African American Discrimination

Introduction

RACIAL DISCRIMINATION, also known as racism, is the practice of limiting people's rights and privileges based on their phenotypic appearance as members of particular groups called races (Molina, 663-685). Some common racial categories are black, white, yellow, red, Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid, and racial determinants can include skin color, nose shape, and hair texture. Often ethnic affiliation, family lineage, national origin, and cultural practices are also used to determine race. It is important to note that while the impact of racial discrimination is concrete, the scientific basis for human racial classification is spurious—all people share a common origin and belong to only one race, human (Rossi, 954-959).

Racial classification and discrimination are relatively new ideas within the scope of world history and are the result of an intentional and systematic process developed by Europeans and European Americans meant to justify their enslavement and colonization of Africans, Asians, and Native Americans over four centuries beginning in the 1500s (North, Smith, 639-647).

Much of what we consider modern racial discrimination is rooted in European and American intellectual thought dating from the 17th through the 19th centuries. British scholar Martin Bernal has shown that as 18th-century Europe became more powerful through its increased economic and industrial strength and its expansion into and exploitation of other continents, it also became more chauvinistic. Many intellectuals asserted that by progressing later in history, European-descended civilizations were necessarily superior to prior civilizations in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa because they were able to improve upon them (Rossi, 954-959).

Further, this idea of progress became intertwined with racist thought and expressed in the writings of people such as Oliver Goldsmith, a popular writer of the 1770s, who wrote that “those arts which might have had their invention among other races of mankind have come to their perfection [in Europe].” From the 1650s on, scholars and writers like John Locke, David Hume, Kristophe Heumann, C. Meiners, and J.F. Blumenbach espoused racist theories justifying the exploitation and murder of non-Europeans (North, Smith, 639-647). Blumenbach, a natural history professor at the University of Gottingen in Germany, claimed that white or Caucasian was the first and most talented race from which all others had degenerated (Blumenbach was the first to publicize the term Caucasian in 1795).

Types of chauvinism are characteristic of many civilizations throughout world history. This European development, however, is the first time that race, rather than religion, geography, or kingdom, played the central feature. Even though some writers, such as Winthrop Jordan and Carl Degler, assert that racial discrimination is an ancient tendency, the historical record clearly indicates that prior to the 17th century, advanced civilizations were widely recognized and credited for their achievements whether in India, Europe, China, or Africa. Race, then, was a mechanism by which a modernizing Europe and America could fabricate their superiority on the basis of an exclusive and relatively permanent feature—white skin (Whaley, 327-338). By organizing race into an hierarchy with white at the top, members of the white race could believe that they were ...