In the 1950’s a segregation was introduced all over America stating that black people couldn’t mix with white people, this meant that they couldn’t go to the same schools, use the same parks or even use buses. If this segregation was broke the person would be arrested, beaten and sometimes killed.
Martin Luther King was one of the main civil rights leaders in America during this time and he didn’t believe in segregation and the way white people acted towards black people. He did many protests and speeches on this matter to try and end racial discrimination, and even though this never actually happened, his work helped make this issue become less common.
Looking at how racial discrimination was many years ago and how it is today, it is not as big an issue like it used to be and there is no longer segregation in Britain or America. However there are still certain groups around today that still discriminate against blacks, but not as bad as it used to be. One of these groups is the British National Party, also known as the BNP, who believe in traditional British culture and think that anyone of another minority, e.g. Indians, Pakistanis, Afro – Caribbean’s, shouldn’t be allowed in our country, as they do not have English roots. This is still discrimination towards ethnic minorities, but it is nowhere near as bad as how it used to be.
In 2007 there was a big issue on the reality TV show Celebrity Big Brother there was an Indian lady on the show Shilpa Shetty and Jade Goody, where Jade called Shilpa an offensive name. This resorted in Jade being taken out the house, she went in to hiding and was petrified for her life because she knew how many people she had offended. She travelled to India to apologise to Shilpa and her family, after this the matter was resolved but still gets brought up in general conversations. Racism is a big thing to some people and for it to be so out in the open an put on TV it offended and affected many people.
There are problems all over the world where a person of different ethnic minority will not get the highest rank in a job, more than likely because the colour of their skin this is absolutely appalling, I think if a person is capable of doing the job why should their ethnic minority effect this. There is also a problem with institutional racism, this is seen quite a lot in the police force. A case of this is a lady of a different minority was bullied that much at work she had to leave.
Today discrimination against ethnic minorities are no longer as bad as they were, a good thing that has happened recently is the election or Barak Obama. He is the first president of the USA to be of a different ethnic minority. Maybe now the discrimination against different ethnic minorities will almost completely stop.
To answer the question, ‘to what extent are ethnic minorities treated equally in Britain and America today’, we can see that there has been a dramatic change in views and in ways we treat people of different races. We no longer have to have segregation to separate us and political correctness has been introduced to try and help people become nicer towards one another and not be offensive. Although these things have been introduced, we still see violence on the news about racial attacks, especially in the southern states of America where racial discrimination is still a huge problem.
Ethnic minorities are generally treated a lot better nowadays, except for a few exceptions that do a occur in everyday life, but we are all the same and should all be treated equally in everything we do, whether we are black or white, skin colour shouldn’t matter.
