A Nation within a Nation? Assessing Afro-American Under/development From An Ethnic And Economic Standpoint

Abstract

African-Americans constitute for just 13% of the population of the United States of America, but their contribution to the nation's real GDP is around one point two trillion USD as on 2008. Ever since their arrival in the New World as slaves, they have not been given their due share; thus prompting writers like Komozoi Woodard to title this politics of exclusion and the resultant rise of the Black Power movement and politics as the veritable existence of ‘a nation within a nation’ striving for equal social and economic rights. Studies have been conducted across disciplines that point out the economic and social deterioration of this section of the American population that still faces discrimination on all fronts. The Ethnogeriatic Curriculum Module points out that the death rate from cancer is 30% more in the African-American elderly community than the whites (Gordon “Ethnogeriatic Curriculum Module”), while there is some recent empirical evidence that suggests that there nevertheless has been a pronounced improvement in the lot of this marginalised section; thus, there is data both for and against this view. The proposed paper would like to have a look at both these views and try to gather conclusive evidence if the politics of exclusion that Woodard once spoke of still holds good or not.