Race in the United States has a long history spanning from the beginning of racial separation to slavery to Jim Crow to the Black Lives Matter movement. Race has historically been used to separate people into different groups and has helped to describe and categorize people into groups based on skin color, physical features, and genetic heredity (Roediger n.d.). The U.S. created the idea of race early on in its history to justify the system of capitalism and forced labor (Roediger n.d.).
“The term “race,” used infrequently before the 1500s, was used to identify groups of people with a kinship or group connection. The modern-day use of the term “race” (identifying groups of people by physical traits, appearance, or characteristics) is a human invention.”
Roediger n.d.; 1
The notion that white people were smarter than people whose skin color was not white became widely accepted across the world and was used as the justification for enslaving people from Africa (Roediger n.d.). The idea of “white” was originally used in Europe to describe upper-class women who did not participate in any form of labor, yet has now gained a new definition. Colonists were the first ones to tie the words “white,” “race,” and “slave” together to describe people within the colonies (Roediger n.d.). Through this process, they were able to create a system that forced people into labor.
In the early history of the colonies forced labor was accomplished through both slaves and indentured servants, it was not until the mid to late 1600s that they finally passed laws that designated forced labor to be provided by exclusively people from Africa. Virginia passed a law that made a child’s status conditional on the mother, with the exploitation of slave women by white men that law made it almost certain that there would be an increase in slaves (Roediger n.d.). In the mid 19th century there was a push to make clear, through a “scientific” lens, that people from Africa were inferior to those of European descent and therefore should be slaves. This helped to embed in the minds of the white population that they were better than the Black community and that Blacks were inferior to them. During the Dred Scott v. Sandford case, the Supreme Court ruled that slaves were property and owners could not be deprived of their property (Roediger n.d.). This helped to continue the enslavement of people. Upon the abolition of slavery white society, mainly white Southerners looked for a way to continue using free labor through systems like sharecropping. When sharecropping became illegal they instituted the Jim Crow laws as another way to continue separating people based on their race. The Supreme Court then made it legal to separate people based on their race in the landmark decision of Plessy v. Ferguson, ruling on the principle of “separate but equal” (Roediger n.d.). These policies and changes in U.S. society helped to create the underlying ideas of race and the racial caste system within the United States.
