The Pros And Cons Of African American Jim Crow Laws

The mistreatment of people, particulary minoritites has been a major issue in society. Being a part of the majority, or in other words “being the big man”, has always given its advantages. Although African Americans are typically first to be categorized for the mistreatment of a minority, they are not the only group to have encountered publicly being abased and endured being the “little man”. This response will cover similarities and differences between African Americans in the United States and Jews in Germany. In the United States, African Ameericans were governed under dehumanized tatics called the Jim Crow laws. These laws, from about 1890-1965, segerated African Americans from white Americans by law and made them second class citizens,

As stated earlier, the Jim Crow laws came into existence around 1890 and the Holocaust around the 1930s leads me to notice there was a possible copy-cat ideology used by Adolf Hitler. “Might not Adolf Hitler and the Nazis have looked to the United States just over ten years later for examples of laws about racial identification, racial discrimination, and racial purity?” (Ezzell 2002). Hegemony and white supremacy was the ultimate goal in both situations but to what extent is the difference. American Jim Crow laws sought to accomplish racial hegemony by strict segregation of the races within their boundaries. They wanted to keep their own state racially pure, but were largely disinterested in imposing their laws upon their neighboring states. As long as each state and each race was partitioned and segregated from the other, the ultimate purpose of American Jim Crow legislation was satisfied. The Nazis, on the other hand, sought to ultimately racially purify the world. Their world conquest ideology led them to enact laws which could be enforced far beyond the borders of the Reich. The ultimate purpose of German race legislation was to impose racial purity and hegemony upon as much of the world as was