Systemic Racism 101
Part 1: Shameless Hypocrisy
Shameless Hypocrisy
"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
"Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival."
Frederick Douglass | July 5, 1852
The Nature Of Chattel Slavery
The human trafficking of Africans to the Americas during the Atlantic Slave Trade led to the development of chattel slavery in the American South. This status of "slave" eventually became based on skin color instead of debt, nationality, or religion, so that enslaved people and their descendants could be held in captivity for life. The economic system benefited so much from this forced labor that enslavers didn’t want there to be a way to “earn” freedom by paying off debt, becoming educated, or converting to Christianity.
"Gradually the plantation owners' perspective became more aligned with that of the plantation owners of the Caribbean Islands. Because they were not Christians, blacks could be forced to work for the rest of their lives and be punished with impunity. Moreover, the color of their skin set them apart, making it easy to identify runaways. Also, there was a seemingly inexhaustible supply of Africans, and since little information flowed back across the Atlantic, mistreatment and abuse in America did not alter the flow of enslaved persons from Africa."
PBS Online, Virginia looks toward Africa for labor (1999)
All Men Created Equal?
The institution of slavery was problematic for Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776 based on Enlightenment ideas of freedom and equality while enslaving hundreds of Black people himself. In Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Jefferson theorized that if all men were created equal, then Black people weren’t quite men because of their mental and physical inferiority.
Though Jefferson later advocated for an end to slavery, he also believed that because of their racial inferiority and history of conflict with white people, the only realistic next step would be to remove the formerly enslaved people to Africa. The most troubling thing about his theory, however, was how it energized a generation of American scientists to find biological evidence to support this theorized inferiority. These scientific studies were used to legally define Blackness and became the basis for the American eugenics movement that resulted in tens of thousands of forced sterilizations of poor, mentally-ill Black women in the South.
"I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose, that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them?"
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of VA, Query IV (1781)
Dehumanization
This social system created an alliance between wealthy enslavers and poor white people, who did not reap the riches of forced labor but did benefit from the elevated social status of being white. This entanglement between economic motivation, societal beliefs, and scientific justification created from the very beginning a nation that was touched in every way by systemic racism.
Soon, racial distinctions were built into the legal system in overt ways, such as the Three-Fifths Compromise, "slave codes", and "fugitive slave laws." Because the southern states had been given credit for 3 out of every 5 enslaved persons in their population count to determine representation in the House, laws made prior to 1865 disproportionately served their interests in preserving slavery.
When enslavers began to feel threatened due to uprisings and the Underground Railroad, they used their political power to enforce tighter controls with militias. In order to preserve a working relationship between the states, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act as part of the Compromise of 1850 to require people in free states to return a person who had escaped slavery back to their captor. These laws taken together defined the enslaved as both humans and property.
"If America had just looked the world in the eye and said, 'We hold these people in slavery cause we need their labor, and we've got the power to do it.' Now that would have been much better because then when the power was gone, when slavery was over, it's over. But what we said was, 'There is something about these people.' By doing that it means, that when slavery is over, that rationalization for slavery remains...All through the late 19th century, there is this constant message hammered at poor white people: 'You may be poor, you may have miserable lives right now, but the thing that is most important, the thing we want you to focus on is the fact that you are white.'"
James Horton, RACE: The Power of an Illusion (2003)
Abolition and Emancipation
Even the rise of the Republican Party in the antebellum era included deep-seeded racism that existed far beyond the South. Whole groups opposed the "expansion of slavery" into the spoils of the Mexican-American War because they didn’t want to co-exist with Black people or share the job market with unpaid, forced labor. Abraham Lincoln, who personally believed the institution of slavery to be immoral, prioritized his role in maintaining the political union between the states over pushing for abolition.
As the war progressed, he pressed the issue of freedom more assertively but never acknowledged the equality of white and Black people. The actual emancipation of enslaved people was not achieved until the 13th Amendment was passed by Congress to extend freedom beyond areas controlled by the Union Army, the states ratified the amendment, and federal military troops were stationed in every former Confederate state to enforce it.
"Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.' With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
President Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address (1865)
Reconstructing White Supremacy
After the Civil War, Radical Republicans in Congress fought to oversee a federal Reconstruction plan in the South. If focused on enforcing the 13th-15th Amendments as the southern states openly violated them. They also created and funded the Freedman’s Bureau to set up schools and other social supports to help the formerly enslaved citizens. But no reparations were ever paid, and Black farmers became sharecroppers caught up in a rigged system and cycle of debt.
Unfortunately, federal Reconstruction efforts were largely abandoned after 1877. For decades, the 13th Amendment was undermined by the sharecropping system, debt peonage, and false imprisonment that could provide forced labor on chain gangs. The federal government would not enforce the 14th Amendment at the state level to overturn Jim Crow laws based on Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal” doctrine, which solidified segregation in schools, businesses, religious institutions, and all other aspects of society.
Black citizens were disenfranchised despite the 15th Amendment through gerrymandering to divide up Black voting blocks, KKK intimidation to scare off Black and white people from voting Republican and challenging societal norms, poll taxes that many Black families could not afford, and unfair literacy tests designed specifically to result in failure. Poor, uneducated white citizens were given an easier test or exempted altogether by the grandfather clause. Between Reconstruction and 1940, the percentage of Black men registered to vote in the South dropped from 90% to just three percent.
"Perhaps one of the most lasting myths about Reconstruction is that the 'forty acres and a mule' proposal was simply too radical to ever succeed. A comprehensive policy of post-war land reform would have served as the primary source for reparations among newly freedmen. Yet when the failure of land distribution among blacks is judged in the context of the simultaneously-implemented Homestead Acts, the reality of the situation is laid bare. While freedmen waited in vain for any type of recompense – for generations of brutality and violence and toil – millions of whites were given free land by the federal government. The problem was not the radical nature of land reform. The problem was race."
Keri Leigh Merritt, Race, Reconstruction, and Reparations (2016)