9781422272701

When we think of racism in America, what comes to mind is the ideology that Black Americans (and other minorities) are somehow “less than” their White counterparts. This is, in part, due to centuries of White people maintaining control and power in the United States, just as White Europeans did in the parts of the world they acquired during the Age of Imperialism. For Black Americans in particular, slavery was the manifestation of White control over the “other,” that those of White European descent were biologically superior and thus destined to rule over other races. The end of the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery gave birth to new attempts to create a system in the South to keep newly freed Black Americans and their descendants in a state of legal inferiority. The battle for civil rights in the mid-twentieth century resulted in legislation preventing the perpetuation of such oppression. But racism has continued to influence multiple areas in which Black Americans today struggle to obtain equal treatment under the law, achieve economic mobility, and access a higher quality of life through education, employment, and housing. the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. The British colonies on the Eastern coast of North America had, to this point, remained free of chattel slavery , even as British holdings in the Caribbean utilized the practice. But with the arrival of those twenty or so enslaved Africans, the legacy of slavery in America began in earnest. By the outbreak of the American Revolution, every colony allowed for the existence of slavery, particularly in the South, where the owners of large plantations raising labor-intensive cash crops depended on slave labor to

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Overview of Slavery and Racial Discrimination in America