Racism

Racism, an ideology that views “race” as a fundamental human category rooted in nature and sees some races as inherently inferior. Racism in America has functioned as a means by which the white majority asserted its superiority and rationalized its dominance over Native Americans, Asian Americans, and African Americans. In the Colonial Era, European settlers often expressed racist views toward the native population, reinforced by religious beliefs in the Indians' satanic nature and God's mandate to the colonists to conquer them. Racist assumptions continued thereafter to justify white appropriation of Indian lands and even campaigns of extermination.

Racist ideas have long been directed against African Americans. When Africans were first brought to America, some historians argue, their treatment was roughly equivalent to that of white indentured servants. The large‐scale influx of Africans in the late seventeenth century, however, historian George Frederickson suggests, engendered fears that hardened prejudice into racism. As Virginia legalized slavery in the 1670s, racist ideas took deep root. Racism underlay not only slavery but also the African colonization movement, which arose in the South after Gabriel Prosser's slave uprising in Virginia in 1800. Supporters of colonization—the return of blacks to Africa—included such notables as Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe. Discussing the peoples of North America in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Jefferson revealed racist notions, portraying African Americans as subhuman while idealizing Indians.

White racism so pervaded antebellum America that the free black leader Martin Delany (1812–1885) argued only that when blacks gained political power would it diminish. Southern religious leaders offered biblical defenses of racism and by the 1850s, an elaborate pseudo‐scientific racism, based largely on measurements of cranial capacity, was devised by the so‐called American School of Anthropology, which included the distinguished naturalist Louis Agassiz and the Mobile, Alabama, physician and ethnologist Josiah Nott (1804–1873). The U.S. Supreme Court's 1857 Dred Scott decision (Scott v. Sandford), declaring that blacks had no rights that whites were bound to respect, rested on a web of racist assumptions. Although abolitionist opposition to slavery threatened its racist foundations, many white abolitionists themselves held racist views and opposed social equality with blacks. Black abolitionists such as David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, and Frederick Douglass, by contrast, urged a struggle not only against slavery but also against the pervasive racism that underlay racial discrimination in the North.

Rooted in phobia and activated by the reflex of color, racism long survived its social construction in the slavery era. Post–Civil War racism found expression in the Ku Klux Klan's reign of terror, in the spread of segregation across the South, and in the 1896 Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson upholding racial segregation in schools and public facilities. Racist assumptions underlay the biased intelligence and psychological tests introduced in World War I, as well as historian Ulrich B. Phillips's American Negro Slavery (1918), long the reigning text on the subject. Racism also pervaded popular culture, including the blackface minstrel shows and D.W. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation (1915), celebrating the Ku Klux Klan and portraying blacks in hostile, stereotyped terms. Racism shaped the history of populism and American labor movements, since poor white farmers and workers, while sometimes joining interracial movements, more often identified with white planters and capitalists than with their fellow black workers.

Opposition to racism continued, however, as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP, 1910) conducted its long legal campaign against discriminatory laws and practices rooted in racist ideas. In addition, during the 1930s the U.S. Communist party mounted an impressive campaign to eliminate racism from its ranks. Its very success, however, militated against efforts to attract white workers, whose racist phobias are explored at length by David Roediger.

Meanwhile, immigrants who arrived in vast numbers from southern and eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often embraced racist ideas as a way of identifying with the native‐born white majority. At the same time, however, nativists used racist language to attack the new immigrants. In The Passing of the Great Race (1916), the New York lawyer and philanthropist Madison Grant, drawing upon the work of the Frenchman Joseph Gobineau and others, stridently insisted on the superiority of the “Nordic” race over all others. Grant proposed immigrant restriction, racial segregation, and sterilization of the “unfit.” The term “race” was loosely applied in these years, and racism often blurred into anti‐Semitism and hatred of various ethnic and national groups. Racist ideology targeted Asian Americans as well, underlying restrictive immigration laws and the incarceration of Japanese Americans in World War II. Pervading anti‐Japanese propaganda, racism also surfaced in the Vietnam War.

But, on balance, developments during and following World War II provided the context in which blatant expressions of racism were reduced. The horrors of the Nazi Holocaust, labor leader A. Philip Randolph's call for a march of blacks on the nation's capital demanding fair employment in the war industries, and opposition to lynching by such eminent figures as Paul Robeson and Albert Einstein helped to discredit racism. Moreover, America's Cold War priority of recruiting allies in Asia and Africa, a diminished emphasis on race in the social sciences, and especially the militancy of the civil rights movement were changing the nation's attitude toward issues of race.

The civil rights movement gained inspiration from the school‐desegregation decision Brown v. Board of Education (1954), in which the plaintiff's case, argued by Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP, included sociological evidence demonstrating the psychological effects of racism on black children. The Montgomery bus boycott led by Martin Luther King Jr., and the heavily publicized brutality of southern racists against civil rights demonstrators further discredited racism.

Racism did not disappear, however. The Mississippi novelist and Nobel Laureate William Faulkner in 1956, speaking of “blood,” “kin,” and “home,” declared that if necessary he would resort to arms to resist government efforts to end racial segregation. The Kerner Commission, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967 to investigate racial disturbances in northern cities, identified white racism as a central cause and warned that America was in danger of becoming two societies, one white, one black. As the twentieth century ended, some observers saw a declining significance of race, emphasizing class differences instead, and social scientists increasingly stressed the social construction of the concept of “race” itself. Nevertheless, as the nation's weakening commitment to racial justice threatened the gains of the civil rights movement, a renewed emphasis on inherent racial difference was evident in such controversial works as The Bell Curve (1996) by Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein, which claimed to find a genetic basis for racial variation in intelligence tests.
See also Antislavery; Communist Party—USA; Eugenics; Garvey, Marcus; Immigration; Immigration Law; Indentured Servitude; Indian History and Culture; Intelligence, Concepts of; Malcolm X; Minstrelsy; Nation of Islam; Nativist Movement; Populist Era; Race, Concept of; Race and Ethnicity; Riots, Urban; Slave Uprisings and Resistance.

Bibliography

W.E.B. Du Bois , Dusk of Dawn, 1940, reprint ed., 1984.
Winthrop Jordan , White over Black, 1968.
George M. Frederickson , The Black Image in the White Mind, 1971.
St. Clair Drake , Black Folk Here and There: An Essay in History and Anthropology, 1987.
David Roediger , Wages of Whiteness, 1991.
Alden T. Vaughn , The Roots of American Racism, 1995.

Sterling Stuckey