Globalization

For many years black people in the United States have struggled for their rights
and their piece of the American dream. Now that the world is moving toward a new
global era the African American person, worker and human has been left out of
this turn in the century and, the system is letting them hang their selves.

Globalization has made it so that anyone with the right equipment and knowledge
can chat or do business anywhere in the world with just a few clicks of a couple
of buttons. Globalization is making the gap between the races bigger every day,
and it seems that no body is slowing down to lend a helping hand. Globalization
has placed a new standard on the way we live today. Because now that we have
reached the technological revolution, you must have a computer or ready access
to one to be considered up to date with the world. There was a time when it was
unheard of not to have more than one television in your home. Or if you didn’t
have cable you must have been poor. Is being poor a new kind of crime, a crime
that says if you can’t log on you are suppose to be were you are, at the
bottom. In “ghettos” across America I bet you can count on your fingers and
toes how many people have a computer in their house, and I am not talking about
a play-station or dream-cast. Is globalization the new apartheid in the United
States? Is this away for our land of the free to keep the hold on the poor and
lower middle class minorities? Are black people free in the coming of
globalization? In Clarence Lusane’s book: Race In The Global Era, he talks of
automation and its effect on black workers. Lusane shows us that not all blacks
are effected by globalization. For instance Michael Jordan and other ball
players that have these big shoe deals. Now these sports super stars have their
faces and name all over the product but have no say so in how, where, or who
will make the product. The funny thing about it is that some commercial ads are
to catch the eye of inner city black youth. I remember when I wanted that new
Michael Jordan shoe, but my mother could not afford it. Now the commercials are
geared for the black youths but the unemployment rate of blacks is two times
higher than white’s, working the same job. Lusane has quotes from Rifkin
notes, Sidney Wilhems, and Holly Sklar that powerfully show the effect on black
Americans in globalization. “The story of automation’s effect on African
Americans is one of the least known yet most salient episodes in the social
history of the twentieth century.” The Rifkin notes “Wilhems predicted that
African Americans were being made obsolete as workers by new technologies.”
“While some workers have jobs with no future, others have futures with no
jobs.” Holly Sklar Automation has played a major role in the decline of
industrial jobs for blacks. Rifkin calls automation a salient episode; it seems
that automation is like a disease or even a plague for some black workers.

Wilhelm also uses words like uselessness, and displaced Negro, to describe what
is happening to the African American worker, no future is said by Sklar. These
are strong words being used here to describe the effect on the majority of a
minority. Now Company’s can us machines to do job in factories and all other
industrial work that was done by blacks. So if they have no jobs and they are
becoming useless and displaced than where and what are the blacks to do, where
is their future? Lusane writes about a study done in Ontario over an eight-year
period of time that showed that the black imprisonment grew 204 percent, and the
white was 23 percent. Plus the whites that committed the same drug crimes were
released at twice the rate of blacks. For the middle and lower class blacks is
this the new placement and their future, jail? Since the 1970’s the
manufacturing employment in the U.S. has lost about 1.4million jobs, from
1978-1990. Some of the hardest places hit were Detroit, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and
my hometown St. Louis. These are all places that have a high crime rate in the
city and of course predominantly all black. I can remember when GM closed down
in St. Louis; it was the largest plant in the city. The