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Race in the United States
8 articles on Race in the United States
Race, Theories Of
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 7307 Includes: Racial Science and Exclusion: 1895–1943. | The Great Transformation: 1944–1965. | Formal Equality and the End of Race? | BibliographyThough significant discussions of race and the meaning of racial differences proliferated throughout the nineteenth century, at the turn of the twentieth century large-scale, globally minded movements emerged that were dedicated to rethinking the meaning of race, while calling for racial equality. The dawn of the twentieth century marked the first meeting of one of these movements, the Pan-African Conference. Occurring on the heels of the first formal overseas colonial expedition by the United States—in the Philippines—and on the cusp of major political upheavals across the globe, this meeting foreshadowed the centrality of the concept of race to social and political life in the coming decades. It was at this first meeting in London in 1900 that W. E. B. Du Bois, perhaps the most influential African ...
Read full articleRace, Theories of
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 6150 Includes: Theology of Race: Single or Multiple Creations | Emerging “American” View of Race | View of Race in the Nineteenth Century | Great Chain of Being and the Hierarchy of Races | Biblical Explanations of Race | Multiple Creations, Multiple Adams, Multiple Races: Polygenetic Theories | Samuel George Morton: Ranking Races by Cranial Capacity | Charles Darwin and Race Theory | Lewis Henry Morgan: Synthesizing the Racial Hierarchy and Evolution | William Graham Sumner and Social Darwinism | BibliographyThe first African slaves in the New World were brought to the Caribbean in 1502. By the time of English settlement, in 1607, African slaves were found throughout Central and South America and in the Caribbean. In the earliest descriptions of European travelers, Africans were seen as biologically different in fundamental ways. For the most part these differences were the result of cultural factors, but Europeans almost always understood the dissimilarities as being rooted in “nature.” The Africans encountered by the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and English were almost all from West Africa, a location dominated by groups that had cultural mores quite different from those of European sailors. European explorers equated variation from their familiar cultural norms with biological inferiority, which they then also linked to differences in physical type. The skin pigmentation of the African populations encountered by European travelers was from the very beginning considered “black,” a label in most cases far from accurate. Prevailing European ...
Read full articleRace and the American Presidency
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 3806 Includes: Antebellum White House, 1788–1860 | From Emancipation to Jim Crow, 1860–1900 | Progressive Era, 1900–1920 | New Era, 1921–1933 | New Deal, 1933–1945 | Cold War, 1945–1961 | New Frontiers and Great Societies | Southern Strategies, 1969–1998“Our fathers brought forth on this continent,” Abraham Lincoln said on a great battlefield of the Civil War, “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Unfortunately, that proposition remained in doubt for the entire four-score and seven years before Gettysburg, and much of the period since.Thomas Jefferson's original draft of the nation's founding document, the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, included an assault on slavery that Southerners excised. The Founders who wrote the Constitution included nine specific protections for the South's peculiar institution. It ought not be a surprise that nine of the fifteen commanders-in-chief before Lincoln owned slaves; all five two-term presidents during the years 1789–1861ALyndon ...
Read full articleRace: An Interpretation
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 7017 Includes: Classical Greeks: Environmentalism | Ancient Hebrews and the Old Testament | Racialists and Concepts of Biological Heredity | Literary Representations of Racial Stereotypes | Elizabethan Theater | Victorian Literature | Race, Nation, and the Idea of Literature | American Literature in the 1900sStretch forth! stretch forth! from the south to the north,
These famous words were published in 1850 in a new journal called The Anglo-Saxon. The publication lasted only a year, but its tone is emblematic of an important development in the way educated Englishmen and women thought of themselves and of what it was that made them English. This development was itself part of a wider movement of ideas in Europe and North America. As heirs to the culture of the modern world, a culture so crucially shaped by the ideas that Tupper's poemThat ...
From the east to the west—stretch forth! stretch forth!
Strengthen thy stakes and lengthen thy cords—
The world is a tent for the world's true lords!
Break forth and spread over every place
The world is a world for the Saxon race!
Martin Tupper, “The Anglo-Saxon Race”
Read full articleRace as a Social Construction
Source: Black Women in America, Second Edition
Word Count: 10442 Includes: Slavery and Nation-Building | Scientific Racism | Evolution and Social Darwinism | Challenging Scientific Racism | Cultural Representations | Class, Appearance, and Identity | (Re)Constructing Race in the Twenty-First Century | BibliographyIn recent years, scholars have come to understand race not as a static, objective, or natural reality, but as a social construction. While human beings have exhibited tremendous physical variation for millennia, the meanings and significance attached to those differences are both culturally and historically specific, and constantly in flux. To be a woman or to be black has had a variety of connotations and expectations in different historical contexts, and across regional and class lines. Throughout American history, one's educational, political, and economic opportunities have largely been prescribed or circumscribed on the basis of gender and race, a matter of particular import for black women. As historian Deborah Gray White notes, "the" ...
Read full articleRace and Ethnicity
Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 3067 Includes: America's Indigenous Peoples and the Columbian Encounter. | English Colonization and Slavery. | Race in Theory, Law, and Social Practice. | Racial Ideas, Expansionism, and Immigration Policy. | Challenging the Primacy of Race.Race and ethnicity have always mattered in the American experience. But their meanings and actualizations have changed over time and space, suggesting that they are social, not scientific, categories. Neither fixed nor permanent, they are continually negotiated and renegotiated. Race and ethnicity, or supposed physical and cultural groupings, respectively, were not always so defined or distinguished. America's first peoples formed economic, political, and ethnic groupings by language, kinship, and religious belief. They created idealized hierarchies that favored their own group over others. These perceived commonalities and differences justified belief systems and practices, alliances and fractures, cooperation and exploitation that shifted as time passed and situations changed. ...
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Source: The Oxford Companion to American Law
Word Count: 5323 Includes: Race and Ethnicity in the Criminal Justice System.are social categories that have been embedded in American law throughout U.S. history. Although the ambiguous nature of these categories is recognized by society in general, many civil rights policies reflect these cognitive understandings. Numerous laws have sought to guarantee the rights of minorities, such as voting rights acts, fair housing laws, and others; many of the most contentious social issues revolve around the proper interpretation of equal protection of the laws, and the question of which groups ought to be considered protected.In the late nineteenth century race was treated as though it were a biological reality. European thinkers published works using pseudoscientific ideas to try to prove the fundamental inequality among races, including Arthur de Gobineau in Essay on the1853 ...
Read full articleRace, Concept of
Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 1315The term “race” with reference to human beings first appeared in English literature in the sixteenth century as a classifactory term with a meaning similar to “kind” or “type,” as in “a race of bishops” or “a race of saints. ” In the eighteenth century the term was more frequently applied to the diverse populations in England's American colonies: the Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans. Here race evolved as a ranking system reflecting the dominant English attitudes toward these populations. Conquered Indians were kept separate and apart from Europeans, often exploited, or moved off their lands for new settlers. Slaveryfor Africans and their descendants was gradually institutionalized over the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and most Africans were identified primarily as property and sources of wealth. ...
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