Racial and ethnic discrimination in US history

Racial and ethnic discrimination has existed in various forms throughout US history. Indeed, it has often been a powerful force in shaping the nation, and it intersects in complex ways with virtually every facet of American society. Responding to racial and ethnic discrimination and conflict has been particularly challenging for the US government, given the immigrant nature of American society and the long-standing commitment to the principle of equality before the law in the country’s political culture.

Within the founding documents of the United States are statements on equality and freedom that contradicted the facts of American society at the time of the founding—contradictions whose effects have never been fully resolved. The Declaration of Independence calls it self-evident that “all men are created equal” and have “unalienable rights.” Yet the Constitution originally acknowledged the institution of slavery, notably in a provision that fugitive slaves must be returned to their enslavers. American Indians also faced discrimination both in law and practice. Any new country proclaiming equality while allowing slavery and thinking of an entire race as inferior is founded on an impossible contradiction, one that many of the founders undoubtedly realized would have to be faced in the future.

The legalization of slavery was ended with the US Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment (1865). Until the mid-twentieth century, however, the federal government generally avoided becoming involved in attempts to legislate against discrimination, allowing the states to establish their own policies. Many states were inclined to condone discrimination and even actively encourage it through legislation.

Discrimination has existed in many different areas of American life, including education, employment, housing, and voting rights. Two major pieces of federal legislation in the 1960s were designed to attack discrimination in these areas: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The primary avenue for fighting discrimination is through the courts, a fact that causes problems of its own. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), for example, has the power to bring lawsuits involving employment discrimination; however, a huge number of charges of discrimination are brought before the agency, which has neither the staff nor the budget sufficient to handle them all. For that reason, the agency has for decades carried a large backlog of unresolved cases. In discrimination cases the courts have sometimes applied a standard of discriminatory intent and sometimes relied on a standard of discriminatory impact.

Some types of discrimination are easier to see and to rectify than others. A number of activists and legal experts had shifted their attention by the 1980s to a type of discrimination generally known as “institutional discrimination” or "institutional prejudice." This refers to discrimination that is built into social or political institutions, frequently in nearly invisible ways. Institutional discrimination is sometimes unintentional, but activists argue that it ultimately has similar negative effects as overt discrimination.

Development of the American Nation

The framework for the development of the United States and its treatment of ethnic minorities was established during the first half-century of the nation’s history. When the American Revolution ended in 1783, there were few people in the thirteen colonies who considered themselves “Americans,” as opposed to Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and so on. Nevertheless, the people who joined under the Articles of Confederation had much in common. They shared a common language, ethnic background, and history as well as a philosophy of government that stressed individual rights over group rights. Given time and interaction, one would expect these former colonials to develop a common sense of national identity.

To a substantial extent, that integration occurred during the nineteenth century via such common endeavors as the successful wars against the Spanish in Florida, against Britain in 1812, and against various American Indian tribes. As people moved westward to the frontier, the conquest of the continent itself also became a unifying national purpose.

Yet a major challenge to the development of this emerging sense of national identity also arose during the nineteenth century. Between 1830 and 1910, while the country was absorbing new territory, approximately forty-four million immigrants entered the United States, mostly Europeans with backgrounds differing from the White Anglo-Saxon prototype of the founders. Moreover, the Civil War resulted in the freeing of millions of African American slaves, who suddenly became American citizens. There was also a trickle of immigrants arriving from Asia. There were also Jewish immigrants, primarily in the Northeast, and Hispanics, primarily in the Southwest. The country’s citizenry was becoming multiethnic and multiracial.

American Indians

Adopted in 1789, the US Constitution made American Indians wards of the federal government. Treaties with the tribes, like all treaties, were to be federal affairs, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed the exclusive nature of this power of Congress (Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 1831; The New York Indians v. United States, 1898). The Supreme Court has also repeatedly upheld the federal government’s right to rescind—by ordinary legislation or the admission of new states to the union—those rights accorded the tribes by prior treaties (the Cherokee Tobacco case, 1871; United States v. Winans, 1905). Even the rationale for the guardian-ward relationship existing between the federal government and the tribes has been elucidated in the opinions of the Court. Essentially, it involves three elements: the perceived weakness and helplessness of American Indians, the degree to which their condition can be traced to their prior dealings with the federal government, and the government’s resultant obligation to protect them. Few of the federal policies adopted before World War II, however, can be described as protective or even benign toward American Indians.

Policies toward American Indians traditionally built on the pattern of relations with the tribes established by Europeans prior to the ratification of the Constitution. For hundreds of years, the French, Portuguese, Spanish, English, and Dutch subdued the tribes they encountered, denigrated their cultures, and confiscated their lands and wealth. Early US actions continued the pattern, especially where tribes physically hindered western expansion. During the 1830s, the concept of Indian Territory (land for American Indians territorially removed from European settlers) gained favor among European Americans.

When even the most remote of areas were eventually opened to European immigrants, the Indian Territory policy was abandoned in favor of a reservation policy: relocating and settling tribes within contained borders. Meanwhile, contact with European diseases, combined with the increasingly harsh life forced on American Indians, had devastating effects on the tribes in terms of disrupting their societies and dramatically reducing their numbers. Beginning in the 1880s, reservation policies were frequently augmented by forced assimilation policies: Many young American Indians were taken from their reservations and sent to distant boarding schools. There, tribal wear and ways were prohibited, and speaking tribal languages in class could mean beatings. Only with World War I did these policies soften.

Significant changes in government attitudes toward American Indians did not come until the Indian New Deal was instituted by reform-minded commissioner of American Indian affairs John Collier in the 1930s. In the late 1960s, another chapter opened as American Indians began to demand their own civil rights in the wake of the predominantly African American civil rights movement. More enlightened federal policies toward American Indians began to emerge, and since the 1960s considerable legislation has appeared, including the 1968 American Indian Civil Rights Act and the 1975 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act. A number of factors have worked against American Indians in advancing their own cause, among them the small number of American Indians (around 1 percent of the American population), the assimilation of their most educated members into the general population, and the fact that American Indians generally think of themselves as members of a specific people or tribe.

Discrimination in Immigration Policy

Fulfillment of the United States’ self-described manifest destiny to spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean required people, and early in the nineteenth century the government opened its doors wide to immigrants from Europe.

Yet even during this period, the door was open to few beyond Europe. Hispanic immigrants could enter the country fairly easily across its southern border, but American memories of Texas’s war with Mexico made the country inhospitable toward them. More conspicuously, immigration policy was anti-Asian by design. The Chinese Exclusion Act, for example, passed in 1882, prohibited unskilled Chinese laborers from entering the country. Later amendments made it even more restrictive and forced Chinese people living in the United States to carry identification papers. The law was not repealed until 1943. Beginning with the exclusion laws of the 1880s, quotas, literacy tests, and ancestry requirements were used individually and in combination to exclude Asian groups. Indeed, even after the efforts during the 1950s to make the immigration process less overtly discriminatory, preferences accorded to the kin of existing citizens continued to skew the system in favor of European and—to a lesser extent—African immigrants.

Meanwhile, Asians who succeeded in entering the country often became the targets of such discriminatory state legislation as California’s 1913 Alien Land Bill, which responded to the influx of Japanese in California by limiting their right to lease land and denying them the right to leave any land already owned to the next generation. The most overtly discriminatory act against Asian immigrants or Asian Americans was perpetrated by the federal government, however: internment of US-born Japanese Americans living on the West Coast in detention camps during World War II. The Supreme Court upheld the relocation program in Korematsu v. United States (1944).

It was not until the 1960s and 1970s, during and following the Vietnam War and the collapse of a series of US-supported governments and revolutionary movements in Asia and Latin America, that the United States opened its doors to large numbers of immigrants and refugees from Asia and the Hispanic world. However, many of these immigrants continued to face discrimination and racism in society. This was exacerbated by the rise of undocumented immigration as a hot-button social and political issue. In the mid- to late-2010s the administration of US president Donald Trump took a particularly hard-line stance on immigration that many criticized as discriminatory, with policies including a ban on immigration from certain Muslim nations, detention and separation of migrant families, and the construction of a wall along the Mexican border.

African Americans

Nineteenth-century European immigrants generally were able to make the transition to American citizenship effectively. The urban political machines found jobs for them and recruited them into the political process as voters who, in turn, supported the machines. The prosperity of the country, manifested in the land rushes of the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution, and the postwar economic booms of the twentieth century, enabled the vast majority of these immigrants to achieve upward mobility and a share of the good life.

The citizens who were unable to fit into this pattern, apart from the reservation-bound American Indian tribes, were African Americans. Enslaved in thirteen states prior to the Civil War (1861–65) and kept in subservience by state laws and various extralegal arrangements for generations afterward, African Americans remained a social, economic, and political underclass with little expectation of progress until nearly eighty years after the Reconstruction Amendments were added to the Constitution to free and empower them.

The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolished slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) was designed to prevent states from interfering with the rights of formerly enslaved people, and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) constitutionally enfranchised African Americans. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, Supreme Court opinions and state action had combined to minimize the impact of these amendments. In the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), the Supreme Court crippled the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court’s decision limited the amendment’s privileges and immunities clause only to those rights a citizen has by virtue of national citizenship, not state citizenship. Second, it interpreted the due process clause as a restraint only on how a state may act, not on what it can do. Only the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which the Court limited to issues of race, continued to offer protection to formerly enslaved people, and in two subsequent cases even that protection was substantially reduced.

First, in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, the Supreme Court ruled that the equal protection clause applies only to state action, not to private discrimination. Then, in the pivotal case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Court held that states could satisfy the requirements of the equal protection clause by providing “separate-but-equal” facilities for Black and White people. In the meantime, the states began to employ literacy tests, poll taxes, and other devices and arrangements to restrict the ability of African Americans to vote.

Inclusion Policies

Between 1896 and 1936, not only did the separate-but-equal doctrine legitimize racial discrimination, but also the Supreme Court persistently sustained separation schemes as long as facilities of some kind were provided to a state’s Black citizens—even if the facilities were woefully inferior to those provided to the White community. In the mid-1930s, however, responding to cases being appealed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Supreme Court began to shift direction. Between 1936 and 1954, it began to demand that states provide equal facilities to both races and to adopt more demanding tests for measuring the equality of segregated facilities. A Texas system providing separate law schools for Black and White students, for example, was ruled unconstitutional in 1950 in Sweatt v. Painter because the Black law school lacked the “intangibles” (such as reputation and successful alumni) that confer “greatness” on a law school and hence was unequal to the long-established school of law for White students at the University of Texas.

Likewise, during the same period the Supreme Court began to remove some of the state-imposed obstacles to Black Americans voting in the South and to limit the use of state machinery to enforce private acts of discrimination. The separate-but-equal test itself was finally abandoned in 1954, when, in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled that segregated facilities are inherently unequal in public education.

The Brown decision led to a decade-long effort by southern states to avoid compliance with desegregation orders. With the Supreme Court providing a moral voice against segregated public facilities, however, these state efforts failed when challenged in court. Moreover, a powerful multiracial civil rights movement emerged to demand justice for Black Americans in other areas as well. In response, Congress enacted such landmark legislation as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (outlawing discrimination in employment and in places of private accommodation), the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and a series of affirmative action laws designed to benefit groups traditionally discriminated against in American society.

As a result of these laws, the profile of the United States as a multiracial society was irrevocably altered. This change occurred almost entirely as a result of action within the country’s legal and constitutional channels. However, prejudice cannot be legislated away, even though discrimination can be made illegal. In the mid-1990s, most American cities continued to possess a large Black American underclass even as affirmative action and Head Start programs were becoming controversial and being canceled. Incidents such as the 1992 Los Angeles riots following the acquittal of police officers caught on camera beating Rodney King, a Black American man arrested for drunk driving, showed ongoing tensions around what many characterized as systemic discrimination.

On the other hand, the policies that had been adopted during the 1950s and 1960s enabled a sizable Black American middle and professional class to develop, and many American cities had elected Black Americans to govern them by the 1990s. It has been argued that the growing prosperity of a subgroup of the Black American community undercut the power of the civil rights movement. By the 1990s, a number of successful and affluent Black American leaders, such as Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, were themselves opposing further affirmative action plans as well as further efforts to finance welfare programs perceived as primarily benefiting a heavily minority urban underclass.

Twenty-First Century

For many, the 2008 election of President Barack Obama as the first African American US president seemed to usher in a new era of inclusion. However, increasing attention in the 2010s to issues such as the mass incarceration of Black men and the unequal treatment of people of color at the hands of law enforcement ensured that racial and ethnic discrimination in the United States remained a topic of heated social and political debate, including with the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. Meanwhile, a conservative Supreme Court took steps such as overturning a key part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that required states with a history of racial discrimination in voting to get federal approval to change voting laws. In a 2013 ruling, the court suggested that racial discrimination against voters was no longer prevalent, but social justice activists argued the decision would allow considerable voter suppression.

Many sociologists suggested that Obama's presidency helped drive a backlash among some white Americans on issues of racial justice, as seen in the resurgence of White supremacist groups and the rise of the so-called alt-right. This trend in turn was seen as contributing to the election of Donald Trump as US president in 2016. Trump ran on a deeply anti-immigrant platform and was widely criticized for xenophobic and racist remarks, though he denied such accusations. His rhetoric was widely seen as normalizing many forms of prejudice, and human rights activists noted a spike in hate crimes following his presidential campaign and election.

By the 2020s, debate and tension over the persistent issue of racial and ethnic discrimination had only become more prominent. While the subject remained highly complex and nuanced, in general attitudes continued to show a stark division along partisan political lines, with liberals more likely to see such discrimination as a major social problem and support government efforts to combat it, while conservatives were more likely to downplay the issue and oppose government intervention. Racial injustice and systemic discrimination were thrust even more prominently into the national spotlight in 2020 after the high-profile police killings of Breonna Taylor, an unarmed Black medical worker in Kentucky, and George Floyd, an unarmed Black man in Minnesota. Mass demonstrations broke out across the country, with some observers eventually calling it the largest protest movement in US history. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic also gripped the country, highlighting other forms of discrimination such as racial inequity in health care and causing a spike in hate crimes against Asian Americans.

The wave of social activism that began in 2020 strongly influenced public discourse around racial and ethnic discrimination, bringing mainstream attention to ideas like systemic racism and in some cases sparking legislative action. However, the movement also drew significant backlash. Trump and other Republican leaders frequently attacked racial justice activists as radical, anti-American instigators, and sometimes leveled charges of "reverse racism" against White Americans. Politicians also continued to stoke fears about immigration, using both overt and covert racialized rhetoric. Although Trump lost the 2020 election, he remained influential, and over the following years several conservative-controlled states introduced or enacted legislation that raised concerns about potential racial and ethnic discrimination. For example, some states moved to restrict voting access, which many experts noted would most impact people of color, and some cracked down on teaching about racial issues in public schools. The Supreme Court also continued to trend toward conservative opinions on cases related to racial and ethnic discrimination, including several rulings in the early 2020s that further weakened parts of the Voting Rights Act. Trump's reelection in 2024 brought additional attention to the politics of racial and ethnic discrimination in the US.

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