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African American Slavery Essay

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The African-American race will never be fully relieved from the emotional pain that was instilled in them over hundreds of years of oppression and inequity. Slavery was a horrendous institution that was full of equally horrendous acts committed against African-American slaves on a daily basis. These acts are the basis of the psychological scar on African Americans. When a race or group of people is forced to endure suffering on the level which slaves experienced during slavery, the memory is not so easily forgotten. It sticks with them, leaving them, and their ancestors, with the burden of this mistreatment. This burden can take form in many ways, primarily distrust (of the perpetrators of the mistreatment), anger, and sorrow. Each of these …show more content…

White Americans, the perpetrators of slavery, also have their own fair share of mental scarring remaining from the time of slavery. However, it takes a much different form from that which African Americans experience. It is not a feeling of distrust, or contempt for the other race, but rather one of guilt, or much more commonly, a sense of superiority over the other race. Despite the different forms that these positions take, they both contribute to the same end result of the destruction of the equity that the African-American race deserves. While these mental scars stay true to their nomenclature, and are unable to ever be repaired to the fullest extent, measures can be taken to reduce the strain on the races and to provide a more equal footing for them to stand upon, along with the rest of America. The goal of this paper will firstly be to explore the specific injustices perpetrated against the African-American race during slavery in America, then to understand how these injustices work against the progress of the race towards equity from a psychological and sociological viewpoint. Finally, it will aim to explain measures that could be made to improve said equity of African Americans, by looking at how the mental scars of slavery continue to affect Black Americans in today’s United

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