Racism

Posted on by Jim Cotterill

The belief that one race, skin color, ethnicity or other group is superior to another in humanity constitutes racism.

It’s a fact that our country has a history of racism. It’s also a fact that we can’t change what happened in the past; all we can do is—hopefully—learn from our mistakes. In order to do that, first we need to understand what racist-motivated injustices have been done.

Racism has been evident in our country since the beginning of the 17th century when it was first colonized by Europeans.

These settlers believed that the Native Americans who inhabited this land were savages, who needed to be civilized through European culture and Christianity. This led to mass murder, land confiscation, eventually forcing a culture that had respectfully lived off expansive amounts of land onto small restrictive areas that we know know as Indian Reservations. This confinement literally destroyed a previously self-supporting, proud culture.

History also teaches us that Europeans’ perspectives were shaped by conquests that resulted in conquerers on all sides taking slaves from a time prior 500 BC. The conquerors and the conquered were often the same color (i.e., Greeks and Romans). And, history teaches us that many Blacks were sold into slavery in the early 17th century by rival Black tribes that had overtaken them.

Although neither European/European slavery or Black/Black slavery were racist in terms of color differences, they formed the roots upon which racism would develop—the feeling of superiority of one group over the other.

For 246 years, slavery was practiced in many parts of our country. Even though President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves by Executive order in 1862, it wasn’t until after the Confederacy surrendered to the Union Army on April 9, 1865 and word finally reached Texas on June 19, 1865, that both North and South recognized Lincoln’s executive order. The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution officially abolished slavery when it was ratified by the required number of states on December 6, 1865.

In 1877 white Southern state legislatures began enacting what have become known as Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation, effectively removing any power and economic gains blacks had made. Many of these laws remained in effect until passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Along with that highly favorable legislation came a crackdown on crime which President Lyndon Johnson initiated in 1965. In the 1970’s the courts moved from flexibility for judges to set sentences to a pre-determined sentencing structure. The 1980s ushered in an even more tough stance on crime, requiring offenders to serve most of their prison sentences with new drug abuse laws that carried mandatory sentences. Then in the 1990s, habitual offender laws, referred to as three-strikes laws went into effect.

As a result, the U.S. prison population nearly quadrupled between 1960 and 2000 with black men being incarcerated at five times the rate of white men. For black women to white women the rate is two to one. Blacks and Hispanics make up 32 percent of the U.S. population, but they are 56 percent of those incarcerated. If they were imprisoned at the same rate as whites, our prison and jail population would be reduced by almost 40 percent.

Blacks and whites use drugs at similar rates, but blacks are convicted and incarcerated at six times the rate of whites.

Since having a record reduces the likelihood of a job callback or offer by as much as 50 percent, and the numbers returning from incarceration are so high among blacks, this is just one more area in which they believe that—due to systemic racism—the deck is stacked against them.

It’s not unusual to hear a white person talk about how blessed he or she is. That same response is far more difficult to elicit from a man whose resume is overlooked due to the spelling of his first name or for a woman who is followed through a store because of the color of her skin or for a teenage boy who is stopped regularly by police for driving “suspiciously” through his own middle class neighborhood. Engrained in American culture for so long, institutional racism remains evident on almost a daily basis to people of color.

As is symbolized by the Kennedy King Memorial (photo above) in which Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, black and white, are reaching out to each other, it’s going to take people of all colors and ethnicities to stand together against racism to drive it out of our country.

Resources


Building Race Relationships

Published by

Jim Cotterill