The clustering of ethnicities within the United States is partly a function of the same process that helps geographers explain the distribution of other cultural factors, such as language and religion—namely migration. In Chapter 3, migration was divided into international (voluntary or forced) and internal (interregional and intraregional). The distribution of African Americans in the United States provides examples of each of these migration patterns.
Key Issue 2: Why Do Ethnicities Have Distinctive Distributions?
The distribution of ethnicities within the United States reflects two types of migration—international (voluntary or forced) and internal (interregional and intraregional). Forced Migration of Slaves from Africa Most African Americans are descended from Africans compelled to migrate to the Western Hemisphere as slaves in the eighteenth century. In contrast to this forced migration, most Asian Americans and Hispanics are descended from voluntary immigrants to the United States during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (excluding those who felt they were forced to emigrate from their homelands, such as Vietnamese and Cubans.)
Slavery Under the slavery system, people were viewed as property of the person who owned them. Africanled raiding expeditions captured Africans from the interior of the continent, brought them to coastal areas, sold them to Europeans who in turn transported them to the Americas where they were sold again. Forced migration brought the first enslaved Africans to Jamestown in 1619 where they were forced to work for the benefit of their owners. Even though the United States banned the importation of Africans as slaves in 1808, about 250,000 were illegally imported during the next half-century.
Triangular Slave Trade Different European countries transported slaves from the west coast of Africa to different regions throughout the world. Large cotton and tobacco plantations developed in the southeastern region of the United States and imported slaves provided the labor force. A system of triangular slave trade connecting Europe, Africa, and the Americas developed. Under this system European ships transported goods to Africa and purchased slaves, then the ships transported the slaves from Africa to the Caribbean, picked up sugar and molasses from the Caribbean and returned to Europe. In an extension of the trade route molasses was transported to New England and rum then transported to Europe.
Voluntary Migration from Latin America & Asia Quota laws limited the number of people who could immigrate to the United States from Latin America and Asia. After the immigration laws were changed during the 1960s and the 1970s, the population of Hispanic and Asian Americans in the United States increased rapidly.
Internal Migration of African Americans In the twentieth century, African American migration within the United States followed distinctive interregional and intraregional migration patterns.
Interregional Migration At the close of the Civil War, most African Americans were concentrated in the rural South working as sharecroppers, working a landowner’s cotton fields and turning over a share of the crop as rent. With the introduction of farm machinery and a decline in the amount of land devoted to cotton, sharecropping declined. With the prospect of jobs in the rapidly industrializing North, African Americans migrated north and west in two main waves, the first in the 1910s and 1920s before and after World War I, and the second in the 1940s and 1950s before and after World War II.
Intraregional Migration When African Americans arrived in the big cities of the North, they clustered in one or two neighborhoods. These neighborhoods became known as ghettos, after the term for neighborhoods in which Jews were forced to live in the Middle Ages.
Expansion of African-American Neighborhoods During the 1950s and 1960s, African Americans moved from the compact ghettoes into immediately adjacent neighborhoods. Their diffusion followed major avenues that radiating outward from the city center. In Baltimore, for example, the west-side African American ghetto expanded from 1 square mile in 1950 to 10 square miles by 1970, along with a 2-square-mile area on the eastside becoming predominantly African American.
“White Flight” The expansion of black neighborhoods in American cities was made possible by the emigration of whites from a neighborhood in anticipation of blacks immigrating into the area. Rather than integrate, whites fled. White flight was encouraged by unscrupulous real estate practices. Under blockbusting, real estate agents convinced white homeowners living near a black area to sell their houses at low prices, preying on their fears that black families would soon move into the neighborhood and cause property values to decline. Redlining was used to limit African Americans from obtaining mortgages in white areas. In this process financial institutions drew red-colored lines on a map and refused to lend money to people to purchase on improve property within than area.
Ethnic & Racial Segregation Geographers look for patterns of spatial interaction. In the United States and South Africa spatial interaction among some groups was limited through legal means, known as segregation laws. Even though these segregation laws are no longer in effect their legacy helps to explain the geography of ethnicity in both countries.
United States: “Separate but Equal” In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court ruled the laws providing for separate facilities for whites and blacks were constitutional. Equality did not mean that whites had to mix socially with blacks. Once the Supreme Court permitted “separate but equal” treatment of the races, Southern states enacted a series of laws to separate blacks from whites as much as possible. These “Jim Crow” laws required blacks sit in the back of buses and permitted restaurants and other businesses to limit their services to whites only. Throughout the country, house deeds contained restrictive covenants that prevented owners from selling to blacks, Roman Catholics, or Jews. Schools were also segregated.
U.S. Civil Rights Movement Another Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas in 1954 ruled that separate schools for whites and blacks were inherently unequal. A year later, the Court ruled that schools should be desegregated with “all deliberate speed.” The Civil Rights Acts during the 1960s outlawed racial discrimination. The civil rights movement continues through Black Lives Matter, an organization that campaigns and educates against violence and perceived racism against black people. The consequences of racial discrimination for African Americans and recent immigrants are still felt in the United States today.
South Africa: Separate Development While the United States was repealing laws that segregated people by race, South Africa was enacting them. Apartheid is a legal system that separates different races into different geographic areas. In South Africa, a newborn baby was classified as being one of four races—black, white, colored (mixed white and black), and Asian. Each four races had a different legal status. To ensure separation of the groups the white-minority South African government designated ten homelands in which blacks were expected to live. The apartheid laws determined where different races could live, attend school, work, shop, and own land. Blacks could not vote or run for political office. The white-minority government repealed the apartheid laws in 1991. In 1994, Nelson Mandela after 27 years of imprisonment was elected the country’s first black president. Even though South Africa’s blacks have achieved political equality, economic equality has not yet been realized.
Dividing Ethnicities Few ethnicities live in a territory that corresponds with a nationality. Ethnicities are often divided among more than one nationality.
Ethnicities in South Asia When the British ended their colonial rule of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, they divided the country into two irregularly shaped countries—India and Pakistan, The division was based on ethnicity and religion with Pakistan predominantly Muslim and India predominantly Hindu. Pakistan was comprised of two noncontiguous areas, West Pakistan and East Pakistan, a thousand miles apart, separated by India. East Pakistan became the independent country of Bangladesh in 1971.
Throughout history, Muslims have fought Hindus for control of territory in South Asia. The partition of South Asia into two states resulted in massive migration because the two boundaries did not correspond precisely to the territory inhabited by the two ethnicities. Pakistan and India have never agreed on the border separating the two countries in the northern region of Kashmir. The division of land is further challenged by the Sikhs who inhabit the Punjab who advocate for more control or even independence of the region.
Dividing the Kurds The Kurds provide an example of an ethnicity divided among several countries. The Kurdish homeland straddles the border between Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and Syria. The Muslim Kurds speak a distinctive language in the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family and have their own literature, dress, and other cultural traditions. Many Kurds would like an independent homeland, but the countries in which they are the minority are unwilling to relinquish that territory. Kurdish nationalists have waged a guerilla war against Turkey since 1984. Until 1991, the use of the Kurdish language in Turkey was banned, and is still illegal to use in broadcasts and classrooms across the country. With destabilization of the government in Iraq, Iraqi Kurds have achieved more autonomy. However their bid for independence was rejected by the Iraqi Parliament in 2017.
7.2
Apartheid A harsh system of racial segregation enforced in South Africa from 1948 - 1994
Black Lives Matter Movement that campaigns against violence and perceived racism toward black people and educates others about the challenges that African Americans continue to face in the United States.
Blockbusting Real estate agents convincing people to sell houses because of minorities or poor people moving into the area and making money by reselling the property for a higher price
Redlining The now illegal (in the USA) practice of refusing to loan money to specific areas because of poverty in the area
Sharecropper A person who works fields rented from a landowner and pays the rent and repays the loans by turning over to the landowner a share of the crops.
Triangular slave trade A practice, primarily during the eighteenth century, in which European ships transported slaves from Africa to Caribbean islands, molasses from the Caribbean to Europe, and trade goods from Europe to Africa.