Categories
Uncategorized

Three Races

Tocqueville has gone in depth of the individual suffering of the three races in America in this section of his book. He describes the three races as the white, educated families, the stolen Africans, and the displaced American Indians. He writes that the white Americans have come from Europe for a better life but in the process of freedom they have enslaved two other races. The new Anglo- Americans have taken Africans from their homeland forced them to work. These are men and women who are stuck between not being Africans and not being Americans, where their native tongue and religion is not allowed and a foreign one is forced on them, and if they don’t comply, they will suffer along with the others. Tocqueville puts it perfectly by saying, “he makes them subservient to his use and when he cannot subdue them, he destroys them…. Taking their humanity”. While the new Americans are stripping Africa’s from their humanity, they are born into this slavery, even before they are conceived. There is a cycle of slavery that seems to have no end in the eyes of Tocqueville. He has witnessed these Americans flee from one country to enslave and own another human for the vison of a profit. This system seems very undemocratic to someone who thought the Americas were a safe haven where the people are supposed to be heard, and it is. Tocqueville went to the Americas to observes a new way of governence, democracy, and he found another system that enslaves its people and forces labor. 

Not only did Tocqueville observe and describe the enslavement of the Africans, but he noticed the third race in the middle of extinction. The American Indians that were there before the Europeans got there, were being displaced and run out of their homes. Once living in surplus and fulfillment and not running for their lives, trying to find the resources needed to sustain life. These American Indians were forced out of their homes and driven to the plains of the west were food and resources are scarce. These populations were documented as ‘destroyed and demolished’ by Tocqueville only in the 1830s. He saw such misery of this races that he felt it was too great to put in words, because it was more of a sympathetic and empathetic feeling to be felt then written down where it could not be justified. The missionary missions to teach the American Indians were seen as unsuccessful and without lasting success. This process of another forced religion and civilization on another race by the new Americans, was not democratic to Tocqueville who believed little in the system at first. He saw that the injustice being done could not be right and could not be along the lines of this new democracy, but he saw no end. The new Americans saw that if they ended this “evil it would imperil their own exitance” on the continent. 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *