All Other Persons...

     "Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included in this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons" (Constitution of The United States Article I Section 2).

     I, being a product of the 1990s, find it so strange that at one point people of another race could be counted as anything less than equal. I am not naive; I know that even 50 years ago this was still the case, but, like most people of today, I write it off, saying that those people were just ignorant and just did not know better. This is a much harder thing to accept as true, when it is the people who created my government that are those people. One would think and at least hope that the framers of the constitution would have a more open mindset, but then on the other hand they did have to get the states to ratify the Constitution so they might have just sacrificed their true beliefs. But if history is any indication as to what a people feel or believe, than the framers of the constitution, along with many Americans past, did not find these minorities equal. What is so sad is that they still do not today.

      Even now, the minorities so discriminated against in the original constitution are being exploited. Although we have an African American for a president, African Americans, as a whole, are a minority ridden by poverty and unequal education. African American households make a little over half the national average and their poverty rate is nearly triple that of whites. These disturbing inequalities are nothing compared to the social and political discrimination that their race has experienced over this nation's long and arduous history. The reasons for these statistics and events are linked directly to the exploitation that they experienced in early America and in the constitution. Although Native Americans are discriminated against in our current society as well, I believe they are more exploited and used than anything else. Just recall the many times that they were forced to move farther away from their ancestral land, because the government wanted the land that they had previously promised the Native Americans would be their new home. When our nation has no more use for them, they are simply forgotten, left to struggle in poverty. If an individual makes less than $9,000 a year or a family of four makes less than $18,000 a year they are in poverty. The nation poverty rate is 13.1%, as of 2000.According to the 2000 census, for the 25 most populous tribes, the lowest poverty rate was 20.1% (Iroquois) and the highest was 48.8% (Navajo). With their poverty being so deep and their struggles so large, one must ask, why them? Why are we as a nation allowing the real first Americans to be living in this way? Why do we keep discriminating against African Americans when it is so clear that they are equal to us. Afterall, "Ho! Mitakuye Oyasin!" We are all related!