Race and racial inequality have powerfully shaped American history from its beginnings.
Americans like to think of the founding of the American colonies and, later, the United States, as
driven by the quest for freedom – initially, religious liberty and later political and economic
liberty. Yet, from the start, American society was equally founded on brutal forms of
domination, inequality and oppression which involved the absolute denial of freedom for slaves.
This is one of the great paradoxes of American history – how could the ideals of equality and
freedom coexist with slavery? We live with the ramifications of that paradox even today.
In this chapter we will explore the nature of racial inequality in America, both in terms of
its historical variations and contemporary realities. We will begin by clarifying precisely what
we mean by race, racial inequality and racism. We will then briefly examine the ways in which
racism harms many people within racially dominant groups, not just racially oppressed groups. It
might seem a little odd to raise this issue at the beginning of a discussion of racial inequality, for
it is surely the case that racial inequality is more damaging to the lives of people within the
oppressed group. We do this because we feel it is one of the critical complexities of racial
inequality and needs to be part of our understanding even as we focus on the more direct effects
of racism. This will be followed by a more extended discussion of the historical variations in the
forms of racial inequality and oppression in the United States. The chapter will conclude with a
discussion of the empirical realities today and prospects for the future.
This chapter will focus primarily on the experience of racial inequality of African-
Americans, although in the more historical section we will briefly discuss specific forms of racial
oppression of Native-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and Chinese-Americans. This focus on
African-Americans does not imply that the forms of racism to which other racial minorities have
been subjected are any less real. And certainly the nature of racial domination of these other
groups has also stamped the character of contemporary American society.
WHAT IS RACE?
Many people think of races as “natural” categories reflecting important biological differences
across groups of people whose ancestors came from different parts of the world. Since racial
classifications are generally hooked to observable physical differences between people, the
apparent naturalness of race seems obvious to most people. This conception reflects a
fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of racial classifications. Race is a social
category, not a biological one. While racial classifications generally use inherited biological
traits as criteria for classification, nevertheless how those traits are treated and how they are
translated into the categories we call “races” is defined by social conventions, not by biology.
In different times and places racial boundaries are drawn in very different ways. In the
U.S. a person is considered “Black” if they have any African ancestry. This extreme form of
binary racial classification reflects the so-called “one-drop rule” that became the standard system
of racial classification in the U.S. after the Civil War.
