Racial equality (racial equity)

Racial equality is the idea that all people—regardless of race—have the right to equal treatment under the law, in society, and in the political realm. Racial equality also embraces the core belief that no one group of people is superior to another based solely on physical qualities such as skin color. While the term racial equality is often used interchangeably with racial equity, some define the latter as a situation in which society has achieved a true level of fairness, and all people exist on equal footing. The idea of racial equality is a relatively modern concept, developing only after centuries of oppression and racism perpetuated by some of the world’s more advanced nations. Through government legislation, diversity movements, and the efforts of numerous individuals, great strides were made toward racial equality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, true success has proven difficult to achieve because inequality and systemic racism remain major issues into the twenty-first century.

Background

By definition, race is the grouping of human beings into categories based on shared physical traits, such as skin color, eye shape, hair type, or bone structure. However, despite what appear to be biological divisions, the concept of race does not have a foundation in human biology. Scientists have established that all human beings are 99.9 percent identical genetically. The few apparent differences, such as skin color, have developed over generations in response to environmental factors. For example, darker skin helps shield people who live near the equator from the more intense ultraviolet light from the sun, while lighter skin helps produce vitamin D in regions near the poles that receive less sunlight.

The idea of categorizing humans by race is purely a social construct, and a relatively modern one at that. In the ancient world, the Greeks and Romans considered some outside groups to be inferior, but those beliefs seemed to be based on cultural differences rather than physical traits. To become accepted in these societies, outsiders would have to adopt the “superior” cultures of Greece or Rome. The Greeks and Romans had numerous encounters with African cultures without any evidence of racial prejudice.

Some scholars view the earliest hints of modern racism as occurring in the Iberian Peninsula during the late fifteenth century. The region had been conquered by Muslim armies in the eighth century, and gradually retaken by Christian forces over the centuries during the Reconquista. In the 1490s, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain began a campaign to Christianize the region by expelling Jews and Muslims. Rather than leave, many chose to convert to Christianity. Spain’s rulers and the Church did not trust the motives of these new converts and began to systematically target them for discrimination. They developed the concept of limpieza de sangre, “purity of blood,” which categorized the population by Christian bloodlines. This idea of inferiority based on non-Christian heritage was carried with Spanish and Portuguese explorers as they encountered the cultures of Africa and the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

At the same time as European influence was expanding across the globe, a new emphasis on science and reason began growing back in Europe during the Age of Enlightenment. Some researchers started to classify the natural world by separating living things into categories based on shared physical characteristics. In 1684, French physician Francois Bernier published A New Division of the Earth, in which he categorized humans into “four or five species or races of men”—the first historical reference to race as a human characteristic. Bernier divided humans by shared physical traits, noting differences such as skin color, bone structure, and face shape.

Bernier did not indicate that any race was inferior compared to the others, but later philosophers and scientists formulated theories that clearly placed white Europeans, who made up the so-called Caucasian race, in a superior position. Many of these same theories considered African peoples to be part of an inferior race. These ideas were based on the false scientific assumption that their forehead shape or head size denoted lesser intelligence. Although these theories have long ago been discredited, they contributed to an environment where slavery and racial inequality spread throughout the world for several centuries.

Overview

The first enslaved Africans were brought to the Americas by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, while the first group of enslaved Africans in the British American colonies arrived in 1619 at Jamestown, Virginia. For much of the seventeenth century, slavery was commonplace in the American colonies, but over time, the northern colonies began to move away from the practice, while the southern states began to rely on it. By the time the United States won its independence in 1783, the issue was beginning to drive a wedge between the two regions. In the nineteenth century, a growing abolitionist movement began in the northern states, while enslaved Blacks continued to be treated as property in the South. In 1861, this divide exploded into the Civil War, with the North eventually defeating the South in 1865.

In the aftermath of the war, the United States attempted to take the first steps toward a unified form of racial equality and greater rights for African Americans. In December 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery. In July 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to anyone born in the United States and equal protection under the law to all US citizens. In February 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment prohibited states and the federal government from denying eligible citizens the right to vote based on race. In theory, these three amendments provided a legal basis for racial equality for all Americans. However, in practice, they fell far short.

By the 1880s, southern states had passed a series of local Jim Crow laws that legalized racial and severely restricted the rights of Black Americans. Despite the prohibition on denying people voting rights, Black Americans were still disenfranchised by being forced to pay high poll taxes or take nearly impossible literacy tests before being allowed to vote. African Americans were not the only people in the country denied their supposedly Constitutional rights during this time. In 1882, the federal government instituted a law banning Chinese immigrants from entering the United States. In the western states and territories, Native Americans continued to be forced from their lands and onto reservations by the US government.

The disparity between the Constitution and the reality of life for African-Americans in the South was challenged in 1896 by the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson. In that case, a man of African American heritage claimed that his rights were violated by his arrest when he refused to leave a Whites-only train car. The Court ruled that the defendant did not have his rights violated because legal segregation did not go against the Fourteenth Amendment. The justices decided that as long as the railroad provided “separate but equal” facilities for African Americans, it was within the law and could continue to segregate passengers. The Court decision had a profound impact on equality in the United States, cementing Jim Crow laws in the southern states for decades.

While the Plessy v. Ferguson verdict was supposed to allow for “equal” facilities for Black Americans and White Americans, the reality was far different. The schools, housing, public transportation, and other facilities provided to Black Americans were underfunded and often inferior to those used by White Americans. Even in the North, where Jim Crow-style laws were less prevalent, racial inequality was common in practice, if not legally mandated. Despite numerous setbacks, Black Americans continued to fight for racial equality in the legal, social, and political arenas. In some areas, especially across the South, Black people who spoke out for equality were met with intimidation, violence, and even murder.

In 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was formed in response to rampant violence against Blacks and to push for equality in the court system. Over the next few decades, several other civil rights groups were formed to join in the fight against segregation. By the 1950s, Black Americans had come together to create a powerful civil rights movement that set the wheels in motion for a series of landmark victories toward racial equality. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was illegal in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The decision dismantled the “separate but equal” justification of Plessy v. Ferguson but did not immediately lead to an end of segregation and Jim Crow laws.

In many places across the South, schools and communities defied the order, leading to tense, sometimes violent confrontations. The resistance to the law galvanized the civil rights movement, which stepped up its efforts to push for further change. Led by Baptist minister Martin Luther King, Jr., the work of the civil rights movement culminated in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which officially outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Among the provisions of the law was a requirement that federal agencies use affirmative action programs to ensure the hiring of minority workers. A year later, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 banned all discriminatory voting practices designed to disenfranchise voters.

The success of the African American civil rights movement also inspired other groups such as Mexican Americans and Native Americans to join the push for racial equality. Compared to the realities of the past, these civil rights movements made significant strides toward equality during the 1960s; however, those strides were tempered by resistance to change in many circles. Despite the legal end to segregation, some cities continued to defy the order for years. Police brutality and the unequal treatment of Black Americans led to several racially motivated riots in American cities in late 1960s. On an everyday level, racial discrimination continued to be a problem in the United States, with many people of color denied their guaranteed rights in housing, employment, and other arenas.

In the twenty-first century, racial equality remains an elusive goal in the United States, as many Black Americans and other people of color still find themselves on unequal footing with White Americans. According to the US Census Bureau, Black Americans made up 21.8 percent of those living in poverty in 2023, despite comprising only 13.5 percent of the US population. Hispanic Americans of any race accounted for 29.6 percent of the population living in poverty, while making up 19.7 percent of the total population. Statistics provided by the NAACP have shown that African Americans account for a disproportionately high number of arrests and convictions when compared to people of other races. In 2023, the United States Sentencing Commission reported federal sentencing disparities across races continued to exist between 2017 and 2021. When compared to White people, Black and Hispanic people received longer sentences than White people, and were less likely to receive probation.

These and similar statistics have led many activists to go beyond the call for racial equality in the United States and push for racial equity. While the terms are often seen as synonymous, racial equality can be interpreted as providing equal opportunities for people of all races. In this definition, people are given the same tools and an equal path toward success. Racial equity can be defined as equality of outcome, in which people are provided with proportional degrees of support to assure that everyone ends up with an equal amount of resources and success.

In the court of public opinion, many Americans doubt that the United States will ever achieve racial equality. According to a 2021 Pew Research Center study, 50 percent of Americans surveyed believed that the United States had a lot more to do to achieve racial equality. Among Black Americans, this figure rose to 78 percent. A Pew study of more than 4,700 Black adults in 2023 found that majorities of respondents said they believed that US institutions—including the prison system, courts and judicial process, policing, political system, economic system, news media, and health care system—were designed to hold back Black people.

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