African Americans and American Indians or Native Americans are two of the major subordinate groups in America today. They face many forms of oppression from the dominant group and have many things in common when it comes to this oppression.
I would like to focus on five specific types of oppression they face: stigmatization, segregation, ethnocentrism, prejudice, and discrimination.
African Americans are facing stigmatization far less these days, but if one looks back a half-century, they will find countless examples. Stigmatization can include the de-humanization, labeling, characterizing, and degrading of a group. During slavery, blacks were stigmatized into the happy and carefree characters Mammy and Sambo. This was done to show that slavery was good and blacks probably wouldn't be able to function in free society. …
