A Brief History of Institutional Racism in the United States for White People Who Don’t Believe that Institutional Racism Exists
Please consider this a very brief history of the progression of institutional, systemic racism in the United States and how laws and policies have been built and perpetuated in a way that systematically denies rights, privileges and civil liberties to black Americans. I do not intend to ‘mansplain’ this history to those who are familiar with it or who experience it on a daily basis; this is for those of us who are white. Those of us who fear that equity means losing some semblance of inherent privilege that we have been freely afforded based solely on the color of our skin.
- Slavery. This country was founded on the implementation of a slave economy and the exploitation of black bodies and labor.
Policing has roots in slave patrols, squadrons made up of white volunteers, vigilantes and civil servants who enforced laws related to slavery. Centralized, municipal police departments did not emerge until the mid-19th century and emerged as a response to “disorder” rather than crime — in other words, to protect an arbitrary social order defined by the white elite and, of course, to protect their economic interests.
2. At the start of the Civil War, the vice president of the Confederate States of America (who I will not name because he doesn’t deserve the attention) gave the infamous “Cornerstone Speech” which pretty much stated that the new government was founded on the idea that black people were inferior to white people.
This racist ideology grew out of hundreds of years of pseudoscience that was used to justify racial discrimination. In the late 19th and early 20th century, Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” was weaponized by political conservatives, racists and imperialists to validate their theory of Social Darwinism.
3. After the Civil War, the passing of the 13th Amendment abolished slavery and indentured servitude (except as punishment for a crime — see “The New Jim Crow”).
4. The slave economy turned into a sharecropping economy which ultimately exploited black labor, kept black workers from owning land and subjected them to inescapable debt, indentured servitude and poverty.
5. Black Americans were victims of Jim Crow laws, a collection of state and local statutes that legalized racial segregation, and black codes which determined when, where and how formerly enslaved people could work, and where they could go (see: vagrancy laws). “The codes appeared throughout the South as a legal way to put black citizens into indentured servitude, to take voting rights away, to control where they lived and how they traveled.”
6. The Freedman’s Bureau was founded in 1865 and lasted until 1972 and was established to help black slaves and poor whites during the Reconstruction of the South after the Civil War. However, the legal system was stacked against black citizens, with confederates and wealthy whites working as police and judges, making it difficult for black Americans to win court cases and ensuring they remain subject to black codes. There have been many efforts by black people to work with/ within the federal government. Unfortunately, these organizations proved to serve merely symbolic purposes.
7. Lynching (muder) became a way for white business owners in the South to maintain economic and racial superiority.
8. Black men fought in American wars, for a segregated U.S. military (until 1948).
9. There were few educational opportunities for blacks in the south. The publication of the Chicago Defender inspired waves of black southerners to the North during The Great Migration of the 1920s, where they found themselves subject to low-paying jobs and employment discrimination.
10. In 1921, mobs of white residents attacked “The Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma on the ground and from private planes destroying “35 square blocks of the district.”
11. The Federal Housing Administration and Home Owner’s Loan Corporation implemented a grading system by racial and ethnic group based on who was best suited to obtain a federal ensured mortgage (the practice was outlawed in 1968). In the 1930s banks were to stay away from certain area — they literally drew lines on maps and said certain areas were ‘threatened’ or ‘hazardous’ if those areas were largely comprised of minorities.
12. The GI Bill offered opportunities to white, male GI’s after WWII. Despite the educational and loan opportunities, black and gay GI’s were excluded via ‘blue charges’ and/or funneled into trade schools and denied access to 4 year colleges and mortgage loans.
13. Levittowns (suburban developments) included an explicit racial exclusion clause stating that homes could not ‘’be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race.’’
14. Contract buying exploited hopeful black homeowners in cities like Chicago. “Contract buying worked like this: A buyer put down a large down payment for a home and made monthly installments at high interest rates.
But the buyer never gained ownership until the contract was paid in full and all conditions were met. Meanwhile, the contract seller held the deed and could evict the buyer. Contract buyers also accumulated no equity in their homes. No laws or regulations protected them.” (NPR “Contract Buying Robbed Black Families in Chicago Of Billions”)
15. Segregation was deemed unconstitutional in 1954 (Brown v. Board of Education) but by this point, segregation and racism had been built into the architecture of the country.
16. The Federal Highway Act of 1956 allowed middle class whites to leave the cities and commute to work from the suburbs.
17. 1963 In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail , Martin Luther King, Jr., defends direct action to clergymen counseling patience. “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed”.
250,000 demonstrators attended the March on Washington demanding the passage of the Civil Rights Act (passed in 1964), outlawing racial discrimination in employment, voting, and the use of public facilities.
18. The rise of The Black Power Movement:
The Black Panther Party originally formed in response to police brutality in Oakland, CA. However, their core activities were community social programs like the Free Breakfast for Children Programs to address food injustice, and community health clinics for education and treatment of diseases. They were an armed, revolutionary socialist organization whose ‘open carry’ practice influenced the NRA to support the gun control laws that they so adamantly oppose today.
19. COINTELPRO (1956–71), or the Counterintelligence Program, was a branch of the FBI whose job was to illegally infiltrate, monitor, discredit and suppress the activities of American political organizations that were considered subversive.
20. The rise of evangelical conservatism and Ronald Reagan’s Presidency:
Reagan supported tax breaks for schools that discriminated on the basis of race, opposed the extension of the Voting Rights Act, vetoed the Civil Rights Restoration Act and decimated the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Hi administration responded to the crack epidemic in major cities across the U.S. with the “War on Drugs” that disproportionately affected poor black Americans while white cocaine users eschewed prosecution. Reagan’s symbolic stance on race issues is best illustrated in his deriding welfare recipients as “welfare queens.”
21. In 1994, President Bill Clinton passed the Federal Crime Bill that created new criminal sentences and incentivized states to build more prisons. The war on drugs and heavy policing in inner cities meant that prisons were packed with POC indicted on minor drug offenses — a real money maker for private prisons and supplying cheap labor for some of your favorite consumer goods.
22. The Los Angeles Riots in 1992 after the four officers involved in the televised beating of Rodney King were acquitted.
This is by no means an exhaustive or comprehensive list. I have chosen to focus on domestic policies that have economically and politically disadvantaged black Americans and continue to affect their ability to obtain “The American Dream.” Racism has been built into the fabric of the United States for the purpose of maintaining white supremacy. I hope that this timeline illustrates how explicit racism has given way to implicit racism, or unconscious biases, that serve to maintain white supremacy.
Reading material:
“The Migration Series” Jacob Lawrence (paintings)
“The Story of the Contract Buyers League”
“Women, Race, and Class” Angela Davis
“The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” Audre Lorde
“Black Panthers” Agnes Varda, 1968 (film)
“The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America” Richard Rothstein
“The New Jim Crow” Michelle Alexander
“A Price for Their Pound of Flesh” Daina Ramey Berry
“Prison Notebooks” Antonio Gramsci (re: Cultural Hegemony)
“Letter from a Birmingham Jail” Martin Luther King, Jr.
“The Souls of Black Folk” W.E.B. Dubois
“Nobody Knows My Name” James Baldwin
“Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases” Ida B. Wells
“How Redlining’s Racist Effects Lasted for Decades” NY Times
