Racism in America: History, Law, and Modern Civil Rights

Introduction: The Persistence of Racism in America

From the time of the New World's discovery in 1492, racism has remained at the forefront of U.S. history. Even in the present day, it is reported that in America, one Black man dies from police confrontations every 28 hours. A majority of these incidents fail to appear even in local newspapers and news channels. It is only occasionally that these unfortunate victims garner state media attention, and even rarer for such incidents to receive coverage at the national level. Over half a century following Martin Luther King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech, and many years following Barack Obama's historic 2008 presidential victory — making him the nation's first African-American president — growing cases of racial violence prove the persistent sensitivity of this social issue. Mass racial aggression, dubbed the nation's "worst nightmare," persists (Lester, 1985). Racism is clearly entrenched in the nation's policing institutions, and each day sees thousands of citizens protesting against police abuse and the unfair treatment of members of the African-American community. Typically, harsher penalties and a greater number of speeding tickets are levied on Black motorists compared to whites, and ninety percent of the time, police dogs end up attacking Black individuals. Furthermore, white personnel in the law enforcement system — including police officers and judges — systematically regard non-whites as threats. For instance, 2012–14 statistics for Ferguson, Missouri reveal that African-Americans accounted for 93% of total detentions, 90% of overall summonses, and 85% of total traffic stops (U.S. Department of Justice, 2015).

The term racism may be defined as a belief that one specific race is inferior or superior to another. More broadly, it entails treating people unjustly or differently for the sole reason that they are members of another ethnic group, and that it is important to maintain divisions between different races. Racism involves bias as well as injustice grounded in social perceptions of biological differences between individuals. The American Heritage College Dictionary defines racism in two ways: (1) a belief that a specific race is superior to all others and that race explains differences inherent in human nature or capacity; and (2) racial intolerance or bias (Klarman, 2007). One must take care not to confuse racism with white supremacy, which, although a form of racism, specifically denotes a belief that white people are superior to those of other racial groups in particular respects.

An important starting point for understanding racism is clarifying the distinction between prejudice and racism. A widespread and costly misunderstanding conflates these two separate concepts, and grasping both is essential to identifying effective action steps for eliminating racism. Prejudice denotes any judgment made without duly considering and analyzing facts — one that persists even after acquiring knowledge that contradicts it. Since there is no factual basis for prejudice, it is driven chiefly by fear and other emotional reactions. Race-based prejudice exists, but it is not the only constituent of racism (D'rozario and Williams, 2005). Racism arises from a combination of prejudice and power — understood as the capacity to command, control, and shape social reality in order to achieve a preferred outcome.

Social scientists have typically studied racial injustice and intolerance together. A commonly shared view holds that individual racists mete out discriminatory racial treatment. Modern discrimination patterns are founded on the historical advantage whites held over non-whites during four centuries of North American racial oppression. A majority of modern-day manifestations of race-based discrimination carry forward the legacy of Jim Crow and the slave trade. Current discriminatory practices replicate the historical pattern of unjust enrichment and impoverishment. Discrimination sustains and echoes the longstanding racist framework, along with its associated collection of anti-African-American emotions, attitudes, and imagery. In modern interracial settings, Black individuals are frequently subject to negative interpretations of their morals, values, orientations, and capabilities. Racial obstacles remain, as a large proportion of white Americans continue to hold certain anti-Black preconceptions, stereotypes, and images, while a significant minority hold such views in their most virulent form (Aptheker, 1992). Research reveals that a majority of whites who interact with Black people in public, at school, at work, or within media and social settings typically perceive them — knowingly or unknowingly — through an innate racial framing that includes stereotypes continuously repeated and reinforced in contemporary society. This kind of socially activated framing usually results in some form of discrimination.

Additionally, the manifestation of anti-African-American attitudes as actual discriminatory behavior is shaped by societal norms — including awareness of others' judgments — as well as perceived behavioral controls such as others' reactions to discrimination. Routinized employment, housing, public accommodation, and political discrimination are meted out by white individuals acting independently or as a group. While societal norms driving racial discrimination may sometimes be codified in law, a majority of current norms are informal and tacit (Appleson, 1982). Furthermore, a large amount of anti-African-American behavior is not isolated but is performed frequently and consistently by many individuals belonging to the dominant racial group, governed by key social network norms. While white individuals possess independent capacity to discriminate against people of color, much of this power derives from their positions within traditionally white-dominated institutions and networks.

Historical Outlook of Racism in America

The racial identity concept acquired a veneer of scientific legitimacy chiefly during the early to mid-nineteenth century, under the influence of the European Enlightenment. Scientists of that period, particularly botanists and biologists, were keen to classify the diverse life forms on Earth, including humanity. Perhaps due to cultural prejudice and ethnocentrism, the classification of humankind was arranged hierarchically, with Europeans placed at the top and Africans at the bottom. The institutionalization of slavery in America would not have been possible without white society providing an intellectual rationale for the mistreatment of millions of African men, women, and children (Appleson, 1982; Childers, 1997). This rationalizing was also mirrored previously by Muslim societies in the enslavement of East African peoples. Slavery necessitated racism and was, in fact, racism's proximate cause.

Racism has been deeply entrenched in American history and in contemporary life. Every non-white group has experienced its ill effects. American history is replete with oppression against non-whites: from the massacre of Native Americans, to the African slave trade, to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, to the mass incarceration of Japanese-Americans, to the discrimination meted out to Hispanic-Americans. Alongside this runs an extensive history of non-white resistance to white oppression. The Black opposition movement of the 1960s brought the social problem of racism onto the agendas of leading churches (Childers, 1997). Ultimately, the epic efforts of African-Americans, accompanied by the powerful support of leading churches, ended legal segregation. The vision of those churches was the eradication of color divisions within their own congregations and throughout all of America, by securing civil rights for all individuals under a system of integration. The basic philosophy informing church advocacy held that racism resulted from personal prejudice and ethnic or racial pride. Accordingly, church initiatives concentrated on changing personal views and overcoming prejudice.

The year 1963 proved historic in American race relations. In April of that year, civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. commenced a peaceful protest for the desegregation of Birmingham, Alabama's public facilities. Birmingham officials turned police dogs and fire hoses on the large crowd of peaceful protesters — which included local schoolchildren — and arrested several hundred activists. This aggressive response was broadcast across national and international news channels, showing the world the shocking reality of racism in America. A few months later, President Kennedy announced his support for a pending bill to ban race-based discrimination in employment, public accommodations, and housing. In backing this legislation, civil rights supporters organized demonstrations in nearly every major U.S. city, culminating in the famous, massive August 1963 March on Washington (Rogers, 2004). That event brought 250,000 Americans — the largest gathering of demonstrators in the nation's history — to the Lincoln Memorial, where a number of civil rights leaders delivered speeches. The event's highlight was Martin Luther King Jr.'s stirring speech, "I Have a Dream," in which he expressed his vision: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Half a century later, King's words continue to be a symbol for those hoping to cultivate a society free from racism. Yet contemporary civil rights campaigners interpret the assassinated leader's dream — and how to achieve it — in starkly different ways. Progressives generally hold that he would support race-sensitive initiatives aimed at counteracting discrimination, such as affirmative action in employment and education. By contrast, most conservatives contend that he would support colorblind programs that emphasize merit and character rather than race in college admissions and hiring decisions (Rogers, 2004).

The ideal of "colorblindness" — the notion that public policy should be blind to ethnicity and race — is strongly championed by Ward Connerly, Glynn Custred, and other Republicans. During the mid-1990s, these two conservatives initiated Proposition 209 (the California Civil Rights Initiative, or CCRI), a ballot measure to end affirmative action in public education, hiring, and contracting. Since the 1970s, such programs had required the state to ensure minority representation in colleges and workplaces by factoring race into policy decisions. In 1996, however, California voters passed the new initiative, which forbade state discrimination against or preferential treatment of any individual or group based on nationality, race, gender, color, or ethnicity in public employment, contracting, and education (Tauber, 1999). Washington State ratified a similar anti-affirmative action measure two years later.

Supporters of the California and Washington programs argue that such legislation moves America closer to King's vision of a society that judges people by ability and character rather than race. They contend that affirmative action amounts to preferential treatment of minorities and thus constitutes reverse discrimination against whites, undermining the values of justice and equal opportunity. As Roger Clegg, general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, has argued, wrongs committed against some non-whites by some white citizens in a distant era cannot be remedied by new discrimination against a different group of whites by a different group of Black individuals — none of whom were involved in the injustices of the past (Tauber, 1999). Rather than trying to solve discrimination through more discrimination, the aim should be enforcing existing laws and halting discriminatory treatment.

Patterns of Discrimination: Political and Legal Institutions

For many centuries, federal, state, and local governments have actively engaged in defending or amplifying the racial discrimination framework. A majority of such governments have historically been undemocratic in practice — that is, they have lacked meaningful input from non-white Americans on key operations and policies, both traditionally and in the present day. Although some social scientists and theorists, including proponents of the theory of racial formation, have overstated the state's role as a neutral entity where different racial populations compete for social and political control, this has not been — and is not currently — the empirical reality of the nation (Henry and Sears, 2002). From the outset, American government has been shaped strongly by racial interests and white male framing. To this day, top governmental positions have remained overwhelmingly and disproportionately held by white elites.

White-dominated governmental systems and authorities have largely favored the political, economic, and racial interests of fellow white Americans. Consequently, governmental programs traditionally provided considerable access to valuable resources — including homesteading land — either exclusively or disproportionately to white Americans. Combined with this longstanding "affirmative action" in favor of whites, the nation's governments developed and enforced widespread patterns of racial marginalization targeting non-whites. Over the long span of American history, white-dominated legislative, judicial, and executive branches at all levels of government characteristically maintained slavery and Jim Crow exclusion (Johnson, 2001).

About 138 years after independence, America's Supreme Court finally began striking down some of the most severely discriminatory state-level Jim Crow rules. Nevertheless, greater political representation was slow to arrive. Ultimately, the civil rights movement of the 1960s drove legislative changes, including the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Johnson, 2001). Partly as a result of that Act, millions of African-American residents of Southern states were finally able to vote in the following decade. Consequently, the number of African-American elected officials grew from a handful in the 1960s to thousands today. There remain, however, many places where African-American voters cannot elect members of their own community as representatives; and where they can elect a few representatives, those officials typically cannot persuade white-dominated legislatures to give adequate weight to their communities' views and concerns.

Current everyday voting restriction activities by dominant white conservative politicians represent deliberate and consistent discrimination against non-white voters. Before the 1960s, most drives to decrease non-white voter participation were initiated by Democrats. However, the 1960s saw Republicans — including Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater — increasingly undertaking voting restriction activities against non-white voters (Krysan, 2000). More recently, such restrictive action has continued at all levels of government. Scholars have documented an alarming range of blocking strategies employed by certain white authorities to diminish Latin American and African-American voting or representation, including: gerrymandering political districts, converting elective offices to appointive ones, destroying voter registration lists, adding new criteria for assuming office, unexpectedly relocating polling stations, complicating registration processes, and numerous other tactics for diluting minority votes (Maddox and Gray, 2004). One example of a geographic vote dilution tactic is the deliberate use of at-large voting systems rather than smaller electoral districts, enabling white voters who control large political units to determine the representatives of those units even when very few voters in the area are non-white.

America's enduring racial hierarchy has been reinforced by the actions of countless governmental agents across diverse institutions. White police officers, for instance, have historically played — and continue to play — a major role in subordinating African-Americans, including those who protest unfairness. Disturbing historical data document American police violence: between 1920 and 1932, more than 50% of Black killings by whites were committed by white police officers. Police were consistently implicated in approximately six thousand violent killings of African-American men and women between the 1870s and 1960s (Altman, 2006). The decades that followed have continued to witness police persecution and brutality against Black people, alongside reciprocal open resistance by the Black community. Analysis of Black "riots" from 1943 to 1972 suggests that the immediate cause of many such community revolts was the persecution or killing of African-American urbanites at the hands of white law enforcement officers. Blacks publicly objected to police malpractice. This pattern of community response to police persecution or killings has been evident in more recent revolts as well — by Black residents of Miami and Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s — and non-whites have since protested in many forms against police abuse in many other cities.

Despite sporadic improvements in policing, police maltreatment and aggression continue to suppress the African-American community. According to a Gallup survey, one in five African-American respondents had experienced police discrimination, a proportion that has risen slightly in recent years. A second Gallup survey found that 42% of African-American respondents — and 75% of young adults — had experienced police racial profiling.

Since 1994, the U.S. federal government has been required to collect data on police brutality. However, subsequent Congresses have not allocated sufficient funds to support this data collection effort. A social scientific study examining 130 police brutality cases in multiple cities found that Latin Americans and African-Americans were the most common targets of police abuse, with nine out of ten officers involved being white. Even today, police brutality is typically inflicted by white officers on Black and Latino individuals (Bird and Clarke, 1999; Altman, 2006). Furthermore, some police persecution of non-whites appears linked to maintaining particular aspects of residential segregation. Even in contemporary America, Black and Latino men who seek to reside in traditionally white neighborhoods are frequently threatened by persecution or pursuit by private security guards and police.

Many contemporary law enforcement agencies screen and stop motorists primarily — or exclusively — on the basis of race, for the so-called offense of DWB ("driving while Black"), as the practice has been labeled by African-Americans. An ACLU report on police racial profiling documents substantial disparities in stop-and-search rates for African-Americans, Latin Americans, Asians, and Native Americans, despite these populations' lower likelihood of possessing contraband (Bird and Clarke, 1999).

Courts in California, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and New Jersey have periodically ruled against racial profiling. A California study demonstrated that African-Americans and Latinos were significantly more likely to be searched without apparent cause by highway patrol officers compared to whites. In 2008, complainants including the ACLU settled a racial profiling class-action suit against Maryland police. Research conducted over an extended period revealed that non-white motorists were disproportionately stopped and searched without sound justification. According to an ACLU statement, the settlement required Maryland police to issue a formal statement disapproving of racial profiling and to retain an independent consultant to evaluate progress in eliminating the practice (Eberhardt et al., 2006).

Racial profiling — treating non-whites as inherently criminal, and stopping and checking non-whites without adequate suspicion — garners relatively little objection from white Americans. Despite the popularity of racialized drug-carrier profiling, governmental agencies have not proven that drug profiles emphasizing non-whites are empirically valid. This kind of policing is sometimes, and erroneously, justified as statistically rational. In fact, African-American youth consume substances at a slightly lower rate than white youth. Moreover, whites account for approximately 70% of illicit drug consumers (Altman, 2006; Bryson, 1998), and most drug couriers and dealers are likely to be white. This white dominance on the drug dealing and consumption scene receives comparatively little police scrutiny or action — yet another clear indication of discrimination on the part of law enforcement and the judiciary.

Race-based discrimination extends well beyond policing to many elements of the criminal justice system. Several courts have very few African-American judges, while many white judges fail to adequately understand the lives of working-class African-Americans — the subgroup they most commonly encounter. Judges typically come from backgrounds very different from those of Black suspects and, as a result, often discriminate against them overtly or subtly. For instance, a 1990s New Haven study of more than one thousand detentions found that, after controlling for eleven crime severity variables, bail amounts set by judges for Black male suspects were 35% higher than those set for white males (Bird and Clarke, 1999; Plant and Peruche, 2005). By contrast, commercial bail bondspeople — operating under market incentives — charged considerably lower rates for African-American suspects than for white suspects. A more recent Northern California study found the same trend of higher bail amounts for African-Americans.

Institutional racism is also starkly apparent in the application of the death penalty. A recent Death Penalty Information Center report stated that since the reestablishment of the federal death penalty in 1988, federal prosecutors sought and obtained capital sentences against 382 offenders, of whom 73% (278 individuals) were minorities. Nearly 60% of current death row inmates are non-white (Staples, 2011). Furthermore, an analysis of California capital murder cases found that the chances of receiving a death sentence were higher when the victim was white compared to when the victim was non-white. Criminal justice authorities appear, in practice, to value white lives more than non-white lives. A Philadelphia study found that African-American defendants in murder cases were four times more likely to receive the death sentence than whites, even controlling for crime severity. A 2008 study of five hundred capital cases in Brewster County, Texas, found that African-American defendants were more likely to receive a death sentence than whites committing comparable crimes, and even more likely than whites committing the most extreme murders. Lastly, racial bias in capital sentencing has a clear regional dimension: 82% of death sentences are pronounced in Southern states.