Essay About African American Ethnicity And United States

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Joshua JacksonResearch PaperEthinicity and ImmCristina Escobar4/22/16INTRODUCTION/BACKGROUNDMy parents were both born and raised in the United States, and so were my grandparents, great grandparents and great great grandparents. I consider myself to be African American, and the generations that have come before are all of the same ethnic group as well. This is going back to 100 plus years since my family and generations past have been in the United States so it was difficult for me to find the information needed to trace back to where exactly my family originated from, because like I said for as long as we’ve all known it we have all been living in this country and never once thought about tracing back our African American ethnicity to anything outside of the United States. My grandparents along with my parents are the two generations of my family that are still alive so that was as far back as I could go when it comes to finding the information needed to answer some of the questions for this research paper.My grandparents who are both 80 and 85 years old were the first people that I spoke to before starting the actual write up for this research paper. The initial questions that I asked them such as, “What is your ethnicity?” “What brought you all here to live?” and “Where did you land/first go to live?” just to state a few, all had straightforward answers. For them America was where everything started, they were here since birth and their parents (my great grandparents) were also here from birth as well. According to my parents and grandparents it was hard to even picture anything outside of this country as far being immigrants that came here for whatever reason, but they knew that we were all obviously descendants of Africans and that the many generations before them migrated to America somewhere along the line. They just couldn’t determine from where and when exactly.  HISTORYIn doing my research of my family’s ethnic group, I tried my best to not go too far back per instructions in the guidelines for this paper. However, in terms of how it all started though as it relates to how Africans even got to America in the first place there was a forced migration of Africans from the continent of Africa known as the Transatlantic Slave Trade for about 360 years spanning from 1500 to 1860. It was 12 million Africans that were forced into going to the Americas with less than half a million being sent to North America. An estimated 40 percent of the slaves coming to the United States entered though the port city of Charleston, South Carolina. These first waves of slaves were mostly concentrated in the South as many of them had to work along the southern coast to cultivate things such as tobacco, cotton and rice.