9781422272701

AMERICA’S “PECULIAR INSTITUTION” The story of slavery and racial discrimination in America began in 1619, when the first African slaves arrived at Jamestown, Virginia. Prior to this, the transatlantic slave trade had prospered for decades, due to the demand for cheap manual labor in Portuguese and Spanish colonies in

UNDERSTANDING RACISM

Racism is the belief that human beings can be divided into separate groups (races) based on certain biological characteristics, and that there are differences between those races in matters of physicality, mental ability, and so on. This belief has no basis in scientific fact; it is a cultural invention. Yet the impact of race theory on human society has been far reaching. Racism, when put into practice, serves to identify a particular group of people as inferior and subservient to another group. With the establishment of the African slave trade, White Europeans, and later White Americans, used the belief in the racial superiority of White people to justify the enslavement of Black Africans and their descendants. In many parts of the world and in multiple historic eras, the concept of race has resulted in public and governmental policies that have perpetuated systemic racism. In South Africa, for example, the apartheid system developed in the early 1900s, forcing Black South Africans to exist in a society in which they were second-class citizens.

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CONTEMPORARY ISSUES: REPARATIONS FOR SLAVERY