Racism in the United States

Racism is the belief that some human beings are superior to others based on the color of their skin, language, or place of birth. The history of racism in the United States can be traced back even before the nation was founded, when the first European settlers encountered the native people of the Americas. As was the case in most developed nations of the time, racist attitudes were based on a mistaken belief that darker-skinned people were biologically inferior. Though this belief—and, indeed, the very idea of race as a biological rather than social construct—was eventually disproven, it contributed to centuries of racism and oppression in the United States, most notably in the practice of slavery and the legal segregation of Black Americans in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While great strides toward equality were made in the mid-twentieth century, racism did not vanish. It remains a serious issue into the twenty-first century where it continues to define and divide many Americans.

Background

The fear and mistrust of outsiders has long played a part in human history, but the idea of racial superiority is a relatively new concept. Ancient cultures such as the Greeks and Romans believed that their climate or way of life made them superior to other cultures, but not the color of their skin. In fact, the Romans often welcomed people from other cultures into their society as long as they adopted the customs and traditions of the empire.

During the age of exploration in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, European sailors first navigated down the coast of Africa and encountered a diverse group of dark-skinned people who had very different cultures than their European counterparts. This time period was also notable for a change in societal thinking as the superstitions of the medieval period gave way to a new emphasis on scientific thought. In observing the natural world, scientists had begun to classify living creatures into subgroups, such as genus and species. With the limited knowledge of the era, some of these early scientists used the false assumption that the darker-skinned peoples of Africa and Asia were somehow a different category of human. They reasoned that since White Europeans had what seemed to them to be a more highly developed culture and better technology, the darker-skinned people must be on a lesser branch of the human family tree. Religion also played a large part in the belief in European superiority. Most Europeans were Christians and believed that they were divinely favored by God, giving them a place in the hierarchy above non-Christians.

In the early nineteenth century, American scientist Samuel Morton performed a series of experiments during which he examined the capacity of skulls from various races. From these experiments, he falsely concluded that humans could be divided into five races, with White people as the most intelligent and Black people as the least. The conclusions made by Morton and other scientists may seem absurd to modern sensibilities but were accepted as scientific fact by many people and used to justify the overwhelmingly racist beliefs of the time.

By the mid-twentieth century, advancements in the science of genetics had definitively proven that the idea of one race being inferior to another was completely false. All humans are part of the same species and share more than 99 percent of their DNA, the genetic building block of life. Small variations in DNA may have led to cosmetic differences in people from different parts of the world, but overall, all humans are part of the same biological family.

Early American History

When European explorers arrived on the shores of the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they brought longstanding false concepts of race with them. They viewed the Native Americans they encountered as uncivilized “savages” and began a centuries-long period of oppression that pushed many native people from their lands and resulted in the deaths of millions through war and disease. By the beginning of the twentieth century, a Native American population that once numbered in the millions was estimated to be fewer than 250,000.

While the practice of slavery was an ancient institution, the enslavement of Africans that began in the sixteenth century was particularly harsh. In many cultures where slavery was practiced, slaves were typically captured during warfare and could sometimes earn their freedom after a period of time. The enslaved Africans brought to the Caribbean islands and southern United States were treated solely as property, a designation that was passed down to their descendants. The racial hierarchy created by slavery was absolute, with even free Black people not allowed the same rights as White people. Black people—enslaved or free—were not counted as citizens of the United States. However, as the US Constitution was being hammered out in 1787, southern lawmakers wanted Black people to be counted as population to increase the political power of slave-holding states. In the end, the Founding Fathers reached the so-called three-fifths compromise—three-fifths of all enslaved people would be counted toward the population. Thus racial inequality was deeply embedded in one of the country's core documents.

Many of the United States’s early leaders and presidents, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, owned slaves themselves. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a growing abolitionist movement began to take hold in the country, but the practice of slavery continued. And even many abolitionists who wanted to end slavery still held the belief that Black people were inferior to White people. The idea of a racial hierarchy in the United States was so entrenched that people believed in the so-called one-drop rule: even one drop of “black blood” in a family lineage meant a person was Black.

From the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement

By the mid-nineteenth century, the fight over slavery led to the bloody four years of the US Civil War. In the wake of the Union’s victory in 1865, Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery. Three years later the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to Black Americans, and the Fifteenth Amendment gave them the right to vote in 1870. However, these glimmers of hope for racial equality were dashed when White lawmakers across the South began instituting a series of oppressive legal measures called Jim Crow laws. These laws made segregation legal and created obstacles that often prevented Black people from voting. The Jim Crow laws stayed in effect in many places until the 1960s.

Technically, Black Americans had their freedom, citizenship, and the right to vote, but the legal system across the South and in some areas of the North had been stacked against them. During the years of slavery most Black people had been denied education, giving them very few options to earn a living as free individuals. Many turned to sharecropping, which was basically a legal form of slavery. Sharecroppers were poor people who worked for wealthy landowners and paid the landowner a portion of the crops they harvested as income for the right to work the land. As a result, homeownership and generational wealth became rare among African Americans. African Americans continued to lag behind White Americans in both these categories into the twenty-first century.

While Black Americans were struggling with divide between freedom and equality, they also increasingly became the targets of violence by some White people. Black families were attacked and some were forced from their land, Black schools and churches were burned, and many African Americans were the victims of beatings and murders. Between 1882 and 1968, at least 3,446 African Americans were lynched in the United States, with the majority of the murders taking place in the South. The violence and terror was meant to reinforce the racial caste system that had been in place before the Civil War. Much of this violence was carried out by White supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), a secret organization formed in 1865 to terrorize Black Americans. The group became entrenched in the American South by 1870 and amassed a great deal of political power. The group maintained a foothold in the United States into the twentieth century and still exists in the twenty-first century, though in a significantly weakened capacity.

Black people were not the only group to experience racism in the United States. The years after the Civil War saw an increase in the number of immigrants from China and other Asian countries, and this influx brought a rise in racist attitudes against these newcomers. Many Chinese immigrants who came to the United States worked as laborers building railroad lines, which were important for transportation and shipping across the country. Some immigrants came to the United States just to work and then return home. Others stayed in the country permanently. By the 1870s, an economic downturn made jobs harder to come by and led many White Americans to resent the Chinese immigrants. They believed that the immigrants were taking jobs that were meant for them. The anti-Chinese attitudes in the United States increased so dramatically that Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. This law banned Chinese immigrants from entering the United States. Schools in California, where many Chinese immigrants had settled, began segregating White students from Chinese and Japanese students. Chinese immigrants would not be allowed back into the United States until 1943, and even then few Chinese immigrants were permitted into the country. It would not be until the 1960s that the United States ended immigration laws that were biased toward a particular nation.

Native Americans, who had long been affected by the injustices of White society, faced additional hardships during the nineteenth century, as an expanding American population pushed farther and farther west. As the US government took more native land, the people were forced onto reservations. In an effort to assimilate native people into Western society, native children were taken from their parents and sent to boarding schools away from their communities. The government claimed this was done to “civilize” the children by teaching them to read and write English and to adapt to the dominant culture. However, these schools did more harm than good as the children were separated from their families, communities, and cultures.

By the 1950s and 1960s, African Americans had begun to make significant strides in the fight for equality. The 1954 US Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education made segregation illegal across the country. A growing civil rights movement also brought African Americans together to stand up for themselves and their communities. They organized protests against racism, violence, and inequality, calling on the nation’s leaders to change the laws and dismantle the racist power structure that held control over large sections of the United States. The movement achieved enormous success with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination based or race, religion, sex, or national origin. A year later, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that banned racial discrimination in voting.

These and other laws were a great benefit not only to African Americans, but also to members of other oppressed groups in the United States. However, while they changed the legal acceptance of racism, they had a limited effect on the prejudicial attitudes that still pervaded many parts of the United States. For example, despite the passage of anti-discrimination laws and numerous Supreme Court decisions, the city of Boston, Massachusetts, continued to fight for the desegregation of city schools until the 1980s. Many sociologists suggested that while overt racism had decreased (or at least become seen as socially unacceptable in most communities), forms of covert racism remained deeply entrenched in US society.

One issue that drew attention to both overt and covert racism was the accusation that police often unfairly targeted Black Americans because of their race. This led to several incidents of civil unrest, such as the Los Angeles riots of 1992. The riots broke out after four White officers with the Los Angeles Police Department were found not guilty in the 1991 beating of a Black motorist, Rodney King. African Americans in the poorest sections of the city responded to the verdict with days of rioting that left 63 people dead, more than 2,300 injured, and caused more than $1 billion in damages.

Twenty-First Century

Racialized violence continued to impact the United States into the twenty-first century. Notably, in the mid-2010s, several high-profile shootings of young, unarmed Black men by police officers ignited a fresh wave of major protests. Though not all the incidents were connected to overt racist attitudes, many observers felt that they represented a growing disconnect between Black communities and law enforcement in the United States, and the Black Lives Matter movement developed as a result. Even bigger protests, some of the largest in the US in decades, broke out in 2020 following the death of another unarmed Black man, George Floyd, in police custody. Many protesters took issue not only with police violence, but also with the systemic discrimination that they blamed for allowing such violence to keep happening. Floyd's death helped make Black Lives Matter one of the largest social movements in US history, placing racism and racial inequality at the center of much public discourse.

Racism also continued to be reflected in politics in the twenty-first century. While some hailed the 2008 election of Barack Obama, the first Black US president, as the beginning of a new era in race relations, many sociologists noted a backlash from some corners of White America. The 2016 election of US president Donald Trump also drew considerable attention to issues of racism, as he had a long track record of stirring racial tension in his business ventures and continued to make controversial remarks on the campaign trail and in office. Indeed, Trump's strongly anti-immigrant platform and criticism of social justice activists was perceived by many as not only normalizing subtle forms of racism but also emboldening White supremacist groups. On the other hand, Trump and his supporters heavily criticized progressive concepts such as critical race theory (CRT) for allegedly representing their own form of racism.

According to a 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center, about 71 percent of Black Americans and 56 percent of White Americans believed that the United States had not made enough progress battling racial inequality in the nation. About 84 percent of Black people and 58 percent of White people believed that the legacy of slavery still had a negative impact on the lives of African Americans. More than half of Black Americans said that their race had hurt them in their ability to get ahead in American society, and exactly 50 percent of African Americans believed that they would never achieve equal rights with White people.

The 2020 presidential election was another flashpoint for debates over racism, especially as conservatives continued to support voting restrictions that many critics saw as voter suppression aimed particularly at people of color. After Trump lost the election and a mob of his supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an effort to overturn the result, many of the rioters were linked to White supremacist groups or views. In May 2021 top US law enforcement officials recognized White supremacists as the top domestic terrorism threat facing the country.

While anti-Black racism continued to draw significant media attention, there was also a marked rise in anti-Asian violence in the early 2020s. Analysts linked this surge to xenophobic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, which first broke out in China in 2019 before spreading around the world in the first months of 2020. The increase in anti-Asian racism motivated the emergence of the #StopAsianHate campaign and other activism. Public outcry over this significant spike in violence also contributed to the passage of the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act in May 2021, a piece of federal legislation that sought to invest in community-based solutions to the rise in anti-Asian racism.

Amid ongoing conversations about the legacy and continued impact of racism in the US, pushback also remained a significant factor. Conservatives in particular often rejected attempts to re-assess American culture and history through the lens of racial justice. By the early 2020s, efforts by certain state and federal policymakers to take actions such as banning the inclusion of CRT-based content in school curricula gained much attention. Some proposed state laws sharply curbed the ability of teachers to teach on topics related to race at all.

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