Racism in the United States
has been reflected in discriminatory laws, practices, and actions against racial or ethnic groups throughout the history of the United States. Since the early colonial era, White Americans have generally enjoyed legally or socially-sanctioned privileges and rights that have been denied to members of various ethnic or minority groups. European Americans have enjoyed advantages in matters of citizenship, criminal procedure, education, immigration, land acquisition, and voting rights.
Before 1865, most African Americans were enslaved; since the abolition of slavery, they have faced severe restrictions on their political, social, and economic freedoms. Native Americans have suffered genocide, forced removals, and massacres, and they continue to face discrimination. Hispanics, Middle Easterns, Asians, and Pacific Islanders have also been the victims of discrimination.
Racism has manifested itself in a variety of ways, including ethnic conflicts, genocide, slavery, lynchings, segregation, Native American reservations, boarding schools, racist immigration and naturalization laws, and internment camps. Formal racial discrimination was largely banned by the mid-20th century, becoming perceived as socially and morally unacceptable over time. Racial [|politics] remains a major phenomenon in the U.S., and racism continues to be reflected in socioeconomic inequality. Into the 21st century, research has uncovered extensive evidence of racial discrimination, in various sectors of modern U.S. society, including the criminal justice system, [|business], the economy, [|housing], [|health care], the [|media], and politics. In the view of the United Nations and the, "discrimination in the United States permeates all aspects of life and extends to all communities of color."
Aspects of American life
Citizenship and immigration
The Naturalization Act of 1790 set the first uniform rules for the granting of United States citizenship by naturalization, which limited naturalization to "free white person," thus, excluding Native Americans, indentured servants, slaves, free Blacks and later, Asians from citizenship. Citizenship status determined one's eligibility for many legal and political rights, including suffrage rights at both the federal and state level, the right to hold certain government offices, the right to serve jury duty, and the right to serve in the United States Armed Forces. The second Militia Act of 1792 also provided for the conscription of every "free able-bodied white male citizen". Tennessee's 1834 Constitution included a provision: "the free white men of this State have a right to Keep and bear arms for their common defense."The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, made under the Indian Removal Act of 1830, allowed Choctaw Indians who chose to remain in Mississippi to gain recognition as U.S. citizens. They were the first non-European ethnic group to become entitled to U.S. citizenship.
The Naturalization Act of 1870 extended naturalization to Black persons, but not to other non-white persons. The law relied on coded language to exclude "aliens ineligible for citizenship," which primarily applied to immigrants of Asian descent.
Native Americans were granted citizenship in a piecemeal manner until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, which unilaterally bestowed blanket citizenship status on them, whether they belonged to a federally recognized Tribe or not. However, by that date, two-thirds of Native Americans had already become U.S. citizens through various means. The Act was not retroactive, so, citizenship was not extended to Native Americans who were born before the effective date of the 1924 Act, nor was it extended to Indigenous persons who were born outside the United States.
Further changes to racial eligibility for citizenship by naturalization were made after 1940, when eligibility was extended to "descendants of races indigenous to the Western Hemisphere," "Filipino persons or persons of Filipino descent," "Chinese persons or persons of Chinese descent," and "persons of races indigenous to India." The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 now prohibits racial and gender discrimination in naturalization.
During the period when only "white" people could be naturalized, many court decisions were required to define which ethnic groups were included in this term. These are known as the "racial prerequisite cases," and they also informed subsequent legislation.
Voting
The Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution explicitly prohibited denying the right to vote based on race, but delegated to Congress the responsibility for enforcement.During the Reconstruction era, African Americans began to run for office and vote, but the Compromise of 1877 ended the era of strong federal enforcement of equal rights in the Southern states. White Southerners were prevented, by the Fifteenth Amendment, from explicitly denying the vote to Blacks by law, but they found other ways to disenfranchise. Jim Crow laws that targeted African Americans, without mentioning race, included poll taxes, literacy and comprehension tests for voters, residency and record-keeping requirements, and grandfather clauses allowing White people to vote. Black Codes criminalized minor offenses like unemployment, providing a pretext to deny voting rights. Extralegal violence was also used to terrorize and sometimes kill African Americans who attempted to register or to vote, often in the form of lynching and cross burning. These efforts to enforce white supremacy were very successful. For example, after 1890, less than 9,000 of Mississippi's 147,000 eligible African American voters were registered to vote, or about 6%. Louisiana went from 130,000 registered African American voters in 1896 to 1,342 in 1904.
Even Native Americans who gained citizenship under the 1924 Act were not guaranteed voting rights until 1948. According to a survey by the Department of Interior, seven states still refused to grant Indians voting rights in 1938. Discrepancies between federal and state control provided loopholes in the Act's enforcement. States justified discrimination based on state statutes and constitutions. Three main arguments for Indian voting exclusion were Indian exemption from real estate taxes, maintenance of tribal affiliation and the notion that Indians were under guardianship, or lived on lands controlled by federal trusteeship. By 1947, all states with large Indian populations, except Arizona and New Mexico, had extended voting rights to Native Americans who qualified under the 1924 Act. Finally, in 1948, a judicial decision forced the remaining states to withdraw their prohibition on Indian voting.
The civil rights movement resulted in strong Congressional enforcement of the right to vote regardless of race, starting with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Though this greatly enhanced the ability of racial minorities to vote and run for office in all areas of the country, concerns over racially discriminatory voting laws and administration persist. Gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts around the country, though mainly motivated by political considerations, often effectively disproportionately affect African Americans and other minorities. These include targeted voter ID requirements, registration hurdles, restricting vote-by-mail, and making voting facilities physically inconvenient to access due to long distances, long lines, or short hours. The 2013 U.S. Supreme court decision Shelby County v. Holder struck down the pre-clearance provisions of the 1965 Act, making anti-discrimination enforcement more difficult.
In 2016, one in 13 African Americans of voting age were disenfranchised, which was more than four times greater than that of non-African Americans. Over 7.4% of adult African Americans were disenfranchised compared to 1.8% of non-African Americans. Felony disenfranchisement in Florida disqualifies over 10% of its citizens for life and over 23% of its African American citizens.
Criminal justice system
There are unique experiences and disparities in the United States, in regard to the policing and prosecuting of various races and ethnicities. There have been different outcomes for different racial groups in convicting and sentencing felons in the United States criminal justice system. Experts and analysts have debated the relative importance of different factors that have led to these disparities.Academic research indicates that the over-representation of some racial minorities in the [|criminal justice] system can, in part, be explained by socioeconomic factors, such as poverty, exposure to poor neighborhoods, poor access to public education, poor access to early childhood education, and exposure to harmful chemicals and pollution. Racial housing segregation has also been linked to racial disparities in crime rates, as Blacks have, historically, and to the present, been prevented from moving into prosperous low-crime areas, through actions of the government and private actors. Various explanations, within criminology, have been proposed for racial disparities in crime rates, including conflict theory, strain theory, general strain theory, social disorganization theory, macrostructural opportunity theory, social control theory, and subcultural theory.
Research also indicates that there is extensive racial and ethnic discrimination by police and the judicial system. A substantial academic literature has compared police searches, bail decisions, and sentencing, providing valid causal inferences of racial discrimination. Studies have documented patterns of racial discrimination, as well as patterns of police brutality and disregard for the constitutional rights of African-Americans, by police departments in various American cities, including Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Philadelphia.
A report by the National Registry of Exonerations found that, as of August 2022, African Americans make up 13.6% of the U.S. population but 53% of exonerations, and that they were seven times more likely to be falsely convicted, compared to White Americans.