Comparison of African and Native American Responses to Europe Essay

Comparison of African and Native American Responses to Europe - Essay Example Through this paper, the writer will explore the similarity between the experiences of European colonialism, among the members of the two minority groups. For both the Native Americans and the black Americans, the phenomena of colonialism developed in a progressive way. For the Native Americans, the times before colonialism and during the early years of experience, they were often referred as noble savages. On their part, Native Americans described themselves in a similar manner, as the groups originating from the nations. Later on, the Indians were given more negative labels, including that they were heathens, wild, savages and those changed to modern labels like drunken Indians (Aguirre & Turner, 2009). In a similar manner, the experience of the Black Americans, their experience of colonialism also developed progressively. In their case, the people that later became the victims of colonialism started out as merchants, Arabic scholars, animal-tenders, arts people and peasants to the would-be colonizers. However, later on as their colonization progressed, they were viewed as niggers, uncivilized, childlike and to current labels, inclu ding criminals and rapists (Glaser, 2005). The experience of Native groups and blacks was similar in that, both groups suffered from the inhumane mistreatment projected by their colonizers. In the case of the Native Americans, the mistreatment experienced entailed the dispossession of their lands by their colonizers (Nash, 2014). In a similar, but different way, the blacks suffered from the mistreatment of their colonizers, which took the forms of forced labor and denial of their human rights. In similar ways, the mistreatment experienced by the Native and the black groups was practiced at both a personal level and also in institutionalized ways. In giving justifications and explanations about the mistreatment of the two groups, the colonizers relied on the idealized ideologies that were institutionalized using social