exercise #2 for Analysis #1

The claim I am going to make in my analysis paper is Howard Zinn and Allan Johnson’s theories on the creation of racism. I will be using chapter two of Howard Zinn’s book, A People’s History of the United States, and chapter three of Allan Johnson’s book, Power, Privilege and Difference. In my analysis paper, I’m going to show the relation Zinn makes about racism and its creation not being a natural process, to Johnson’s theory on how capitalism played the biggest part in creating capitalism.
Both men state that the United States was desperate for labor and used African Americans as the source to fix it. This is an important issue because without it, the United States wouldn’t have been the country they grew to be without slavery. The influx of black people grew astronomically in a short period; this influx was greatly due to the plantation owners needing an endless supply of slaves. Zinn states that plantation owners wanted greater numbers for a greater profit, and that is the simplest form of capitalism and what Johnson is trying to get across. Zinn also states that “if racism can’t be shown to be natural, then it is the result of certain conditions, and we are impelled to eliminate those conditions.” Johnson gives a name to those conditions in his book, and the main one is called capitalism. So Johnson simply agrees with Zinn theory even though he doesn’t say it literally, but really he just supplies the condition Zinn was looking and that is capitalism. In my analysis paper, I’m going to go into more detail on to how these two men are giving us the same point, but one just gives a name to the problem and the other tries to let us figure it out ourselves.
Thesis: Howard Zinn and Allan Johnson both enlighten their readers on the beginning of racism, how the United States played a big role, and the same general theory that it created by people and not naturally.