of America during the Civil War, where black people were kept as slaves. The word derives from many languages spelling of the word black,

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The study of slavery in the southern half of the United States prior to the Civil War examines the institution in a capitalistic sense, choosing to see the punishment of slaves as unlikely due to the paternalistic relationship that allegedly existed between slaves and their masters. Recently, historiographical texts, such as River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom by Walter Johnson, have taken up the mantle of disproving this. In his introduction, Johnson describes the institution of slavery as such: "The Cotton Kingdom was built out of sun, water, and soil; animal energy, human labor, and mother wit; grain, flesh, and cotton; pain, hunger, and fatigue; blood, milk, semen, and shit." In regards to the title of his book, Johnson asserts that the importance of slavery in terms of economic history did not lie with Massachusetts, but along the Mississippi River, additionally dismantling prior historiography surrounding slavery. Serving as the major thesis of his book, Johnson convincingly and ambitiously argues that slaves labored, resisted, and reproduced in the Mississippi Valley Region, and it was the response by southerners to material limitations, such as land degradation, in this region that slaveholders increasingly projected their power onto

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What was never presented was the point of view from the African Americans because it was seemingly dismissed. It was eye-opening to read about the experience from an African’s perspective because it brought a whole new light to my understanding of what it meant to be a slave and the struggles black Americans face here in the US, even

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The oxford dictionary had much to say about the word “nigger.” The oxford dictionary said, slave masters got the name “nigger” from the Latin word “Niger” meaning black. They also got the word “Negro” from the meaning of the Spanish diction meaning “black” also. They used the word “black” to describe African American’s instead of letting them have their names or giving them an actual name. It wouldn’t be so bad

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The history of slavery is known as brutal punishments, beatings, harsh labor, and inhumane treatment. In the film Roots and in the book Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, it portrays an image of how slaves were treated and handled back then. In book and movie there are two main characters. The fiction film, Roots, introduces the protagonist character named Kunta Kinte, and in the autobiography written by Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass writes about his journey of slavery. A similarity both of them have are the resistances against their slave masters by attempting to run away.

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The theme of slavery still, to this day, remains and the world doesn’t need to remain shy on this brutal topic. Gaspar, David Barry, and Darlene Clark Hine. Black Women and Slavery in the Americas: More Than Chattel. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996. Print.

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African Americans in the 1800’s had been controlled nearly their entire life, Once they were freed they thought they could start over on their own and become part of the community. That was not the case however. Instead they had unfair laws placed on them which caused many upset and confused African Americans. The white southerners never gave the African Americans and chance to fully live there free life. They still felt the necessity to control their life.

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From this, derives a bond with the reader that pushes their understanding of the evil nature of slavery that society deemed appropriate therefore enhancing their understanding of history. While only glossed over in most classroom settings of the twenty-first century, students often neglect the sad but true reality that the backbone of slavery, was the dehumanization of an entire race of people. To create a group of individuals known for their extreme oppression derived from slavery, required plantation owner’s of the South to constantly embedded certain values into the lives of their slaves. To talk back means to be whipped.

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Quite simply put, Europeans viewed Africans and Native Americans as inferior to themselves. They were considered to be heathens and barbarians by the Europeans. And, at least initially, they were not Christian. It was believed that Europeans could save both Native Americans and Africans not only spiritually but also economically and socially. This type of attitude also most likely made it much easier for the Europeans to discriminate and exploit them.

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In the dictionary nigger is defined as a contemptuous term for a black or dark-skinned person. During slavery it was used as a way for white people to oppress slaves, and after slavery was ended it was still used to oppress and demean black people. This is why the word nigger is such a loaded word. After the civil rights movement, the black community reclaimed the n-word.

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