race classification act essay

Apartheid Museum

• [email protected]
• We are open Wednesday to Sundays, 09:00 to 17:00 and most public holidays.

Race Classification

Racial classification was the foundation of all apartheid laws. It placed individuals in one of four groups: 'native', 'coloured', 'Asian' or 'white'.

In order to illustrate everyday reality under apartheid, visitors to the museum are arbitrarily classified as either white or non-white. Once classified, visitors are permitted entry to the museum only through the gate allocated to their race group. Identity documents were the main tool used to implement this racial divide, and many of these documents are on display in this exhibit.

Quick Facts

• From 1950 South Africans were classified on the basis of their ‘race’.
• People were classified into one of four groups: ‘native’, ‘coloured’, ‘Asian’ or ‘white’.
• By 1966, 11 million people had been classified under the Population Registration Act of 1950.

Ready to explore the exhibition? Secure your spot by booking your ticket here!

Permanent exhibition.

• 1. The Pillars of the Constitution
• | 2. Race Classification |
• 3. Journeys

• Teaching Resources
• Upcoming Events
• On-demand Events

Introduction: Early Apartheid: 1948-1970

• Social Studies
• Democracy & Civic Engagement
• facebook sharing
• email sharing

Table of contents:

Triumph of the National Party

• Science, God and Race

Many Nations

The passbook system, the defiance campaign, the freedom charter, women protest, the sharpeville massacre, the rivonia trial, shut down at home, organizing overseas.

The roots of apartheid can be found in the history of colonialism in South Africa and the complicated relationship among the Europeans that took up residence, but the elaborate system of racial laws was not formalized into a political vision until the late 1940s. That system, called apartheid (“apartness”), remained in place until the early 1990s and set the country apart, eventually making South Africa a pariah state shunned by much of the world.

Having aggressively promoted an ideology of Afrikaner nationalism for a decade, the National Party won South Africa’s 1948 election by promising to clamp down on non-white groups. Once in office, the National Party promptly began to institute racial laws and regulations it called  apartheid  (a word that means “apartness” in Afrikaans). Led by Daniel Malan, a former pastor in the Dutch Reformed Church turned politician, the National Party described apartheid in a pamphlet produced for the election as “a concept historically derived from the experience of the established White population of the country, and in harmony with such Christian principles as justice and equity. It is a policy which sets itself the task of preserving and safeguarding the racial identity of the White population of the country; of likewise preserving and safeguarding the identity of the indigenous peoples as separate racial groups.” 1

• 1 D. W. Kruger, ed., South African Parties and Policies 1910–1960 (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1960), available at Politicsweb, accessed July 29, 2015.

Apartheid Era Sign

The Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (passed in 1953) led to signs such as the one shown above. The Act prohibited people of different races from using the same public amenities.

By 1948, segregation of the races had long been the norm. But as journalist Allister Sparks noted, apartheid, drawing on racist anthropology and racist theology, “substituted enforcement for convention. What happened automatically before was now codified in law and intensified when possible. . . . [Racism] became a matter of doctrine, of ideology, of theologized faith infused with a special fanaticism, a religious zeal.” 1

Religion was an important aspect of Afrikaner identity. Most Afrikaners were members of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa, a strict and conservative Calvinist church that promoted the belief that the Afrikaners were a new “chosen people” to whom God had given South Africa. Journalist Terry Bell explained the role of religion in the outlook of those who supported the National Party: “Afrikaners [saw themselves] as players in the unfolding of the Book of Revelations, upholding the light of Christian civilization against an advancing wall of darkness. . . . It was God’s will that the ‘Afrikaner nation’ . . . linked by language and a narrow Calvinism, had been placed on the southern tip of the African continent.” 2  As a result, they saw themselves as a select group whose right to the land was greater than any other group’s.

The new National Party administration offered a stark view of ethnic categories. As laid out in the Population Registration Act of 1950, these categories were as follows: “white” (“a person who in appearance obviously is, or who is generally accepted as a white person, but does not include a person who, although in appearance obviously a white person, is generally accepted as a coloured person”), “native” (“a person who in fact is or is generally accepted as a member of any aboriginal race or tribe of Africa”), and “coloured” (“a person who is not a white person or a native”). 3  “Indian” was soon added as a fourth group. The groups were not only portrayed as distinct and fundamentally different; drawing on principles of Social Darwinism, they were ranked hierarchically in terms of supposed intellectual capacity and other attributes. The white population stood at the pinnacle of the South African racial hierarchy, with the National Party ideology claiming that they should dominate the other groups because of their natural superiority. Their control of the state guaranteed whites superior access to education, healthcare, employment, and housing. “Natives,” or black South Africans, stood at the very bottom of this steep hierarchy—a necessity in the eyes of Afrikaners, who believed not only that their livelihoods depended on depriving black South Africans of land, voting rights, the right to marry freely, and, above all, the right to participate freely in the labor market but also that Africans were not as deserving as whites of these privileges. Indian and “coloured” groups were “ranked” above black South Africans, allowing them some employment and mobility privileges denied to black South Africans yet still making them subservient to the white South African population.

Science, God, and Race

The triumph of the National Party pushed to the forefront of South African racism the ideas fostered by church leaders and scholars in Afrikaner institutions. During the 1930s, scientific books and articles, some written by scholars at Stellenbosch University and the University of Pretoria, lent credence to the idea that white populations were of superior intelligence to nonwhite groups. The Dutch Reformed Church, whose congregations had been segregated since 1857, also preached that, following the Tower of Babel, God had ordained that different cultures be distinct and sovereign. The church’s ideas combined with the pseudoscience of race to give rise to a secular theology of Christian nationalism. If groups were to develop as God intended, they needed to live separately.

Because they conceived of blacks and whites as fundamentally different, Afrikaners concluded that contact between the groups fostered conflict. Each group would prosper most if left to develop on its own; to impose segregation was to protect and promote black culture, they argued. The 1947 National Party campaign pamphlet explained:

The party holds that a positive application of apartheid between the white and non-white racial groups and the application of the policy of separation also in the case of the non-White racial groups is the only sound basis on which the identity and the survival of each race can be assured and by means of which each race can be stimulated to develop in accordance with its own character, potentialities and calling. Hence inter marriage between the two groups will be prohibited. Within their own areas the non-white communities will be afforded full opportunity to develop, implying the establishment of their own institutions and social services, which will enable progressive non-Whites to take an active part in the development of their own peoples. The policy of our country should envisage total apartheid as the ultimate goal of a natural process of separate development. 4

The reading  Apartheid Policies  offers a more extended explanation of the ideas behind apartheid, as publicly articulated by the party.

A contradiction arose, however, because if black South African labor had been subtracted from the white South African economy, the latter would have immediately collapsed. While the theory of apartheid argued that the races should be kept separate, the economy of the South African state depended heavily on black South African labor. Therefore, the apartheid state had to permit black South African laborers to come and go between white and black territories.

After the National Party took power, it implemented a series of laws designed both to separate each of the country’s racial groups and to divide and weaken the black South African population and allow for the easy exploitation of its labor. The Population Registration Act created a national system of racial classification that gave every citizen a single identification number and racial label that determined exactly what privileges this person would be able to enjoy. Where one could live, whether one had to carry a passbook to travel, and what sort of education one could receive depended on one’s racial classification. While white South Africans enjoyed every conceivable right, black South Africans could not vote for South African officials, and coloured South Africans could only vote for white representatives—they could not run for office themselves. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 banned interracial marriage, while the Immorality Act of 1950 “prohibited sex between whites and non-whites.”

The Group Areas Act of 1950 was the Malan government’s first attempt to increase the separation between white and black urban residential areas. The law was both a continuation of earlier laws of segregation and a realization of an apartheid ideal that cultures should be allowed to develop separately. The law declared many historically black urban areas officially white. The Native Resettlement Act of 1954 authorized the government to force out longtime residents and knock down buildings to make room for white-owned homes and businesses. Whole neighborhoods were destroyed under the authority of this act. For example, on February 9, 1955, Prime Minister Malan sent in 2,000 police officers to remove the 60,000 residents of Sophiatown, a vibrant African neighborhood in central Johannesburg. Black South African residents were forcibly resettled in the Meadowlands neighborhood of Soweto, where they were expected to move into houses without electricity, water, or toilets. In Durban, Indian neighborhoods faced a similar fate. City centers became enclaves for the white South African population, while black, coloured, and Indian South Africans were relegated to townships at the periphery of the urban areas, which were often far removed from centers of employment and resources such as hospitals and recreation spaces. Generally, the townships were intended to contain the black South African population by restricting movement through urban planning while ensuring that black South Africans had permission to leave these areas in order to work.

• 1 Allister Sparks, The Mind of South Africa: The Story of the Rise and Fall of Apartheid (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2006), 190.
• 2 Terry Bell, Unfinished Business: South Africa, Apartheid and Truth (London: Verso, 2003), 23.
• 3 Population Registration Act (1950) , Wikisource entry, accessed July 27, 2015.
• 4 D. W. Kruger, ed., South African Parties and Policies 1910–1960 (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1960), available at Politicsweb, accessed July 29, 2015.

Bantustans in South Africa

With the passing of the Bantu Authorities Act in 1951, the apartheid set in motion the creation of ten bantustans in South Africa, illustrated in this map.

Apartheid laws treated black South Africans not as citizens of South Africa but rather as members of assigned ethnic communities. The Bantu Authorities Act (1951) and the Bantu Self-Government Act (1959) created ten “homelands” for black South Africans, known as Bantustans, and established new authorities in the Bantustans. While the apartheid state portrayed the Bantustans as a system that offered black South Africans independence, giving the appearance of self-government, the leaders of the homelands were appointed by the apartheid state. Furthermore, black South Africans were assigned these ethnic identities and corresponding “homelands” even if they did not see this as a central aspect of their identity. Black South Africans were essentially stripped of their South African citizenship.

By making black South Africans citizens of Bantustans, the government deflected any possible criticisms of refusing them the right to vote in South Africa. But this arrangement also very deliberately created a system of migrant labor. Since the homeland areas, which were mostly rural and underdeveloped, offered inhabitants few employment opportunities, most had to search for work in cities and live temporarily in townships. Given the desperate situation in the homelands, the apartheid state was ensured of a regular source of cheap labor for white-owned businesses and homes.

Although they were said by apartheid authorities to bear a historical association with the different kingdoms, Bantustans were scattered around the fringes of the country without any consideration for the well-being of their residents. KwaZulu in Natal, for example, was divided into many pieces, separated by large areas designated as white. The apartheid government reserved urban areas, the most desirable farmland, and regions rich in natural resources for white South Africans, while it allocated the least arable land for the Bantustans. Although black South Africans constituted nearly 70% of the population, only 13% of South Africa’s territory was allocated to the Bantustans. The reading  A Wife’s Lament  offers a look at how the creation of the homelands affected black South African families.

Girl Walking to School, Mthatha

A child walks to school through the barren village of Qunu, South Africa, located just outside of the town of Mthatha.

Dividing the black South African population into Bantustans was in part intended to break the solidarity that had formed between groups of black South Africans in the face of white oppression. By cultivating a false sense of “tribal” belonging, the government sought to reduce the black South African population to many small, ineffective groups, channeling discontent from resistance to apartheid into internal bickering.

A decade after the rise of the National Party, many black South Africans found themselves effectively stateless. They could only enter white areas to work, and they needed documents authorizing them to do so.

By the middle of the twentieth century, vast numbers of black South Africans commuted daily from Bantustans and townships to the white areas where they worked. Various forms of internal passports had existed in South Africa since the early twentieth century, but the apartheid government expanded and formalized the pass system. Designed to satisfy both the need for black labor and the need to protect white advantages, “pass” laws required every black male over the age of 16 to carry a passbook, which contained a photograph, fingerprints, a racial classification, place of work, and the bearer’s police record.

Additionally, the passbook had to have a current signature from an employer and proof that the bearer had paid income taxes. The passbook bureaucracy was so convoluted that few people were able keep their records current, providing authorities with an excuse for detaining black South African men at will. Anyone living in a black township on the outskirts of a white city who did not possess appropriate papers was effectively treated as an illegal alien and subject to arrest. Those found in violation were sometimes imprisoned, often forced to pay fines, and sometimes sent back to their homelands. Eventually, black South African women were also required to carry passes, an act that had a tragic impact on the lives of tens of thousands of families who were not allowed to live together. Only a few of these women with formal salaried employment were able to secure the necessary passes and keep them current, thereby satisfying the authorities’ requirements to be legally living in the same house as their husbands. Most black South African women were forced to remain in the homelands, raising their children and eking out a living off the land while their husbands worked in the cities or on white-owned farms.

Most black South Africans were obliged to leave “white areas” by sunset. At the country’s many checkpoints and roadblocks, black South Africans were at the mercy of the police and could summarily be stopped, arrested, and deported to homelands. Thousands of black South Africans were forced to break the law on a daily basis as they searched for work or attempted to keep their families together.

Police carried out daily raids on black residences, bursting in at midnight, forcing residents to show their passes, and arresting those out who did not have them. Police brutality was rife; hundreds of thousands of black South Africans were arrested, thousands disappeared from their homes without a trace, and hundreds lost their lives to the guns and batons of law enforcement officials. The government recruited black South Africans to join the police force and serve as informants, torturers, and, in some cases, executioners, and for a variety of reasons (bribes, economic pressures, and scare tactics), some black South Africans helped the government enforce apartheid. The reading  Experiencing Apartheid  gives an account of how the draconian enforcement of apartheid laws could affect black South Africans.

As apartheid laws were implemented, South Africa’s black leaders looked for a way to protest the changes imposed by the minority white government. Denied the right to vote, they had to find other means of expressing opposition outside the formal political system. From 1950 to 1952, the African National Congress (ANC) organized mass actions, which included boycotts, civil disobedience, demonstrations, and strikes.

A group of resisters proudly pose after their release from prison in Durban during the Defiance Campaign Against Unjust Laws, 1952.

Launched in April 1952, on the 300th anniversary of the arrival of the first Dutch colonists, this Defiance Campaign became the largest campaign of civil disobedience in South Africa’s history up to that point. It was also the first multiracial mass-resistance campaign, and its unified leadership included representatives from the African National Congress, the South African Indian Congress, and the Coloured People’s Congress. Together with other groups, these organizations formed the Congress Alliance, which forged a multiracial front against the implementation of apartheid. 1 Following heavily attended demonstrations in a number of towns, defiance of the newly erected racial laws commenced on June 26, 1953. Ten thousand volunteers, organized by the leader of the ANC Youth League, 34-year-old Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, were instructed to enter forbidden areas without passes, use entrances designated “Europeans only,” and occupy “white only” counters and waiting rooms. 2  These violations were designed to flood the prison system, rendering law enforcement impossible.

• 1 For Nelson Mandela’s description of the first months of the campaign and the unity between the different groups, see “ We Defy—10,000 Volunteers Protest Against Unjust Laws ,” August 30, 1952, African National Congress website, accessed July 27, 2015.
• 2 Reader’s Digest Illustrated History of South Africa: The Real Story , 3rd ed. (Cape Town: The Reader’s Digest Association Limited, 1994), 385.

Nelson Mandela, 1937

A young Nelson Mandela poses for a photograph in Umtata shortly before moving to Fort Beaufort to attend Healdtown Comprehensive School.

A decade later, Mandela reflected on the goals and strategies behind the Defiance Campaign:

Even after 1949, the ANC remained determined to avoid violence. At this time, however, there was a change from the strictly constitutional means of protest which had been employed in the past. The change was embodied in a decision which was taken to protest against apartheid legislation by peaceful, but unlawful, demonstrations against certain laws. Pursuant to this policy the ANC launched the Defiance Campaign, in which I was placed in charge of volunteers. This campaign was based on the principles of passive resistance. More than 8,500 people defied apartheid laws and went to jail. Yet there was not a single instance of violence in the course of this campaign on the part of any defier. I and nineteen colleagues were convicted for the role which we played in organising the campaign, but our sentences were suspended mainly because the judge found that discipline and non-violence had been stressed throughout. 1

The government lashed out, arresting over 8,000 South Africans and handing out stiff penalties and long prison sentences to those who had broken apartheid laws. It adopted the Public Safety Act (1953), which allowed the president to suspend all existing laws, stripping away basic civil liberties. “The government saw the campaign,” Mandela later recalled, “as a threat to its security and its policy of apartheid. They regarded civil disobedience not as a form of protest but as a crime, and were perturbed by the growing partnership between Africans and Indians. Apartheid was designed to divide racial groups, and we showed that different groups could work together. The prospect of a united front between Africans and Indians, between moderates and radicals, greatly worried them.” 2

While the Defiance Campaign lost momentum after a few months, and it did not achieve many concessions from the government, it was a turning point for South Africa. For the liberation movement, it was the first mass campaign, swelling the membership ranks of the ANC from just 7,000 to 100,000 and helping to transform the group from an elite organization into a mass movement. 3

In early 1955, the ANC organized a listening campaign, in which they sent out 50,000 volunteers to talk with people across the country about their political hopes for South Africa. In June 1955, the ANC, along with several other anti-apartheid political organizations—the South African Indian Congress, the Coloured People’s Congress, the South African Congress of Trade Unions, and the Congress of Democrats—developed a set of political demands that drew on the results of these interviews. The “Freedom Charter,” as it became known, called for a nonracial South Africa, in which people of all races would have equal rights and would share in the country’s wealth.

The Freedom Charter became the political agenda for the ANC, shaping its actions over the next several decades. The charter called for rights for all South Africans, not just black South Africans, and this concept of nonracialism became an important principle behind the ANC’s approach to political change. The Freedom Charter served as the guiding document for the ANC in its struggle against apartheid and beyond, as its nonracialism ultimately became a basis for ANC policies after the fall of apartheid. The reading The  Freedom Charter  includes the text of this foundational document.

Although their role has often been overlooked in historical accounts of resistance to apartheid, black South African women played an important part in opposing the system of racial segregation. (White and “coloured” women were part of the resistance, but the vast majority were black South Africans.) In the early 1900s, black South African women successfully resisted proposed legislation that would require them to carry passbooks. After a setback in 1918, women organized again to end the practice altogether under the leadership of Charlotte Maxeke, a gifted singer, social worker, and activist—a hero of the early days of protest. She was called “the mother of African freedom in this country” by A. B. Xuma, who served as the president of the ANC in the 1940s. 4

• 1 Nelson Mandela, “ An Ideal for Which I Am Prepared to Die ,” The Guardian , April 22, 2007, accessed July 27, 2015.
• 2 Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1994), 116.
• 3 For a full and vivid description of the campaign, see Monty Naicker, “The Defiance Campaign Recalled,” June 30, 1972, African National Congress website, accessed July 27, 2015.
• 4 Andile Mnyandu, “ Charlotte Maxeke ,” eThekwini Municipality website, accessed July 27, 2015.

Woman Showing Her Passbook

An unidentified black South African woman defiantly shows her passbook.

The multiracial Federation of South African Women was formed in the 1950s, representing hundreds of thousands of women. Together with the ANC Women’s League, the federation organized many local demonstrations against the pass laws, culminating in the March on Pretoria. On August 9, 1956, about 20,000 women peacefully gathered in front of the city’s Union Buildings. They stood in silence for 30 minutes and then, breaking the quiet, chanted a call to the prime minister: “Wathint’ abafazi, wathint’ imbokodo!” (Now that you have touched the women, you have struck a rock!) Alerted to the protest ahead of time, the prime minister, J. G. Strijdom, had slipped out of town. Before they concluded their protest, activists left on the prime minister’s door a petition bearing the signatures of 100,000 women. Their chant became the slogan for future women’s protests. The reading  Women Rise Up against Apartheid and Change the Movement  features a firsthand account of the 1956 women’s march.

By the late 1950s, a growing number of activists questioned the tactics of the African National Congress. The young founders of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), formed in 1959, believed that only an all-black African organization, in league with anti-colonial Africans throughout the continent, could adopt the forceful posture necessary to overcome apartheid. The time had come, these firebrands believed, to reclaim the land stolen by whites. In his inaugural speech, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, head of the PAC, outlined their approach:

[W]e reject both apartheid and so-called multi-racialism as solutions of our socio-economic problems. . . . To us the term “multi-racialism” implies that there are such basic insuperable differences between the various national groups here that the best course is to keep them permanently distinctive in a kind of democratic apartheid. That to us is racialism multiplied, which probably is what the term connotes. We aim, politically, at government of the Africans by the Africans, for the Africans, everybody who owes his only loyalty to Afrika and who is prepared to accept the democratic rule of an African majority being regarded as an African. 1

Questioning the effectiveness of nonviolence against apartheid, the PAC set up a military wing, Poqo, that was feared by the white establishment.

The PAC announced to authorities that it would lead a peaceful demonstration against pass laws in the township of Sharpeville on March 21, 1960. Some 5,000 protesters gathered in the town center and then marched toward the police station to turn themselves in for defying pass laws. 2  Around midday, the police panicked and opened fire on the demonstrators, killing 69 people and wounding another 180. Most were shot in the back as they fled.

Black South African leaders called for a day of mourning and a “stay-at-home” strike on March 28, 1960. Hundreds of thousands of black South Africans did not show up for work that day, making it the first successful national strike in the nation’s history. Marches took place in Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town; the largest included a group of 30,000 who marched from Langa to Cape Town, led by 23-year-old Philip Kgosana. Fearing that black protests might spread, the government acted decisively in the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre. It declared a state of emergency and arrested more than 11,000 people, including the leaders of both the ANC and the PAC. On April 8, the government banned both organizations. This put an abrupt end to the protests and ushered in a period of harsh repression that lasted for more than a decade.

During the 1960s, the government intensified its policies against the anti-apartheid movement by severely restricting the ability of the movement’s leaders to speak in public and to mobilize the population. The government went on to scrap what few rights non-white workers had, including the rights to organize, bargain, and strike, and it also intensified efforts to shut down surviving black urban neighborhoods and move the black population to the townships and homelands.

Although officially banned, the ANC continued to function clandestinely. The young leadership of the ANC, having seen their hopes for change dashed so violently, began to discuss a new approach to resistance. Despite opposition from the old guard, in 1961 the young upstarts prevailed: while there would never be official ANC approval, the creation of an armed wing was tacitly accepted. Named Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation,” known as MK), the clandestine group had Nelson Mandela as its commander.

Such a group needed new skills and new partners. Mandela and the other militant ANC members formed an alliance with the South African Communist Party, a multiracial political organization with ties to the Soviet Union that had been banned in 1950 but remained active underground, working primarily to support the interests of workers. They based MK operations at a farm in Rivonia, not far from Johannesburg. Setting up a network of operatives committed to terror permitted MK, over a year and a half, to carry out approximately 200 attacks on government facilities. By January 1962, Mandela had traveled to Algeria, where he learned the basics of guerrilla warfare from members of that nation’s National Liberation Front. A fortnight after his return to South Africa, he was arrested on the charges of inciting workers to strike and leaving the country without a passport. A year later, Mandela’s MK comrades were arrested at their Rivonia training camp.

In 1963, three years after the terror of the Sharpeville massacre carried out by government forces, the Rivonia Trial began with the government seeking to accuse its opponents of fomenting violence. Ten defendants, including six black Africans, three white Jews, and the son of an Indian immigrant, were charged with sabotage and attempting to violently overthrow the government of South Africa.

During the trial, the defendants decided not to deny the charge of sabotage. They wanted the world to know what they had done and why. Their lawyers expressed misgivings about their decision, because it meant that they could be put to death for treason. But the revolutionaries felt that they had to take the risk, using the trial to make their positions known to every person in South Africa.

When he took the stand at the Pretoria Supreme Court, Mandela described his personal journey within the resistance movement, explaining the reasoning behind the adoption of a militant approach. (The reading  Mandela on Trial  includes the text of this testimony.) The prosecutor attempted to prove that the group, which he labeled communist, was plotting to overthrow the government of South Africa. He played on Afrikaner fears of Soviet revolutionary plots. The government had long presented itself as a true ally of the West, securing generous financial and military support—a position unusual among African states, many of which adopted socialism as a reaction against the colonial powers they had thrown off.

When the trial ended in June 1964, two men had been acquitted. Six of the remaining eight, including Mandela, were found guilty on all counts and sentenced to life in prison.

In the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre and the government crackdown that followed, the ANC leadership charged Oliver Tambo, the organization's deputy president, with the task of beginning to organize overseas. With protest nearly impossible within the country and so many top ANC leaders in prison, Tambo looked for new ways to fight against the apartheid regime. Making use of a home base in London, he lobbied international leaders to speak out against the brutality in his homeland. Almost immediately, Tambo and British anti-apartheid movement activists organized to have South Africa removed from the British Commonwealth, an intergovernmental organization made up of countries that were formerly part of the British Empire—a move that succeeded in 1961. At the same time, activists began to lobby against South Africa in the United Nations, winning a 1962 vote at the UN General Assembly for a trade ban on South Africa. A partial arms ban followed a year later. Further international pressure against South Africa’s discriminatory policies came from the International Olympic Committee, which first suspended South Africa from participating in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and then formally banned the country from the Olympics in 1970. The ANC, with Tambo’s leadership, eventually set up 27 overseas missions.

However, diplomacy was only one part of the strategy. In 1965, the countries of Tanzania and Zambia agreed to let the ANC’s unofficial armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), set up paramilitary training camps. Under the leadership of Abongz Mbede and Joe Slovo, a South African Jew whose family emigrated from Lithuania, the MK sought to bring what they called an “armed struggle” to South Africa. In the late 1960s, though, South Africa was surrounded by neighbors that were allies of the apartheid government, making it difficult for fighters to make it into the country. An official history of the ANC describes the situation:

The ANC consultative conference at Morogoro, Tanzania in 1969 looked for solutions to this problem. . . .The Morogoro Conference called for an all-round struggle. Both armed struggle and mass political struggle had to be used to defeat the enemy. But the armed struggle and the revival of mass struggle depended on building ANC underground structures within the country. A fourth aspect of the all-round struggle was the campaign for international support and assistance from the rest of the world. These four aspects were often called the four pillars of struggle. The non-racial character of the ANC was further consolidated by the opening up of the ANC membership to non-Africans. 3

• 1 “ Robert Sobukwe Inaugural Speech, April 1959 ,” African National Congress website, accessed June 2018.
• 2 David James Smith, Young Mandela: The Revolutionary Years (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010), 210.
• 3 “ A Brief History of the African National Congress ,” African National Congress website, accessed June 2018.

How to Cite This Reading

Facing History & Ourselves, “ Introduction: Early Apartheid: 1948-1970 ”, last updated August 3, 2018.

You might also be interested in…

10 questions for the future: student action project, 10 questions for the present: parkland student activism, the union as it was, radical reconstruction and the birth of civil rights, expanding democracy, voting rights in the united states, my part of the story: exploring identity in the united states, the struggle over women’s rights, equality for all, protesting discrimination in bristol, how to read the news like a fact checker, the devastation of war, inspiration, insights, & ways to get involved.

• Society and Politics
• Art and Culture
• Biographies
• Publications

Grade 9 - Term 3: Turning points in South African History, 1960, 1976 and 1990

Turning points in modern South African History since 1948&

In 1948 South Africa held a general election which was to be decided by the white population of the country. A manifesto outlined how Apartheid would be implemented in practice which was enforced by the National Party (NP) when they won the election. The focus of this lesson will be on some of the key turning points in South African history, including the coming of apartheid in 1948 and non-violent resistance to apartheid in the 1950s.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights after World War II

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), also known as the Magna Carta, was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948. Due to the experience and effects of the Second World War, the international community vowed to prevent the atrocities and conflicts that occurred during the Second World War to take place again. After approximately six million Jews, Gypsies homosexuals and people with various disabilities were exterminated, the idea of Human rights grew and there was a need to protect every inpidual from these heinous crimes.The United Nations was born from various governments with the principle aim to bolster international peacE and prevent crime and conflict. World leaders then decided to codify these rights that are attributed to each inpidual within a single document, hence the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This document aimed to be the fundamental document of all countries with regard to human rights and strove to secure these rights to all inpiduals.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights captured the international community’s need to guarantee that no one would ever be unjustly denied life, freedom, food, shelter and nationality; as occurred during World War II. The Commission of Human Rights was established within the United Nations which laid out the basic fundamental rights and freedoms as proclaimed in the Charter. One of the most significant aspects of the UDHR is legitimization of the notion that how a government treats its citizens is, especially after World War II, an international concern, and not just a domestic issue. The importance of the UDHR can be seen in the fact that some of the principles have been adopted into national constitutions. 

In its preamble and in Article 1, the Declaration unequivocally proclaims the inherent rights of all human beings: “Disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people...All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”

The Declaration of Human Rights is the most universal human rights document in existence, delineating the thirty fundamental rights that form the basis for a democratic society.

Definition of racism

According to the Merriam Webster Dictionary definition, racism can be described as the “poor treatment of or violence against people because of their race”, and it supports the notion that “some races of people are better than others”. Throughout history race has been associated with the belief that it is a primary determinant of human traits, and it has played a significant factor in the way that power relations occur. Below follows two different discourses regarding the definition and understanding of racism throughout history, as well as South African history.

Human evolution and our common ancestry

Human Evolution describes the extensive process of change where people originated from apelike creatures. Aspects of Human Evolution has been proved by scientific evidence and one of the the main findings that forms the fundamental basis of Evolution is that physical and behavioural traits, which are shared by all humans, originated from these apelike ancestors and have evolved for approximately six million years. 

Apartheid and the myth of ‘race’

The construct can be seen as a highly notorious term, despite it having no physical basis. This term was, however, heavily used in South Africa’s pre- democracy phase, Apartheid. During this period between 1948 and 1994, race was used as a measure to categorize and distinguish people from each other, and determined their position within society. To be more specific, this system categorized people on the basis of their skin colour. All aspects of society were pided to facilitate the complete pision of all race groups. Certain activities and privileges were only reserved for certain people of a specific race. In short, Apartheid was the system during which Africans were legally, socially, politically and economically disenfranchised while the National Party governed South Africa. It is a fact that in any society, race is never an objective, biological characteristic; race is a socially created construct. 

Apartheid, literally meaning (if translated into Afrikaans) “to be in a state of being apart”, was further facilitated by institutionalized Apartheid laws, which further dictated the everyday lives of South Africans. These laws determined where blacks would stay, work, and even who they would marry. During modern times, the indicators of the pision of people are class, status, education, etc. During Apartheid, race was the only aspect that pided society.

1948 National Party and Apartheid 

Racial segregation before Apartheid 

Before the official institutionalisation of Apartheid in 1948, some historians saw it as a complex development that started during the 20th century which was linked to the evolution of South African Capitalism. After the Mineral Revolution took place in South Africa, cheap labour became widely used (which was advocated by Cecil John Rhodes), which the dominating notion that Black labour was cheaper to use in mines and on farms. It is also believed that Apartheid was an outcome of earlier racial prejudices and policies imposed by the British and Dutch. Various sources can be attributed to the cause of Apartheid, or rather the idea of racism. These include colonial conquest, land dispossession, economic impoverishment and exclusion from citizenship for black Africans. These factors shaped the way the world saw Africans and influenced the negative manner in which they were perceived. 

Uneven and, in some cases limited, capitalist growth was facilitated by the colonial conquests of the British and Dutch during the 17th and 18th centuries. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) was established in 1795 with the aim of being a refreshment station for passing ships. When it was established, it was done so at the expense of indigenous citizens, such as the KhoiKhoi and Xhosa people. The Khoi societies sustained their livelihood through their land and livestock, and when the VOC took over their land, the Khoi were subjected to becoming underclass domestic farm workers. They were further disenfranchised when the VOC imported slaves imported from Angola, Mozambique, Madagascar and South East Asia, which curtailed the Khoi’s chances of earning a decent wage. 

Apartheid arose when the National Party, who represented ethnic Afrikaner Nationalism, won the National election on the basis of racism and segregation in 1948. It significantly extended the reach of the racist state and led to a systematic and fundamental deterioration of the position of black people in South Africa until 1994.

The victory of the NP in 1948 can be attributed to the rise in Afrikaner Nationalism during the 1920’s and 1930’s. Afrikaners constituted a majority in terms of quantity of the white electorate, but they were pided by class, regional and educational fault lines. When the Afrikaner Broederbond, a secret Afrikaner society, was established in 1918, Afrikaner nationalism grew from a Calvinist perspective which was united by a common language. The Dutch Reformed Church provided a foundation for the theological justification of Apartheid. In terms of capital, the Afrikaners grew and expanded their financial support through the insurance company Sanlam, the Volksklas Bank and Spoorbond. The rise of the use of cheap labour was induced by the emergence of mines, factories and farms. White-owned businesses accumulated big profits by supporting a government that denied blacks the vote and paid artificially low wages. Many white factory workers and World War II veterans voted for apartheid in 1948 to protect their economic advantages and to oppose black urbanization and social welfare. Furthermore, many white families benefited from the work of black domestic servants who provided childcare, cooking, and house care. D.F. Malan and Hendrik Verwoerd can be considered as the architects of Apartheid. 

Main apartheid laws in broad outline 

The period of the 1950’s can be described as “Petty Apartheid” where Nationalists imposed the laws that created a racially segregated and unequal social order. One of these laws was the 1953 Reservation of Separate Amenities Act that imposed segregation on all public facilities; including post offices, beaches, stadiums, parks, toilets, and cemeteries, and buses and trains as well. In other words, the Act was to provide for the reservation of public premises and vehicles or portions thereof for the exclusive use of persons of a particular race or class, for the interpretation of laws which provide for such reservation, and for matters incidental thereto.

The Pass Laws Act of 1952 was implemented to ensure that a supply of cheap African labour, and increasingly they were made more restrictive. This law required all black South Africans over the age of 16 to carry a pass book, known as a dompas, everywhere and at all times.  It was a criminal offense for Africans to be without a pass and made movement and residence dependent upon a pass. Within the pages of an inpidual's dompas was their fingerprints, photograph, personal details of employment, permission from the government to be in a particular part of the country, qualifications to work or seek work in the area, and an employer's reports on worker performance and behavior. If a worker displeased their employer and they in turn declined to endorse the book for the pertinent time period, the worker's right to stay in the area was jeopardized. 

Two laws that were implemented during this time had arguably the biggest impact on the country. 

The Population Registration Act, which commenced 7 July, classified all South Africans as members of the White, African, Coloured, or Indian racial groups, and because racial identities were (and are) historically and socially constructed, the government created Racial Classification Boards to officially determine a person’s "race." A person’s race was reflected in their identification numbers.

The Group Areas Act imposed strict residential racial segregation. Apartheid social engineering irreparably damaged countless families, communities, and livelihoods, as the government forcibly removed blacks to African, Coloured, or Indian "townships" (also known as "locations") on the outskirts of cities and towns. In the process of enforcing this plan, government bulldozers destroyed vibrant, racially mixed neighbourhoods, such as Sophiatown in Johannesburg and District Six in Cape Town. In practice this meant that all white, black, coloured and Asian people in South Africa would have to live in group areas allocated to members of their groups. Their ownership of property and business rights would be confined to those areas. This also meant that many people had to move out of their homes where they had lived for years and go and live in unfamiliar places which they knew little or nothing about because they had occupied a Group Area designated for another race.  Township residents tried to rebuild their lives despite inadequate housing, material poverty, and, for Africans, the constant danger of arrest for not carrying a pass book.

The Immorality Act caused couples of differing racial backgrounds to be tracked down by the police who were suspected of being in a relationship. Homes were invaded, and mixed couples caught in bed were arrested. Underwear was used as forensic evidence in court. Most couples found guilty were sent to jail. Blacks were often given harsher sentences than whites.

The impact of Apartheid on education was so profound it can still be seen today. Verwoerd’s 1953 Bantu Education Act established an inferior education system for Africans based upon a curriculum intended to produce manual labourers and obedient subjects. Similar discriminatory education laws were also imposed on Coloureds, who had lost the right to vote in 1956, and Indians. The government denied funding to mission schools that rejected Bantu Education, leading to the closure of many of the best schools for Africans. In the higher education sector, the Extension of University Education Act of 1959 prevented black students from attending "white" universities (except with government permission) and created separate and unequal institutions for Africans, Coloureds, and Indians respectively. The apartheid government also undermined intellectual and cultural life through intense censorship of books, movies, and radio and television programs. Censorship reached absurd proportions, exemplified by the banning of the children’s book Black Beauty and the tardy introduction of television in 1976. After that date, government-controlled broadcast media regularly disseminated apartheid propaganda. Educational ties with the rest of the world gradually diminished as countries applied a cultural boycott on South Africa.

In the 1960s the pursuit of white domination led to a new policy of "Grand Apartheid." As a massive social engineering project, grand apartheid created ethnically defined "Bantustans" (or "Homelands") out of the "Tribal Reserves" carved out by the 1913 Land Act. Between 1960 and 1985, approximately 3.5 million Africans were forcibly removed to alleged "homelands." These rural dumping grounds functioned as reservoirs of cheap black labour for white employers, but the apartheid regime also envisioned them as "independent" territories that would ensure the denial of South African citizenship to millions of Africans. Some of these territories, such as Bophuthatswana, comprised dozens of isolated pieces of territory with no common frontier. Situated in the most unproductive regions of the country, Bantustans were inhabited largely by poverty-stricken women and children since men migrated annually to work in South African cities and towns, and farms as well. Generally, government-approved "tribal" leaders ruled over the Bantustans in violent and corrupt fashion with the full support of the South African government, which was responsible for their entire budgets and provided military assistance.

Case study: Group Areas Act: Sophiatown forced removal 

Sophiatown was established in 1904. Before 1913 black South Africans had freehold rights, and they bought properties in the suburb. By the 1920s whites had moved out, leaving behind a vibrant community of blacks, coloureds, Indians and Chinese.

One of the most controversial actions occurred in the mid-1950s when blacks living in Sophiatown, Johannesburg, were compelled to move along with many others to a vast new black township southwest of Johannesburg, called Soweto. In 1955, army trucks and armed police removed 60,000 people from Sophiatown to areas that were designated for Africans such as Meadowlands, Lenasia, Western Coloured Township (now Westbury) and Noordgesig. 

Sophiatown was rezoned for whites only and renamed Triomf (Triumph). The removals sparked the creation of a song called “Meadowlands”, in reference to the Meadowlands township to which many Sophiatown residents were forced relocate.  Another removal that caused particular outrage occurred in the second half of the 1960s, when 65 000 Coloured people from District Six, a vibrant inner city ward of Cape Town, were forced to leave. 

One white observer remarked:

“It was a fantastic sight. In the yard [opposite the local bus station] military lorries were drawn up. Already they were piled high with the pathetic possessions which had come from the row of rooms in the background. A rusty kitchen stove; a few blackened pots and pans; a wicker chair; mattresses belching out their coir stuffing; bundles of heaven-knows-what; and people, all soaked to the skin by the drenching rain”.

When the removals scheme was promulgated, Sophiatown residents united to protest the forced removals, creating famous the slogan "Onsdaknie, onspholahier" (We won't move). Another source states that "We got a notice that we were going to be moved on 12 February 1955, but we were taken by surprise by thousands of policemen and soldiers, who were heavily armed, "We were still preparing ourselves to protest the removals, and we had no choice because no one was ready for them - and besides, they were armed" .  Some people did not qualify for resettlement, so they had to find their own accommodation. Many people moved to Orlando East and other parts of Soweto. 

The Forced Removals Act disrupted the existing family dynamic due to racial classifications and separation of group areas. 

Dr Alfred Xuma, who lived in Toby Street, was one of the last residents to leave Sophiatown in 1959. Today, his house is one of only two houses that managed to escape the destruction of Sophiatown by the apartheid government.

The removals continued for over eight years. Blue-collar Afrikaners were moved in, and still largely occupy the small houses that replaced the lively but desperately poor three-bedroomed homes and backyard shacks of Sophiatown.

Case study: Bantustans: Forced removal: People of Mogopa to Bophuthatswana 

For over 70 years, these people had lived on good land which their forefathers purchased before the 1913 Land Act made this impossible. Then their land was designated a “black spot” in a white area and they were ordered to move to Pachsdraai, in Bophuthatswana. They refused to move. The government, confronted by organized and strong resistance, mounted a counterattack. It imposed a new corrupt chief whom the community refused to recognize. Bulldozers razed the school, the church, and some houses. It withdrew services, no pensions were paid out, no annual labour contracts were issued and the bus service was suspended. Still the people of Mogopa stood fast.

Then a removal squad arrived, complete with tractors, trucks and buses, and camped on their land. Challenged in court for trespass, the government backed down temporarily. But soon the people of Mogopa received an order to leave by November 29, 1983. Hundreds of supporters, black and white church people, students, political groups and the press arrived to wait with the Mogopa people for the government trucks. They did not come. The supporters returned home.

The Mogopa people began to rebuild their battered community. They raised money to buy a new water pump. The men rebuilt the school. The women repaired the roads.

But in the early hours of the morning of February 14, 1984, heavily armed police arrived in Mogopa and declared it an “operational zone” a term usually reserved for the war zones of Namibia. No outsiders were allowed in. Lawyers, priests, diplomats and the press were all turned away at the entrance. The police, working with dogs, forcibly loaded people and belongings onto buses and trucks and took them to Pachsdraai. They arrived to a barren welcome, with their furniture broken, many belongings lost, their cattle sold at a pittance to white farmers, who were the only civilians allowed into the area. Pachsdraai offered little. It was far from towns and job opportunities. The depleted soil was unsuitable for the non-irrigated farming that was the basis of their subsistence agriculture, and the hated imposed headman was given complete control of the allocation of all resources.

The Mogopa people refused to stay, and moved to another area of Bophuthatswana, Bethanie, which is under the jurisdiction of their paramount chief. But their lives are still painfully difficult; the strong community now lives, pided into three groups, without water, without permission to hold meetings, without grazing grounds, without plots to farm, a witness to the real meaning of the bantustan system.

1950s: Repression and non-violent resistance to apartheid  

SACP banned

Initially known as the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) which was founded in July 1921, its name was changed to the South African Communist Party (SACP) during the 1950’s. The Party was founded on the foundation of various leftist movements, including the International Socialist League (ISL), the Social Democratic Federation, the Durban Marxist Club, the Cape Communist Party, and the Jewish Socialist Society, and affiliated itself with the Communist International (Comintern) which was headquartered in Moscow. By the mid-1940s, CPSA membership was increasing, and the party had gained influence after a few CPSA members (all white) won political office. After the 1948 NP election victory, however, the government quickly restricted black political activity and in 1950 banned the CPSA. The party went underground temporarily but also strengthened its ties to local nationalist organizations, such as the ANC. During the years it was banned, while the ANC continued to operate legally, the CPSA viewed the ANC as the primary expression of black aspirations for a multiracial socialist state under eventual communist leadership. The SACP and the ANC in the 1950s held similar views about policy and tactics as embodied in the ANC's Freedom Charter; in addition, they both advocated the use of guerrilla warfare against the apartheid regime in order to bring about the dual-phase revolution of political liberation followed by economic transformation. 

In 1950, the Apartheid Government introduced a bill called the Unlawful Organisation Bill, but later its name was changed to the Suppression of Communism Bill to focus on the undermining and limiting of communism within South Africa due to the government’s concern of a large number of communists infiltrating non- White political organisations.

When the SACP was unbanned in February 1990, its strength was difficult to estimate because many party members had been underground for years. In July 1990, a party spokesman publicized the names of twenty-two SACP members who were prominent in national politics but said that the names of others would remain secret. In 1991 SACP leaders estimated that the party had 10,000 dues-paying members, but refused to publish the party's membership rolls.

ANC programme of action

A Programme of Action was introduced on 17 December 1949 at the December conference which could be considered as a major turning point in the existence of the party. After the victory of the National Party, which was representative of an Apartheid government, the ANC, who stood for the deals of national freedom, wanted to introduce a policy that would counter the NP’s decision. Through this Programme of Action, the ANC was transformed from a party that was run by Middle Class liberals, to a militant liberation movement. The Programme of Action called on the ANC to partake in mass action, including civil disobedience, strikes, boycotts, and other forms of non- violent resistance.

The ANC Programme of Action was based on the principle of national freedom, which is meant by the freedom from white domination and the attainment of political independence. This would also include the rejection of the notion of segregation, apartheid, trusteeship, and white leadership which are motivated by the idea of white domination over blacks. Another basis for the Programme of Action is the Africans’ desire to claim the right of self determination. 

Brief biography: Albert Luthuli, his role in the ANC, and resistance to apartheid 

Albert John Luthuli (1898- 1967), was a South African statesman and the first African to win the Nobel Prize for peace. He was born in Solusi mission station, Rhodesia, where his father served American missionaries as an interpreter. On completing a teacher’s course from a Methodist Institution at Edendale around 1917, Luthuli took up a job as principal in an intermediate school in Natal. In 1920, he attended a higher teacher’s training course at Adams College with a scholarship provided by the government and joined the training college staff afterward. Albert Luthuli was elected as the secretary of the African Teacher’s Association in 1928 and subsequently as its president in 1933. It was while he was teaching at Adams that the Groutville community requested him to become its chief. Sugarcane production, which was the reservation's main source of income, had run into difficulties. Luthuli accepted the invitation and saved the community's economy from collapse.

Luthuli regarded the traditional evaluation of the person as transcending all barriers of race because the infinite consciousness has no colour, and that black and white people are bound together by the common humanity they have. He believed that Christian values can unite black and white in a democratic coalition. Apartheid's preoccupation with colour and the particular experience of the Afrikaner outraged him because it gave a meaning to Christian values which used race to fix the person's position in society and set a ceiling beyond which the African could not develop his/her full potential as a human being.

For holding these views Luthuli was later to be deposed, banned, and brought to trial for treason. The law under which he was charged (1956) was the Suppression of Communism Act. South African law recognizes two forms of communism: the Marxist-Leninist, and the statutory. Whoever opposes apartheid with determination or advocates race equality seriously was a statutory Communist.

Luthuli had involved himself directly in his people's political struggle and, in 1946, had been elected to the Natives Representative Council, a body set up by James Munnik Hertzog to advise the government on African affairs. Luthuli became president of the Natal section of the African National Congress (ANC) in 1951. In this capacity he led the 1951-1952 campaign for the defiance of six discriminatory laws. 

In 1936, the government imposed total restriction on the non-white community, circumscribing every aspect of their lives. Luthuli’s concern for all black people made him join ANC (American National Congress) in 1944. The Africans were denied the right to vote, and in 1948 the government adopted the policy of racial segregation, known as ‘Apartheid’; the Pass Laws were tightened in the 1950's. The objective of the ANC was to secure human rights for the black community, bringing them the rights to justice and equality.

He was elected to the committee of the Natal Provincial pision in 1945 and soon after, he became the president of the pision in 1951. The following year, he came in contact with other ANC leaders and decided to join them in a struggle for justice and equality for all South African people. He organized non-violent campaigns to raise voice against discriminatory laws and racial segregation. He was charged with treason and was asked to pull out with the ANC or leave his office as tribal chief. Luthuli refused to do either and subsequently, he was fired from his chieftainship. In the same year, he was elected president-general of ANC.

For around fifteen years before his death, Luthuli suffered from high blood pressure and he suffered a slight stroke. Over time his sight and hearing also became impaired. In July of 1967, he was fatally injured when a freight train struck him at the age of sixty nine. 

The Defiance Campaign (including the influence of Mahatma Gandhi) 

The ‘Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign’, as it was formally known, was launched on 26 June 1952 by the ANC and South African Indian Congress (SAIC) in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi. A tremendous number of people demonstrated against the existing Apartheid Laws by disobeying them to combat Apartheid. The Defiance campaign embraced Gandhi’s notion of Satyagraha, the term he coined in 1907 when he led a batch of volunteers to defy anti-Asian legislation in the Transvaal. Satyagraha entails a firm but non-violent struggle for a good cause. This non-racial initiative raised the controversial issue of the different ‘locations’ of the perse communities it aimed at mobilising, in contrast to the more homogeneous nature of the earlier campaigns, which comprised of Indians only. More than 8000 people of various race groups were arrested for defying the laws of Apartheid by using bathrooms that are not reserved for them, by riding in busses not reserved for them and by committing other offences that were against the law. A major tactic employed by the resistors was choosing to be imprisoned, rather than paying a fine, after arrests which allowed demonstrators to burden the government economically, while giving them a chance to voice their opinions on apartheid when they were tried in court.

In response to the campaign being spread to small rural areas, the South African Security Police, a branch of the government, implemented in August 1952 the biggest police raids on both the offices of the liberation campaign and the homes of liberation leaders. Many of these raids were carried out without legitimate search warrants and if the offices or homes were locked, the police would simply break in. This was a major effort by the South African government to repress the movement, intimidate the people, and find evidence for a trial that would remove the leadership of the campaign. The courts also got involved in the repression by levying the maximum sentence in each case of a resistor. Police brutality also escalated as spectators at trials of protesters were often roughed up by police officers. In prisons, especially, the resistors were targeted by officers for punishment and beatings.

An increasing number of people joined the movement despite the government trying to curtail it. The government aimed all attacks at the leaders of the movement in an attempt to combat the growing popularity of the movement. Nelson Mandela, who was the president of the ANC Youth League at that time, was one of the Defiance Campaign leaders, and was charged with leading the Campaign with the goal of effecting change in both the industrial and social structure of the country using “constitutional and illegal tactics”. This trial provided the foundation for campaigners to spread their message on a national level. 

Although this campaign had been non- violent since its formation, a turning point at this trial occurred when riots broke out, which started in New Brighton and moved to Port Elizabeth, continuing to Denver (in Southern Transvaal) on 18 December 1952. An African person was shot by a railway officer in New Brighton after being accused of stealing paint, which was followed by a group of other Africans who witnessed the commotion and threw rocks at the station where the man was shot, which led to the police opening fire on the crowd, killing seven people. The riots of Denver had a different cause than the one in New Brighton. The residents of the Denver African Hostel refused to pay the increased rental fee. This sparked a conflict in which police fired into the hostel, killing three people. Five days later, after three people gave an ANC salute when they finished their drinks in a Municipal African Beer Hall; they were thrown out of the bar. A group accumulated outside the bar and they began throwing rocks at the hall. Police arrived and opened fire on the crowd, killing thirteen Africans and injuring seventy-eight.

At the end of November 1952, the government prohibited all meetings of more than ten Africans throughout the country and then followed by instituting two laws, the Criminal Law Amendment Act (which targeted any person who broke any law in protest or support of a campaign) and the Public Safety Act (which allowed the Cabinet to temporarily suspend all laws whenever they declared a state of emergency and to enact emergency rules for anything necessary). These new laws were meant to directly suppress the campaign. In the middle of April 1953, after the two laws were passed and all of the damage had been done by the riots, Chief Albert John Mvubi Luthuli, the President-General of the ANC, proclaimed that the Defiance Campaign would be called off so that the resistance groups could reorganize, taking into consideration the new climate in South Africa. The Defiance of Unjust Laws campaign had not been successful and the further movement against apartheid would go on for several more decades.

Freedom Charter and Treason Trial

The initiative for the adoption of the Freedom Charter came from a multiracial coalition of political organisations, including the ANC, Congress of Democrats, Indian National Congress, and South African Coloured People’s Congress. The Freedom Charter’s basic principles rested on the demands for human and political rights, as well as the image of the society it envisioned to replace the Apartheid System, including ideals of the sharing of wealth, adequate housing, education, and healthcare. In other words, the Freedom Charter consists of the political parties’ emphasis on non-racialism is enshrined in a single seminal document of the liberation movement. It also asserts that South Africa belongs to everyone who owns it - which had a strong socialist basis to it. These statements were sued by the government to ascribe communist influence to the movement, and they arrested 153 leaders of the alliance who were charged with high treason. 

The Freedom Charter grew from a campaign to collect the citizens’ ideas for alternative regimes other than Apartheid, which were gathered at meetings. On the June the 26th, 1955 at a Congress where delegates were discussing the Freedom charter, police arrived in force armed with stun guns, and they formed a cordon around the sports field where the discussions were held. Fifteen security policemen then mounted the platform to address the crowd. They claimed that all people present at the congress were committing treason. They then confiscated all documents, posters and film and proceeded taking names and addresses of all the delegates. Everybody was under arrest. A few days later Congress Alliance proceeded to gain the charter's ratification by inpidual member organizations, and launched a campaign to get a million signatures endorsing the document.

A few months after the discussion of the Freedom Charter, the police conducted the raid of 500 activists’ homes, including the homes of Chief Albert Luthuli (president of the ANC) and Nelson Mandela, seizing documents related to the Freedom charter, and also searching for possible evidence of high treason or sedition. The following week, another 12 people, including Walter Sisulu, were arrested. In total the police arrested 156 people: 105 Blacks, 21 Indians, 23 Whites and 7 Coloureds. Banning and restriction were served to hundreds of activists as the Apartheid government stepped up pressure on the liberation movements.In December 1956 police organized a nationwide crackdown on the anti-apartheid movements; top leaders of these movements were arrested and driven or flown in military aircraft to Johannesburg where they were incarcerated in The Fort Prison. In 1957 the "Treason Trial" began in the Johannesburg Drill Hall. The trial lasted until 1961. During this time the leaders of the various liberation movements had the opportunity to share ideas and make future plans.

The accused were represented by a legal team which included Izrael Maisels, Sydney Kentridge, Vernon Berrangé and Bram Fisher. A Treason Trial Defense Fund was started up by Bishop Ambrose Reeves, writer Alan Paton, and Alex Hepple to pay the bail of the accused.

The trial required two stages, a preparatory examination in a magistrates court which would determine if there was sufficient evidence to support a trial, and then, if evidence existed, a trial by the Supreme Court. The preparatory examination of the case lasted until January 1958 (over a year), and resulted in charges against 61 of the accused being dropped - 95 people were still facing trial.

The treason trial proper started on 3 August of 1958

International observers flocked to the trial. Supporters of the liberation movement from all over the world rallied around the black leaders in prison. Funds started pouring in to sustain the accused, their families, and to pay legal costs. Most of those charged were subsequently freed without going to trial. In 1961 the remaining 30 prisoners were freed. The trial lasted for more than 4 years 

Within a week of the trial starting, one of the two charges under the Suppression of Communism Act was dropped. Two months later the Crown announced that the whole indictment was being dropped, only to issue a new indictment against 30 people - all members of the ANC. Additional indictments against another 61 people were threatened but were never realized.

Chief Albert Luthuli and Oliver Tambo were released for lack of evidence. Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu (ANC secretary-general) were among the final 30 accused.

On 29 March 1961 Justice FL Rumpff interrupted the defense summation with a verdict. He announced that although the ANC was working to replace the government and had used illegal means of protest during the Defiance Campaign, the Crown had failed to show that the ANC was using violence to overthrow the government, and were therefore not-guilty of treason. The Crown had failed to establish any revolutionary intent behind the defendant's actions. Having been found non-guilty, the remaining 30 accused were discharged.

Women’s March

The women’s march was greatly a response to one of the Apartheid laws that were originally imposed on African men alone.  Although African men had been required to carry passes for many decades, only in the 1950s did the government impose pass laws on African women. The first attempt to make black women in South Africa carry passes was in 1913 when the Orange Free State introduced a new requirement that women, in addition to existing regulations for black men, must carry reference documents. The resulting protest that was by a multi-racial group of women, many of whom were professionals (a large number of teachers, for example), took the form of passive resistance - a refusal to carry the new passes. African women were not allowed to live in towns unless they had permission to be employed there, and extending pass laws to them made it more difficult for women without jobs to take their children and join their husbands in town. Many of these women were supporters of the recently formed South African Native National Congress (which became the African National Congress in 1923, although women were not allowed to become full members until 1943). The protest against passes spread through the Orange Free State, to the extent that when World War I broke out, the authorities agreed to relax the rule. Across the country, dozens of protests against pass laws for African women took place before the Federation of South African Women (formed in 1955) and the African National Congress Women’s League organized a massive protest march in Pretoria. 

At the end of World War I, the authorities in the Orange Free State tried to re-instate the requirement, and again opposition built up. The Bantu Women's League (which became the ANC Woman's League in 1948 - a few years after membership of the ANC was opened to women), organized by its first president, Charlotte Maxeke, coordinated further passive resistance during late 1918 and early 1919. By 1922 they had achieved success - the South African government agreed that women should not be obliged to carry passes. However, the government still managed to introduce legislation which curtailed the rights of women and the Native (Black) Urban Areas Act No 21 of 1923 extended the existing pass system such that the only black women allowed to live in urban areas were domestic workers.

With the Blacks (Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Documents) Act No 67 of 1952, the South African government amended the pass laws, requiring all black persons over the age of 16 in all provinces to carry a 'reference book' at all times - thereby enforcing influx control of blacks from the homelands. The new 'reference book', which would now have to be carried by women, required an employer's signature to be renewed each month, authorization to be within particular areas, and certification of tax payments.

During the 1950s women within the Congress Alliance came together to combat the inherent sexism that existed within various anti-Apartheid groups, such as the ANC. Lillian Ngoyi (a trade unionist and political activist), Helen Joseph, Albertina Sisulu, Sophia Williams-De Bruyn, and others formed the Federation of South African Women. The prime focus of the FSAW soon changed, and in 1956, with the cooperation of the ANC's Women's League, they organized a mass demonstration against the new pass laws.

On August 9, 1956, 20,000 women, representing all racial backgrounds, came from all over South Africa to march on the Union Buildings, where they stood in silent protest for 30 minutes while petitions with 100,000 signatures were delivered to Prime Minister JG Strijdom’s office. These petitions were in favour of the introduction of new Pass Laws and the Group Areas Act No. 41 of 1950. Many men in the anti-apartheid movement were surprised by the women’s militancy, and the protest contributed to women playing a bigger role in the struggle for freedom and democracy. August 9th now is celebrated as National Women’s Day in South Africa.

During the march the women sang a freedom song: Wathint' abafazi, Strijdom!

wathint' abafazi,

wathint' imbokodo,

[When] you strike the women,

you strike a rock,

you will be crushed [you will die]!

Brief biographies: Helen Joseph and Lillian Ngoyi and their roles in resistance to apartheid

Helen Joseph: Helen May Fennell was born in Sussex, England, in 1905 and grew up with her parents and brother. She graduated from King’s College, University of London, in 1927 with a degree in English. She then went to India to teach at a school for girls in Hyderabad for three years. In 1931 Helen came to Durban, South Africa where she met her husband, Billie Joseph. 

During the Second World War Helen served as an Information and Welfare officer for the Women's Auxiliary Air force where she decided to become a social worker. In 1951 she took a job with the Garment Worker’s Union, led by Solly Sachs. During this time, and as a result of working closely with Sachs, Helen came to see and experience the "true face" of Apartheid, which angered her tremendously due to its blatant injustice. Helen was a founding member of the Congress of Democrats (the ANC's white ally). In 1955 Helen was selected as one of the people who read out clauses of the Freedom Charter at the Congress of the People in Kliptown. In 1956, Helen led a march of 20 000 women to Pretoria's Union Buildings in protest of the Pass Laws.

Like some of South Africa’s black leaders during that time, Helen was arrested on a charge of high treason, followed by her being banned in 1957 as well as being the first person to be placed under house arrest. When she was 80, she regained her freedom when her final ban was lifted in 1985. 

Helen died on 25 December 1992 in Johannesburg, Gauteng. 

Lillian Ngoyi: Lillian Ngoyi was one of the women leading the Women’s March on 9 August 1956. She was born on 25 September 1911 and she, a widowed seamstress supporting two children and an elderly mother, joined the ANC Women’s League in 1952.  She went on to become the first woman elected to the executive committee of the African National Congress.

She travelled to Switzerland in 1955 to participate in the World Congress of Mothers held by the Women’s International Democratic Federation to plead the cause of black women in South Africa.  Then she went on to visit England, Germany, Romania, China and Russia before returning to South Africa as a “wanted woman”. She was arrested in 1956, spent 71 days in solitary confinement and for eleven more years was banned and confined to her home in Orlando, Soweto, causing great suffering for her and her family.  Mangosuthu Buthelezi and Beyers Naudé wrote several letters pleading Lilian Ngoyi’s cause. Naudé discussed her various domestic and financial needs, while raising the possibility of her banning order being lifted. 

Amongst the many honours since the fall of apartheid that have been heaped on her, a community health centre in Soweto, a Hall at Rhodes University, as well as an environmental patrol vessel is named in her honour.

Lilian Masediba Ngoyi died on 13 March 1980, many years before the country would reap the fruits of her labour despite her express wish:  “I am hoping with confidence that, before I die, I will see change in this country.”

Collections in the Archives

Know something about this topic.

Towards a people's history

Fourteenth Amendment , Section 1:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

When the government legislates or acts on the basis of a “suspect” classification, the Court sets aside the traditional standard of equal protection review and exercises a heightened standard of review referred to as “strict scrutiny.” 1 Footnote See Parents Involved in Cmty. Schs. v. Seattle Sch. Dist. No. 1, 551 U.S. 701 , 720 (2007) . Paradigmatic of “suspect” categories is classification by race. Under the strict scrutiny standard, the government must demonstrate a compelling interest; usually little or no presumption favoring the classification is to be expected from courts. In addition, the government must demonstrate that its use or reliance on a racial classification is narrowly tailored to further that compelling interest. 2 Footnote See, e.g., Fisher v. Univ. of Tex. , 570 U.S. 297 , 309–12 (2013) . Both prongs of the Court’s strict scrutiny standard involve the case-by-case analysis of multiple factors.

Before settling on strict scrutiny for evaluating racial classifications for equal protection purposes, the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on racial classifications went through significant change over the years. In its 1944 decision Korematsu v. United States , 3 Footnote 323 U.S. 214, 216 (1944) , overruled by Trump v. Hawaii , No. 17-965, slip op. at 38 (U.S. June 26, 2018) . In applying “rigid scrutiny,” however, the Court was deferential to the judgment of military authorities, and to congressional judgment in exercising its war powers. for example, the Court adjudicated the wartime forced removal of Japanese-Americans from the West Coast. In that case, the Court said that because government action targeted only a single ethnic-racial group it was “immediately suspect” and subject to “rigid scrutiny.” 4 Footnote Korematsu , 323 U.S. at 216 . In the context of striking down state laws prohibiting interracial marriage or cohabitation in the late 1960s, the Court stated in its 1967 decision Loving v. Virginia that racial classifications “bear a far heavier burden of justification” than other classifications and that these state laws were invalid because no “overriding statutory purpose” 5 Footnote McLaughlin v. Florida, 379 U.S. 184, 192, 194 (1964) was shown and they were not necessary to some “legitimate overriding purpose.” 6 Footnote Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, 11 (1967) . In Lee v. Washington, 390 U.S. 333 (1968) , the Court said that preservation of discipline and order in a jail might justify the use of racial classifications if shown to be necessary. Accord Johnson v. California, 543 U.S. 499, 512 (2005) .

Meanwhile, not all racial classifications harm a particular group, and the Justices debated which standard to apply to racial classifications motivated by a “benign” interest to help or assist a particular racial group. The Court ultimately concluded in its 1995 decision Adarand Constructors v. Pena , that one standard—strict scrutiny—applies to evaluate all racial classifications. 7 Footnote 515 U.S. 200, 227 (1995) . Thus, government actions that use a racial classification to remedy or ameliorate conditions resulting from intentional discrimination must also undergo strict scrutiny. 8 Footnote Adarand , 515 U.S. at 226 ; City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., 488 U.S. 469, 493 (1989) .

• Utility Menu

Jennifer L. Hochschild

H.L. Jayne Professor of Government, and Professor of African and African American Studies

Center for Government and International Studies 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

Policies of Racial Classification and the Politics of Racial Inequality

Harvard University

Department of Government

Vesla Mae Weaver

University of Virginia

Department of Politics

In Suzanne  Mettler, Joe Soss, and Jacob Hacker (eds.).  Remaking America: Democracy and Public Policy in an Age of Inequality (forthcoming, Nov. 2007).

Introduction: Policy, Politics, Inequality, and Race

In 1890, the United States census bureau reported that the nation contained 6,337,980 negroes, 956,989 “mulattoes,” 105,135 “quadroons,” and 69,936 “octoroons.” [1] In the early twentieth century it also reported the number of whites of “mixed parentage,” the number of Indians with one-quarter, half, or three-quarters black or white “blood,” and the number of part-Hawaiians and part-Malays.  The boundaries between racial and ethnic groups, and even the definition of race and ethnicity, were blurred and contested.  By 1930, however, this ambiguity largely disappeared from the census.  Anyone with any “Negro blood” was counted as a Negro; whites no longer had mixed parentage; Indians were mainly identified by tribe rather than ancestry; and a consistent treatment of Asians was slowly developing.  In other work we examine how and why these classifications rose and fell; here we examine the consequences for contemporary American politics and policy.

Official governmental classification systems can create as well as reflect social, economic, and political inequality, just as policies of taxation, welfare, or social services can and do.  Official classification defines groups, determines boundaries between them, and assigns individuals to groups; in “ranked ethnic systems”  (Horowitz 2000), this process enshrines structurally the dominant group’s belief about who belongs where, which groups deserve what, and ultimately who gets what.  Official racial categories have determined whether a person may enter the United States, attain citizenship, own a laundry, marry a loved one, become a firefighter, enter a medical school, attend an elementary school near home, avoid an internment camp, vote, run for office, annul a marriage, receive appropriate medical treatment for syphilis, join a tribe, sell handicrafts, or open a casino.  Private racial categories have affected whether an employer offers a person a job, whether a criminal defendant gets lynched, whether a university admits an applicant, and whether a heart attack victim receives the proper therapy.  In these and many more ways, racial classification helps to create and maintain poverty and political, social, and economic inequality. Thus systems of racial categorization are appropriate subjects for analysis through a policy-centered perspective because they are “strategies for achieving political goals, structures shaping political interchange, and symbolic objects conveying status and identity” (p. 2 of Intro).  Race is also, not coincidentally, the pivot around which political contests about equality have been waged for most of this country’s history. 

            The same classification system that promotes inequality may also undermine it.  Once categorization generates groups with sharply defined boundaries, the members of that group can draw on their shared identity within the boundary to mobilize against their subordinate position – what one set of authors call strategic essentialism (Omi and Winant 1994).  Thus classification laws are recursive, containing the elements for both generating and challenging group-based inequality. For this reason -- and also because demographic patterns and other social relations on which classification rests can change -- categorizations are unstable and impermanent.

We explore these abstract claims by examining the past century of racial classification in the United States.  That period encompassed significant change in systems of classification and their attendant hierarchies; thus we can see how classification and inequality are related, as well as tracing the political dynamics that reinforce or challenge inequality-sustaining policies.  From the Civil War era through the 1920s, the Black population was partly deconstructed through official attention to mulattos (and sometimes quadroons and octoroons), then reconstructed through court decisions and state-level “one drop of blood” laws.  As of 1930, a clear and simple racial hierarchy was inscribed in the American polity -- with all the attendant horrors of Jim Crow segregation. However, the one-drop policy that reinforced racial inequality also undermined it.  From the 1930s through the 1970s, that is, the Black population solidified though a growing sense of racial consciousness and shared fate, and developed the political capacity to contest their poverty and unequal status. 

Currently, the Black population is being partly deconstructed again, through official recognition of the new multiracial movement and through engagement with the growing Hispanic community and immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean.  The United States is wrestling with an unstable set of conditions: mostly-unrecognized but persistent skin color differences among Blacks, the growth of a class structure and political disparities among Blacks, a new multiracial advocacy community, a continuing ideology of racial solidarity in the Black community, and a principle of colorblind equality held by many Whites. The possible implications of all of this for racial classification are multiple. Whether changing classification systems will reinscribe racial inequality as some fear, or allow submerged inequalities and old hierarchies to be vigorously fought as others hope, remains to be seen. Thus a central element of democratic citizenship is at stake.

 We aspire, in short, to make both particular and general contributions to this volume.  In particular, we show how the policy-centered perspective operates outside the more-commonly studied social welfare system. In each era between the Civil War and the new millennium, contending political forces shaped official policy; the new policy helped to reshape political forces; and the new forces in time contributed to a new policy.  That construction of the American racial order in the twentieth century is too simple and linear, of course, but we lack the space to develop all of its complexities here. What we can do is trace the stages of racial classification policy and their connections with politics and inequality in order to show how a policy-centered perspective illuminates American racial dynamics.

More generally, we hope to establish in this chapter a larger argument about democracy and public policy in an age of inequality.  Just as American politics and scholarship are impoverished by paying too little attention to class, so they are diminished by a lack of attention to racial inequality.  We mean five things by this.  First, a ranked social order created through a system of official classification is itself a structure of inequality.  Second, racial inequality is not reducible to an observation that a disproportionate share of a given group is poor or rich; being a member of a favored or disfavored race can shape one’s life chances independently of one’s economic standing.  For example, middle-class Blacks remain almost as residentially segregated as do poor Blacks, with powerful consequences for quality of life, school achievement, wealth acquisition, and social relations.  Third, the American structure of poverty and inequality is itself highly racially inflected.  Fully 24.9 percent of Blacks, compared with 8.3 percent of non-Hispanic Whites, lived below the poverty line in 2005 ( www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/poverty05/table4.pdf ).  Put another way, if Blacks are not included in measures of income inequality in the United States, it declines.  The Gini index for all Americans in 2005 was 0.469; for Whites alone, it was 0.461 ( www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/h04.html ). 

Fourth, the existence of socially consensual nominal racial groups (a.k.a. races) partly explains socioeconomic and political inequality.  A crucial answer to the old saw of “Why no socialism in the United States?” is that racial hostility and mistrust prevented the working class from consolidating into a powerful movement to contest structures of economic and political inequality.  Similarly, one reason why the many poor in the purportedly democratic United States have not wrested political control from the few rich is that the former are deeply divided by racial animosity and mistrust (often fostered by the well-off themselves) [(Morgan 1975);  (Woodward 2002)] .  Finally, the nature of the racial order partly explains social policies themselves; American policies ranging from housing subsidies to social security to school finance to criminal justice probably would have developed very differently if the Black-White binary had not existed or had been more fluid and fragmented, as in most other nations [(Quadagno 1994); (Lieberman 1998); (Katznelson 2005); (Weaver 2007)].

Racial Classification of Mulattos

 Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, individuals were commonly identified as negro or mulatto, with the latter group often subdivided into quadroons and octoroons and sometimes even more finely split into griffes (the child of a Black and a mulatto) or sang-meles (1/64 th Black).  In principle, these categories identified the precise nature of a person’s lineage; in practice, the categories were typically determined by reputation or physical appearance, with light skin serving as a proxy for mixed ancestry.  Thus, for example, in the Louisiana case of State v. Treadaway , the court declared: “The person too black to be a mulatto and too pale in color to be a negro is a griff.  The person too dark to be a white, and too bright to be a griff, is a mulatto.  The quadroon is distinctly whiter than the mulatto.  Between these different shades, we do not believe there is much, if any, difficulty in distinguishing” (State v. Treadaway 1910), quoted in Finkelman 1993: 2111).  The  Census Bureau also delineated races by mixture, counting mulattos as a separate group from 1850 through 1920 except in 1900, and including quadroon and octoroon at the behest of Congress in 1890 [(Nobles 2000); (Hochschild and Powell 2007)].  Similarly, in 1869 the United States Sanitary Commission published a volume summarizing data on most of the roughly 2,500,000 volunteers and recruits in the Union army. For many tables in the volume, Blacks were separated into “full blacks” and “mixed races” (while Whites were separated into soldiers, sailors, and students)  (Gould 1869).

Analysts producing or using census or military data usually accepted the view that Blacks and mulattos were meaningfully distinct.  The Sanitary Commission’s report showed that mulattos tended to weigh a bit more than Blacks, although they were not taller, and to have more muscular strength than either Blacks or Whites.  Census analysts (“a corps of Negro clerks working under the efficient direction of three men of their own race,” as the director of the census carefully pointed out in 1918) meticulously documented differences in population growth rates, birth and death rates, school attendance and literacy, and migration patterns.  [(Bureau of the Census 1918): “Letter of Transmittal,”].  The report showed, for example, that “the proportion attending school in the population of school age among mulattoes exceeds the proportion among Blacks in each section of the country” (ibid., p. 215).

A few people saw mulattos as a separate race altogether.  The self-trained social analyst Alfred Holt Stone argued in 1908 that:

The mulatto is not a Negro, and neither written nor social law can make him one. By consent of all parties, including himself, he may be called a Negro. But we can no more make a Negro by such a process than we can alter the life traits and nationality of a Russian peasant by bestowing upon him an English name.  The essential fallacy which underlies this classification will sooner or later make the latter impossible to maintain.

In his view, “there can no longer be a question as to the superior intelligence of the mulatto over the Negro” (Stone 1908): 398,  401).  Marcus Garvey saw an equally wide gap, but in the other direction – reportedly describing W.E.B. Du Bois as “a mulatto,… a monstrosity” ( http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/garvey/peopleevents/p_dubois.html ).  Still others saw little meaningful difference between Negroes and mulattos; the census bureau frequently disclaimed the accuracy of its own distinctions (especially between mulattos, quadroons, and octoroons).

            State laws ranged across this array of presumptions.  Elevated legal status for mulattos was the rare exception. [2]   Nevertheless, in at least twenty-five laws mulattos were legally distinguished from Blacks, for example by specifying that Whites were forbidden from marrying “Negroes or Mulattoes.”  More generally, states’ classifications diverged widely from each other, changed over time, and often contained no clear boundary between groups (authors’ analysis from data in (Murray 1997 [1950]).  In three states, marriage to a White was prohibited if the person were one-fourth Black; in seven others the formula was one-eighth while in still others, the law was simply unclear.  States could employ one calculus for laws on marriage and another for purposes of segregation; in Tennessee, for instance, a marriage was interracial and therefore illegal if the person was “descended from a Negro to the 3 rd generation inclusive” but in another Tennessee law Negroes were defined as including “mulattoes, mestizos and their descendants, having any blood of the African race in their blood.”   

These distinctions had deep symbolic and substantive impact; most saliently here, they created inequalities within as well as across groups.  We need not detail the stratification between Blacks and Whites in the early days of Jim Crow, or remind readers of the depths of poverty to which designation as Black consigned people.  Less well known, for reasons that we discuss below, is the significant stratification between Blacks and mulattos.  The inequalities covered all arenas – social, economic, and political.  Well before the Civil War, the census office had noted the “preference they [mulattos] have enjoyed in the liberation from slavery” (Bureau of the Census 1864): XXX). Free mulattoes in the lower south were “afforded a status superior to that of Blacks,” and they “tended to dominate the free Black community in both numbers and influence. The lightest of the light-skinned lived almost as well as their White neighbors.” Some owned slaves [(Jones 2000): 1506-07]. [3]   Among  Union soldiers in the Civil War, lighter-skinned Blacks held more skilled occupations and higher military ranks than their darker counterparts; they were taller (a measure of nutrition) and less likely to die in the war (Hochschild and Weaver 2003).  Mulattos were more literate than Blacks, and their children were more likely to attend school (Bureau of the Census 1918), especially chapter 11). 

On average, mulattos also enjoyed economic advantages over Blacks. Before the Civil War, free mulattos were more likely to own their own farms (Bodenhorn 2003), and their households had much greater wealth than Black households (Bodenhorn and Ruebeck forthcoming). Those differences continued, and perhaps deepened, after emancipation. “Complexion homogamy” – the tendency for people to marry others of a similar color – prevailed, and couples in which both spouses were mulatto had at least 30 to 90 percent more wealth than partnerships with at least one Black [(Bodenhorn 2006); see also (Reuter 1917); (Gatewood 1990); (Hill 2000)].

Skin color differences similarly structured political opportunities when those became available.  Of the two Black senators and twenty Black members of Congress during Reconstruction, only three were not mulattos. Perhaps a majority of the prominent racial leaders of the era were light-skinned or had White ancestors, including Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and A. Phillip Randolph. The status of mulattos was hardly risk-free, but in most cases they were better off and had more resources for fighting or avoiding the worst features of the racial order.

 Bottom-up social relations often mirrored top-down systems of categorization.  Marcus Garvey observed in 1923 that “unfortunately, there is a disposition on the part of a certain element of our people in America, the West Indies and Africa, to hold themselves up as the ‘better class’ or ‘privileged’ group on the caste of color....  The evil of it is working great harm to our racial solidarity” (Garvey 1969 [1925]): II: 55).  Another observer surely exaggerated, but he too worried that “often their [mulattos’] arrogance and intolerance toward the thick-lipped, kinky-haired Negro were more marked than that of the whites, and within two generations after emancipation, they had erected a ‘color-caste’ system within the race somewhat analogous to that prevailing in India” (Brisbane 1949).  Black colleges and fraternities preferred light-skinned applicants; churches and organizations made distinctions in who could join or enter [(Frazier 1957); (Graham, L. 2000)].  Charles Chesnutt described a (apocryphal?) group whose “purpose was to establish and maintain correct social standards among a people whose social condition presented almost unlimited room for improvement.  By accident, combined perhaps with some natural affinity, the society consisted of individuals who were, generally speaking, more white than black.  Some envious outsider made the suggestion that no one was eligible for membership who was not white enough to show blue veins.”  To the charge that they discriminated against darker-skinned people seeking membership, the members of the society “declared that character and culture were the only things considered; and that if most of their members were light-colored, it was because such persons, as a rule, had had better opportunities to qualify themselves for membership” (Chesnutt 1898).

On the other side of the fundamental racial divide, the meaning of Whiteness around the turn of the twentieth century was almost as contested as the meaning of Blackness.  Congressional committees held hearings to decide whether members of the “Hebrew race” were White, and how to categorize Mexicans (Perlmann 2001; (Hattam forthcoming 2007); (Ma'rquez 1993); (Schor 2000). [4]   Before 1870, the census tabulated the few Asians in the United States as White, although a footnote distinguished them; conversely, the 1908 Dillingham Commission’s Dictionary of Races and Peoples described Slavs as quasi-Asian [see (Hodes 2006) on the classification of Asians in 1890]. 

Courts almost despaired of drawing legal bright lines; as one put it,

Then, what is white? What degree of colorization …constitutes a white person as against a colored person, and is the court to take the responsibility by ocular inspection of determining the shades of different colorization where the dividing line comes between white and colored.

The statute … is most uncertain, ambiguous, and difficult both of construction and application…. There have been a number of decisions in which the question has been treated, and the conclusions arrived at in them are as unsatisfactory as they are varying ( Ex parte Shahid 1913): 813). [5]

An array of legal cases, in state and federal courts and across many decades, groups, and issues, ensued before the judiciary was able to settle “what is white.”  Criteria included physical appearance (requiring in at least one famous case that the defendant strip before the jury), community recognition, ancestry, behavior, personal history, property considerations, timing of the case, and other factors [(Haney Lo'pez 1996);  (Gross 1998); (Elliott 1999). (Mack 1999)].  Two Supreme Court decisions in the 1920s almost resolved the problem, but for decades after that school boards and state regulatory agencies were adjudicating whiteness for children and would-be marital partners  [(Douglas 2003); (Kennedy 2003); (Ford 1994)].

The entry of European nationalities into Whiteness is much better known than that of mulattos into Blackness, and its implications for social, political, and economic inequality are clear.  Hence we will not consider it further here (Sollors 1989; Gerstle 1993; Jacobson 1998; King 2000; Perlmann 2001; Hattam 2004; Roediger 2005).  Suffice it say that we differ from the many legal scholars and historians who have depicted liminal individuals or nationalities as anomalies in a basically dichotomous Black-or-White world.  That viewpoint gives insufficient weight to the fact that many public agencies and private actors at the turn of the twentieth century classified an array of groups and people as neither Black nor White, but as something in between and perhaps separate from both.

Thus politics and policy interacted between the Civil War and the Great Depression in a complex racial reorganization with an equally complex impact on structures of inequality.  Politics created the policies of emancipation, immigration, and Mexican labor migration. Those broad policies called forth more specific policies from the census bureau, state legislatures, courts, and other institutions that sought to label, classify, order, and otherwise manage people of mixed or ambiguous or merely foreign descent.  In the process, mulattos were sometimes distinguished from Negroes and elevated above them; light-skinned people sometimes took advantage of their ambiguous status to escape the poverty and degradation that dogged almost all Blacks.  The same dynamics occurred, mutatis mutandis , among European immigrants, American Indians, and Mexican migrants.  While the policies remained confused, so did the politics and the structure of race-based inequality, although the basic system of ranked ethnic orders was never threatened.

The One-Drop Rule, Jim Crow, and Racial Politics  

From 1930 onward, racial classification changed.  Uncertainty about racial classification and boundaries gave way to the clear, simple set of categories with which we are now familiar. Several strands of classification came together to permit that outcome.  First, the concept of ethnicity became widely accepted, and enabled officials to locate various European nationalities in the White race.  As European immigration declined and immigrants’ children increasingly intermarried, Whiteness was consolidated.  Second, protest in response to the 1930 experiment of classifying Mexicans separately ensured that they too were White.  Thus the politics of immigration restriction and foreign relations with Mexico, combined with the conceptual breakthrough of “ethnicity,” shaped the policy definition of Whiteness.  That policy, in turn, enabled the majority of Americans to see themselves as part of the mainstream and to live in reasonable comfort with the hardening segregation of Jim Crow. [6]

On the other side of the basic divide, the boundary around Blackness was hardened, and the consequences of being labeled as Black deepened, at the same time that more and more people were being placed inside the category of Black.  This occurred in several political institutions, more or less simultaneously.  At the census bureau, the category of mulatto was dropped in 1930, with these instructions:  “A person of mixed white and Negro blood should be returned as Negro, no matter how small the percentage of Negro blood.  Both black and mulatto persons are to be returned as Negroes, without distinction.”  In state legislatures, “as the likelihood that more biracial people could be classified as White under existing laws increased, the laws became more restrictive, often progressing from one-fourth to one-eighth…, and finally culminating in the one-drop rule” by about 1930 (Wright and Hunt 1900): 524).  Virginia provides the classic case. The Black category grew from one-fourth before 1910 to one-sixteenth in 1910; the 1924 “Act to Preserve Racial Integrity” defined Whites as having “no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian” (Finkelman 1993; (Gilanshah 1993). [7]   By 1930, Virginia defined Blacks as people with “any Negro blood.”  At the same time, the legal rights of mulattos were largely dissolved into those of Blacks only. [8]  State laws stopped using the phrase, “Negroes & Mulattoes,” substituting for both terms “Colored” (Higgenbotham & Kopytoff 1989).  Only two of the twenty-five state laws that specifically addressed mulattos were enacted after 1930. 

In public discourse also, discussion of mulattos as a separate category largely faded away.  The term “mulatto” and its variants appeared on average forty-two times a year in the Washington Post between 1890 and 1910 but only seventeen times a year from 1920 to 1940 -- and only eight times a year in the latter period if three outlier years are set aside (authors’ analysis of keywords in the Washington Post , 1865 -2005).  

The new one-drop policy was associated with two immediate and related effects with regard to classification: the rejection of explicit multiracial identity within the group, and the suppression of recognition of skin color differences both within and outside the group. Neither Blacks nor Whites described mulattos any longer as evidence of a link between them, even if usually forced and shameful, or as a distinct category meaningful on its own terms.  Since 1990, “mulatto” and its variants have appeared anywhere from zero to three times a year in the Washington Post .  This was not merely a change in vocabulary, as was the decline of “colored” or “Negro” to describe Blacks; the whole concept of a group that was neither fully Black nor White faded from social legitimacy.

As the law of hypodescent was consolidated, so was Jim Crow segregation; the relationship is mutually causal.  Americans found it difficult to have a system of strict and elaborate segregation until they had eliminated the categories that blurred the lines between segregators and segregated.  Conversely, the more elaborate and wide-ranging the system of segregation became, the less feasible was occupation of any middle ground. Together, these two policies generated or sustained several forms of inequality.  Most obviously, Black poverty and racial economic inequality persisted and perhaps worsened. [9]   

We lack systematic income or poverty statistics for the decades around the turn of the twentieth century; the best long-term data are for life expectancy.  It was always, and remains, lower for blacks than for whites (in 2000, Blacks could expect to live about 93 percent as long as Whites). But Blacks’ life expectancy actually declined by up to six percentage points as a proportion of Whites’ life expectancy between 1910 and 1940.  Table 1 shows the pattern:

Table 1: Life Expectancy for Blacks as a Percentage of Life Expectancy for Whites, 1900-1940

Sources: (Haines 2006a): column 2; (Haines 2006b): columns 3 and 4. 1900 is the first year for which these data are available; they are not available for 1950 and 1960.

Given those results, it is no surprise to find that, as table 2 shows, about two and one-half times as many Black as White families were poor in every year from 1947 (the first year for which these data are available) and 1970:

Table 2: Annual Family Income of Poorest and Most Affluent Black and White Families, 1947-1970 (in 1967 dollars)

Source: (Bureau of the Census 1975): Series G 16-30.

The policies of the one-drop rule and legal segregation shaped racial politics as well as economic inequality.  Most importantly, they denied the enlarged Black population access to political power to change the laws that kept them poor, and legal redress for harms done under those laws.  All Blacks, even those with very light skin or many White ancestors, were accorded an unambiguously inferior legal and political standing.  Inferior social and cultural status, of course, went along with subordinated economic and political status.

Over the long run, however, the policies of the one-drop rule and segregation, in conjunction with other factors such as a long tradition of racial nationalism and white liberal support, generated a counter-reaction that led to a very different form of racial politics.  A black sociologist predicted as much in 1926: "The American Negro will be forced by outside compulsion to maintain his social and physical identity, independent of any purpose or policy on his part.  The Negro will thus become one with himself long before he becomes one with the American people" (Miller 1926): 249). That is just about exactly what happened.  By 1961, 89 percent of southern Black adults agreed that they felt close to other Blacks, and over three-quarters reported a “good deal” of interest in “how Negroes as a whole are getting along in this country” [authors’ analysis of the Negro Political Participation Study (Matthews and Prothro 1961)].   This was a far cry from the “color-caste” of the early twentieth century.

The politics of racial solidarity directly challenged the politics of racial hierarchy, through bus boycotts, sit-ins, freedom marches, voter registration drives, and other acts. In Albert Hirschman’s terms (Hirschman 1970), once partial or complete exit from being Black was no longer possible for those with light skin or known White ancestry, imposed loyalty to the group became, over several decades, genuine loyalty.  Loyalty was followed by an increase in voice, now from a stance firmly within the Black community.  Put in other terms, by reinforcing the line between Black and White, the one-drop rule and segregation primed Black group consciousness and reduced the likelihood of division by color, at least in the public arena. [10]

The third effect of the post-1930 system of racial classification, however, reinforced rather than undermining inequality – but in this case within the group.  While recognition of skin color differences was officially eliminated and publicly muted, its strong association with economic, social, and political outcomes for Blacks persisted.    In the 1961 survey of southern Blacks, family income and years of education were both higher for those identified as light-skinned, and declined proportionally with darker pigments [authors’ analysis of (Matthews and Prothro 1961)].  The 1968 Kerner Commission survey, of Blacks in fifteen major American cities, yielded the same results [authors’ analysis of (Campbell and Schuman 1997)].   This pattern of light-skin advantage within the Black population has persisted to the present, and ranges across arenas as diverse as the likelihood of marrying, visual representation in the media, the length of prison sentences, the chances of becoming a political candidate and winning elective office, and the selection to a judgeship (Hochschild and Weaver 2007).

Light-skinned Blacks seldom, however, combined their status advantages with withdrawal from other Blacks as mulattos had often done; in both the Negro Political Participation Study and the Kerner Commission survey, light-skinned Blacks were just as likely as their darker counterparts to have a strong sense of group consciousness.  That pattern, too, has continued to the present.  Intra-racial inequality moved in tandem with attacks on inter-racial inequality.

By the second half of the twentieth century, then, most Blacks had embraced the one-drop policy imposed on them by 1930; despite the undisputed fact of racially mixed ancestry, racial mixture disappeared as an officially or unofficially recognized category.  The internal politics of the Black community mirrored the external legal standing of African Americans. But with three very distinct consequences: Segregation and hypodescent first reinforced racial inequality and poverty, then fostered the conditions for group solidarity and the generation of energy and resources for fighting racial inequality and poverty.  These two dynamics co-existed with a third – paler Blacks continued to enjoy higher social, cultural, and economic status and more political power, although their status was not accorded public recognition.    Thus between 1930 and roughly 1990, the policies of American racial classification contributed to a complex, intertwined set of political dynamics – which set the stage for a new round of policy-making. 

Multiracialism Re-emerges

By the 1990s, while the old politics of racial hierarchy persisted, the United States was moving into a new era of politics and policy-making with regard to, once again, racial mixture.  The impact of this new era on poverty, inequality, democracy, and citizenship remains to be seen; all one can do at present is analyze the beginning of a set of dynamics that will take decades to play out.

 Racial mixture has reemerged as a political issue because of several policy and social changes.  First, as a largely-unintended consequence of the 1965 immigration law, hundreds of thousands and then millions of residents of nations outside Europe began  moving to the United States in the 1970s.  Senator Edward Kennedy asserted in 1965 that “this bill is not concerned with increasing immigration to this country,” and President Lyndon B. Johnson concurred that “this is not a revolutionary bill.  It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives or add importantly to our wealth and power.”  Both were wrong, as were virtually all other supporters of the Hart-Celler Immigration Act (only its opponents accurately predicted its impact on the demography of the United States) [(Tichenor 2002); (Graham, H. 2002);  (Hochschild and Burch forthcoming 2007)].

By 2005, immigrants represented about 12 percent of the American population, and their children added another 12 percent or more.  Through both immigration and high birth rates, the Latino population rose from four percent of Americans in 1970 to 13 percent in 2000, and the Asian population similarly increased from one to four percent.  And like Europeans around the turn of the twentieth century, contemporary immigrants and their descendents are marrying across group boundaries.  About 30 percent of Asian marriages are to non-Asians (Fryer 2005) and that figure is projected to rise to 50 percent soon (Edmonston and Passel 1999).  At least 14 percent of the much larger population of married Hispanics have a non-Hispanic spouse (Lee and Edmonston 2005): 25), and these figures too are rising rapidly. [11]  

A second policy choice has also contributed to the rising salience of racial mixture in the American racial order.  In 1967 the Supreme Court banned state anti-miscegenation laws.  Black/White unions, and their bi-racial offspring, remained rare for decades, but are now increasingly rapidly.  About 10 percent of African Americans were married outside their race as of 2000, and about a quarter of cohabiting Blacks have a non-Black partner.  Over 13 percent of children with at least one Black parent have a non-Black parent as well (Fryer 2005). Given the trajectory of the past three decades, it is reasonable to assume that Black outmarriage will continue to rise, as will the number of partly Black children.  And once “a fifth to a quarter of children with a Black grandparent ... also have a non-Black grandparent,...  the history of outmarriage in other groups suggests it might well soar within a generation” (Perlmann 2002): 15-16).  In short, mixed-race ancestry has returned to salience in the United States.

These changes have contributed to a new politics of multiracial assertion.  Advocacy groups argue that multiracial individuals are being treated unequally because of their lack of official recognition, their distinctive medical needs [for example,  (Beal et al. 2005)], and their desire to retain multiple identities rather than follow the one-drop rule (DaCosta forthcoming 2007).  The mission statement of the Association of Multiethnic Americans (AMEA) reads, in its entirety, “to educate and advocate on behalf of multiethnic individuals and families by collaborating with others to eradicate all forms of discrimination ” ( www.ameasite.org , emphasis added).  One spokesperson developed a "Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People" with twelve elements, including “I have the right… not to keep the races separate within me, … to identify myself differently than strangers expect me to identify, [and]… to have loyalties and identify with more than one group of people” ( www.washington.edu/alumni/columns/dec96/blurring5.html ).

            The politics of racial mixture have by now permeated public discourse.  The term “multiracial” was almost never used in the Washington Post from the 1870s through the 1950s; it began to be seen in the 1960s, and appeared an average of sixty times a year through the 1990s.  Between 1990 and the present, commercial polling organizations, academic survey researchers, or media have asked forty-six questions on national surveys that include the terms “multiracial,” “mixed race,” or “biracial.” At least one major national poll has been conducted with  biracial respondents ( Washington Post et al. 2001). College campuses have witnessed the growth of many student groups devoted to understanding and expressing multiracial identities.  Amazon.com reports tens of thousands of book including the words “multiracial,” “mixed race,” or “biracial.”  Advertising firms and marketers are developing new plans based on the premise that “in this new, urban market, it is essential to get beyond ethnic segmentation and understand that it is the very intermingling of cultures and ethnicities that defines the urban sensibility” (Waterston 2004), emphasis in original).  The phenomenal rise of Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) in the national political arena guarantees that multiracialism will remain politically salient at least for some years. [12]

Policies changed; the political dynamics regarding racial mixture then changed; policy-makers are now scrambling to catch up. At present, official systems of racial classification practice a complex balancing act between competing norms and inconsistent applications.  For example, UC Berkeley and Pennsylvania State University treat racial classification very differently, as figure 1 indicates:

Figure 1:  Racial Classification Forms from Two Public Universities

On the one hand, for several decades individuals have been able to choose both a Hispanic ethnicity and a racial identity on the census and other official documents – thus resolving (at least for now) the dilemma of the statistical agencies in 1930 about whether there is a Mexican “race.”  In addition, for the first time in history the 2000 census invited people to select multiple racial identities – thus recreating, in a very different political atmosphere, the mixed race categories that featured prominently in official statistics, state laws, and court cases between the Civil War and the Great Depression.  (Health-related federal agencies have collected data on racial mixture for some time.)  The Office of Management and the Budget (OMB) is working to ensure that other federal agencies, such as the military and the public education system, follow suit.  Prominent private institutions such as universities, hospitals, and corporations are moving in the same direction, and the media are full of stories and visual images reflecting ethnic ambiguity and multiracial diversity.   

On the other hand, as the cartoon in figure 2 satirizes, OMB permits or encourages the re-aggregation of mixed-race individuals into a single race, that of the smallest minority or the one charging discrimination, for many policy purposes and legal cases. 

Figure 2:  Boondocks Cartoon on Racial Classification

Reprinted with permission.

Most federal policies (such as redistricting under the Voting Rights Act) and many private sector policies (such as affirmative action in universities and corporations) still operate on the assumption that people belong to only one race.  The situation with regard to whether Hispanicity should count as another race, like Black or White, or whether it should remain as a separate ethnic category independent of race, is a complete statistical, substantive, normative, and administrative hodgepodge. 

There is actually a third “hand” in this balancing act – an effort to avoid racial classification in any form.  Some important actors, such as hospitals and schools, find it embarrassing to ask about racial identity and either make an administrative choice by visual inspection, or do not record race at all.  A few states are legally banned from practicing affirmative action in public agencies or institutions, and referenda to ban collection of racial data have appeared and may reappear.  Thus we see policies that permit or encourage multiracialism, that permit or encourage monoracialism, and that permit or require race-blind practices.  The implications of all of this for inequality and citizenship are, not surprisingly, unclear.

The multiracial movement itself is very small at present. Fewer than three percent of census respondents chose more than one race for themselves or their children (if Hispanics are not counted as a race), and only seven states permit people to choose more than one race on official forms (Williams 2006).  However, it is plausible that the category will grow rapidly over the next few decades if two conditions obtain.  First, the policies and demographic forces that impelled its emergence will need to continue for some decades. And second, the politics of multiracialism will need to develop in a way that make a mixed-race identity attractive to the many Americans who could claim it; while sharing some characteristics with the old interest in boundary-blurring represented by mulattos and whites of mixed parentage, multiracialism will have to take on the connotations of multiculturalism and identity choice if it is to be widely accepted.

Skin Color Disparities Persist  

While the politics and policy concerns around racial mixture were re-emerging in the United States during the 1990s, albeit in a very different form from a century earlier, skin color disparities persisted with almost no public recognition and little change.  The two issues are related, but not in a simple way.  In the aggregate, skin color differences within a given race are obviously a consequence of racially mixed ancestry.  But in particular cases, the connection can be weak; a light-skinned Black can have two Black parents and a racially mixed person with Hispanic and American Indian parents may be dark-skinned.   Most importantly for our purposes, the political dynamics and policy issues are very different for skin color inequality than for multiracial identity.

Skin tone is a much more fraught topic, and much less part of the public discourse, than is multiracialism. Nevertheless, differential treatment by skin color is arguably more implicated in racial inequality and racially-inflected poverty than is multiracial heritage.  People of mixed race on average have a socioeconomic status (SES) between the averages of their parents’ racial group.  Multiracial identifiers on the 2000 census were somewhat younger, better educated, and more urban than monoracial identifiers (Hochschild 2005). So multiracials are relatively well-off compared with the average Black.  Not so for dark-skinned African Americans (and Latinos, although we do not consider them in this chapter). 

Many scholars, using the eight national surveys with a skin color measure as well as local or more opportunistic surveys, have reached the same conclusion: darker skin color within a given race or ethnicity is associated with lower SES.  The 2107 respondents of the 1979-80 National Survey of Black Americans (NSBA) (Jackson and Gurin 1987), for example, averaged 10.9 years of schooling.  But a gap of almost two years separated the schooling of the darkest and lightest among them. [13]   The pattern is the same for income: Blacks’ mean family income in NSBA was $12,417, with almost a $5000 annual difference in family income between the lightest- and darkest-skinned respondents.  Put another way, dark-skinned Blacks earned less than 70 percent as much as light-skinned Blacks, during a year in which Black families’ mean income was 63 percent of that of White families. [14]

            Other features of life are affected by skin color as well, ranging from length of prison sentences (Burch 2005) and likelihood of death sentences (Eberhardt et al. 2006) to attractiveness as a dating or marital partner (Hunter 2002) to likelihood of being negatively stereotyped (Maddox and Gray 2002) to  chances of being nominated for or elected to political office (Weaver 2005); (Hochschild and Weaver 2007).  People of all races treat light-skinned Blacks differently from dark-skinned Blacks, although it is not clear that they intend or even recognize such differential treatment. In short, even beyond its impact through the assignment of individuals into nominal racial categories, skin color remains a vital part of private, perhaps subconscious, classification by citizens and public officials alike.  As such, it is deeply implicated in racial inequality and poverty, perhaps as much as it was around the turn of the twentieth century.

            Nevertheless, the United States has not witnessed a politics of skin color analogous to the politics of multiracialism, never mind the politics of racial group identity.  Variation in appearance is neither a source of political mobilization among Blacks nor a subject of public discussion generally.  Nor are there policies to address the disparities associated with skin tone.  To the contrary: policies to promote racial equality, such as majority-minority districting or affirmative action, treat a given racial category as though all of its members are essentially the same for purposes of that policy.  As the editors of this book put it, policies can not only provide benefits (or harms) but can also “obscure which groups are benefiting or being harmed.”

Skin color is not a subject of discourse in the public arena because of one of the other strands of racial politics that we discussed earlier – group solidarity. As Marcus Garvey wrote in 1923, “We desire to have every shade of color, even those with one drop of African blood, in our fold.... Whether we are light, yellow, black or what not, there is but one thing for us to do, and that is to get together and build up a race” (Garvey 1969 [1925]): II: 61).  This logic was deeply internalized, was effective, and continues to predominate in the African American population.  From this vantage point, any internal difference that diverts attention or generates conflict – differences by gender, class, skin color, sexuality, and so on – should receive low priority until the fight for racial equality is closer to being won. As Cathy Cohen puts it, Blacks “must weigh concern over the respectability and legitimization of Black communities in the eyes of dominant groups against concern over the well-being of those most vulnerable in our communities, as they struggle against very public, stigmatizing issues.  It is this tension that informs the indigenous political processes that determine which issues will be embraced by Black elites and organizations” [(Cohen 1999, 15); see also (Shelby 2005) on the need for racial solidarity].  By this logic, light-skinned Blacks should not take advantage of the possible benefits of their position – but also dark-skinned Blacks should not draw attention to the possible additional costs of theirs. 

Several other features of the American racial order reinforce the role of racial solidarity in suppressing attention to skin color discrimination.  The relatively subtle effects of skin color discrimination can be submerged in perceptions of persistent broad-based racial inequality.  Thus in some (though not all) surveys, lighter-skinned Blacks perceive just as much discrimination against themselves and their group as do darker-skinned Blacks. [15]    In addition, those who suffer most from skin color discrimination have, almost by definition, the fewest resources and lowest social standing with which to fight it.  Because they are subject not only to racial discrimination but also to colorism (Maddox and Gray 2002) by both Blacks and Whites – what Cohen calls “advanced” or “secondary” marginalization (Cohen 1999) -- even when they have wanted to, they have not been in a position to challenge their situation very effectively. 

Finally, the whole history of “mulattos” that we recounted earlier in this chapter affects our ability in the present era to publicly discuss skin color differentiation. The history of American racial classification and boundary blurring provides very little by way of a useable past.  The language of mulattos, quadroons, and octoroons (never mind griffs, half-breeds, and metis) has been rejected for public use, along with the complicated and ambivalent social interactions, political maneuverings, and individual emotions that that language and its history evoke.  It is hard, if not impossible, to find in American history attractive models or tested strategies for negotiating or overcoming intra-group ancestral differences.  Racial mixture, in turn, was typically “proven” by appearance, including skin tone – so disavowal of the earlier politics around “mulatto” slides easily into disavowal of any current politics around light or dark skin.  Conversely, the history and practice of the one-drop rule has generated a norm, shared across races, of public assertion of social equality within racial groups regardless of appearance or ancestral mixture.  In short, the United States lacks both a politics and a policy agenda with regard to skin color inequality.

The Possible Futures of Multiracialism

            At this point, no one can confidently predict whether the policies of recognizing multiracialism will persist, whether political contestation around the concept will grow or diminish, or whether recognition of racial mixture or skin color differentiation can make a material difference in reducing racial inequality and enhancing citizenship.  There are simply too many variables, interacting in too many ways – and too much room for political entrepreneurship – for any prediction to be worth much.

Consider, for example, the array of responses to the idea of publicly recognizing racial mixture in the 2000 census. All but one member of the Congressional Black Caucus opposed the proposal for a multiracial category.  Some opponents feared a diminution of still-essential racial solidarity; as Arthur Fletcher, then chair of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, commented, “I can see a whole host of light-skinned Black Americans running for the door the minute they have another choice....  All of a sudden they have a way of saying--in this discriminatory culture of ours, ... ‘I am something other than Black’" (Fletcher 1993): 273)  Others cautioned against undermining policies designed to ameliorate racial inequality and poverty.  Thus Harold McDougall of the NAACP testified to a Congressional committee that

“The creation of a multiracial classification might disaggregate the apparent numbers of members of discrete minority groups, diluting benefits to which they are entitled as a protective class under civil rights laws and under the Constitution.  In our quest for self-identification, we must take care not to recreate, reinforce, or even expand the caste system we are all trying so hard to overcome” (McDougall 1997).

            Conversely, some people supported official recognition of multiracialism as a first step toward replacing racial classification with color-blind policies and politics.  Then-Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich (R- GA), testified that “ideally, I believe we should have one box on federal forms that simply reads, ‘American.’ But if that is not possible at this point,… allow[ing] them [i.e. Americans] the option of selecting the category ‘multiracial,’… will be an important step toward transcending racial division and reflecting the melting pot which is America” (Gingrich 1997): 661-662). [16]   That is the conservative version of color-blindness; there is also a liberal version, held by people who argue against strong racial identities on the grounds that they inhibit class-based loyalties and political contestation around economic inequality (Gitlin 1995; Wilson 1999; Warren 2001).             

Public opinion on the issue of multiracial classification is largely unformed.  In 1995, more Blacks (49 percent) than Whites (36 percent) thought the census should add a multiracial category ( Newsweek 1995).  Overall, only 38 percent of respondents endorsed the addition.  In 2001, however, perhaps as a result of the policy change in the census that invited respondents to “mark one or more” race, public opinion shifted.  About two-thirds of a national sample then agreed that it is “good for the country… if more Americans think of themselves as multi-racial rather than belonging to a single race” (CNN/ U.S.A. Today 2001).  There was no material difference between Whites and Blacks in their response. [17]   Both survey questions, like most others asking about multiracialism, showed high rates of “don’t know” responses.  Looking across the full array of survey items since 1990, it seems clear that on balance Americans now favor recognition of multiracialism and that respondents identified as biracial are largely content with their situation [( Washington Post et al. 2001); (Massey and Charles 2006)].  But none of these views are firmly grounded; political activity could surely push them in one or another direction.

            We do not expect to see political activity developing around skin color disparities. The subject is simply too fraught – equally for both Blacks and Whites, although for different reasons.  (It might emerge in the Latino population as part of the on-going discussion about the racial classification[s] of Hispanic Americans.)  Nor do we expect much decline in African Americans’ perceptions of linked fate and commitment to racial solidarity. After all, unlike most ethnic groups in which those who are upwardly mobile become less ethnically identified,  middle-class Blacks are, if anything, more committed to their racial identity than are poorer or less well-educated Blacks (Hochschild 1995).

            Reduced to its simplest terms, policies of racial classification over the past century have generated four elements now yoked in unstable tension – differentiation by ancestry, differentiation by  skin color, an ideology of color-blindness, and deepening of the one-drop rule for African Americans. In official rules and public discourse, color-blindness contests with one-drop solidarity; in practice, multiracialism and skin color hierarchy complicate both of those simple principles.  As a consequence of this history, efforts to “help Blacks” risk disproportionately benefiting the best-off within the group, while efforts to help the worst-off Blacks risk undermining group connectedness.  It remains unclear whether fostering the new identity of “multiracialism” or giving attention to the old problem of discrimination against the dark-skinned would weaken, or strengthen, efforts to ameliorate racial inequality and population-wide poverty.  The politics of racial classification are in flux, and it is just too soon to determine whether policy makers would best promote justice by reinforcing or by challenging group boundaries.  What is clear is that racial classification is a central form of policy-making that affects and is affected by inequality, norms of citizenship, and political formations – but not in any linear or simple way.

Allen, Walter, Edward Telles, and Margaret Hunter. 2000. "Skin Color, Income and Education: A Comparison of African Americans and Mexican Americans." National Journal of Sociology 12 (1): 129-80.

Beal, Anne, Shu-Chiung Chou, R. Heather Palmer, Marcia Testa, Christine Newman, and Sudhakar Exhuthachan. 2005. "The Changing Face of Race: Risk Factors for Neonatal Hyperbilirubinemia." Pediatrics xx (xx): xx.

Bobo, Lawrence, James Johnson, Melvin Oliver, Reynolds Farley, Barry Bluestone, Irene  Browne, Sheldon  Danziger, Gary  Green, Harry  Holzer, Maria  Krysan, Michael  Massagli, and Camille Charles. 2000. Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality, 1992-1994: [Household Survey Data] [Computer file]. 3rd ICPSR version .  Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research.

Bodenhorn, Howard. 2003. "The Complexion Gap: The Economic Consequences of Color among Free African Americans in the Rural Antebellum South." in  Advances in Agricultural Economic History, vol. 2 . Kyle Kauffman, Ed. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science North-Holland, 41-73.

---. 2006. "Colorism, Complexion Homogamy, and Household Wealth: Some Historical Evidence." AEA Papers and Proceedings 96 (2): 256-60.

Bodenhorn, Howard and Christopher Ruebeck. forthcoming. "Colorism and African-American Wealth: Evidence from the Nineteenth-Century South." Journal of Population Economics XX (XX).

Bowman, Phillip, Ray Muhammad, and Mosi Ifatunji. 2004. "Skin Tone, Class, and Racial Attitudes Among African Americans." in  Skin Deep: How Race and Complexion Matter in the 'Color-Blind' Era . Cedric Herring, Verna Keith, and Hayward Horton, Ed. Chicago IL: University of Illinois Press, 128-58.

Brisbane, Robert. 1949. "His Excellency: The Provincial President of Africa." Phylon 10 (3): 257-64.

Burch, Traci. 2005. Skin Color and the Criminal Justice System: Beyond Black-White Disparities in Sentencing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Department of Government.

Bureau of the Census. 1864. Population of the United States in 1860. Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

---. 1918. Negro Population 1790-1915. Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office.

---. 1975. Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 . Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Campbell, Angus and Howard Schuman. 1997. Racial Attitudes in Fifteen American Cities,1968 [Computer file]. 2nd ICPSR version .  Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor].

Chesnutt, Charles. 1898. The Wife of His Youth . Fact Monster  (from Information Please). 2005.

Clegg, Roger. 2002. Statement re Racial and Ethnic Data Collection by Government Agencies. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

CNN/ U.S.A. Today . 2001. Gallup, CNN, U.S.A. Today Poll .

Cotton, Jeremiah. 1997. "Color or Culture? Wage Differences among Non-Hispanic Black Males, Hispanic Black Males, and Hispanic White Males." in  African Americans and Post-Industrial Labor Markets . James Stewart, Ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 61-75.

DaCosta, Kimberly. forthcoming 2007. "Making Multiracials: State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line." in Ed. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.

Davis, F. James. 2001. Who Is Black?: One Nation's Definition . University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Douglas, J. Allen. 2003. "The 'Most Valuable Sort of Property': Constructing White Identity in American Law, 1880-1940." San Diego Law Review 40 (xx): 881-946.

Eberhardt, Jennifer, Paul Davies, Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, and Sheri Johnson. 2006. "Looking Deathworthy: Perceived Stereotypicality of Black Defendants Predicts Capital-Sentencing Outcomes." Psychological Science 17 (5): 383-86.

Edmonston, Barry and Jeffrey Passel. 1999. "How Immigration and Intermarriage Affect the Racial and Ethnic Composition of the U.S. Population." in  Immigration and Opportunity: Race, Ethnicity, and Employment in the United States . Frank Bean and  Stephanie Bell-Rose, Ed. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 373-414.

Edwards, Ozzie. 1972. "Skin Color as a Variable in Racial Attitudes of Black Urbanites." Journal of Black Studies 3 (4): 473-83.

Elliott, Michael. 1999. "Telling the Difference: Nineteenth-Century Legal Narratives of Racial Taxonomy." Law & Social Inquiry 24 (3): 611-36.

Ex parte Shahid . 1913.  205 F. 812 (E.D.S.C. 1913).

Finkelman, Paul. 1993. "The Crime of Color." Tulane Law Review 67 (xx): 2063-112.

Fletcher, Arthur. 1993. Testimony at Hearings of the Review of Federal Measurements of Race and Ethnicity .  Washington D.C.: Committee on Post Office and Civil Service , 273.

Ford, Christopher. 1994. "Administering Identity: The Determination of 'Race' in Race-Conscious Law." California Law Review 82 (xx): 1231-85.

Frazier, E. Franklin. 1957. Black Bourgeoisie . Glencoe IL: Free Press.

Fryer, Roland. 2005. Figures .  Cambridge MA.

Garvey, Marcus. 1969 [1925]. Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, volumes I and II . New York: Atheneum.

Gatewood, Willard. 1990. Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920 . Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.

Gerstle, Gary. 1993. "The Working Class Goes to War." Mid-America 75 (3): 303-22.

Gilanshah, Bijan. 1993. "Multiracial Minorities: Erasing the Color Line." Law and Inequality Journal 12 (xx): 183-204.

Gingrich, Newt. 1997. Statement at Hearings on "Federal Measures of Race and Ethnicity and the Implications for the 2000 Census" CHECK ALL .  Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office , xxx.

Gitlin, Todd. 1995. The Twilight of Common Dreams . New York: Metropolitan Books.

Gomez, Christina. 2000. "The Continual Significance of Skin Color: An Exploratory Study of Latinos in the Northeast." Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences 22 (1): 94-103.

Gould, Benjamin. 1869. Investigations in the Military and Anthropological Statistics of American Soldiers . Cambridge: : Riverside Press.

Graham, Hugh. 2002. Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Graham, Lawrence. 2000. Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class . New York: Harper.

Gross, Ariela. 1998. "Litigating Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in the Nineteenth-Century South." Yale Law Journal 108 (1): 109-88.

Haines, Michael. 2006a. "Tabel Ab1-10: Fertility and mortality, by race: 1800-2000." in  Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present, Millennial Edition . Richard Sutch and  Susan Carter, Ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1-391.

---. 2006b. "Table Ab704-911: Life table 1(x) values at selected ages, by sex and race: 1850-1997." in  Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present, Millennial Edition . Richard Sutch and  Susan Carter, Ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1-447 to 1-57.

Haney Lo'pez, Ian. 1996. White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race . New York: NYU Press.

Hattam, Victoria. 2004. "Ethnicity: An American Genealogy." in  Not Just Black and White: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States . Nancy Foner and  George Fredrickson, Ed. New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press, 42-60.

---. forthcoming 2007. Ethnic Shadows: Jews, Latinos, and Race Politics in the United States . Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press CONFIRM.

Hill, Mark. 2000. "Color Differences in the Socioeconomic Status of African American Men: Results of a Longitudinal Study." Social Forces 78 (4): 1437-60.

Hirschman, Albert. 1970. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty . Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Hochschild, Jennifer. 1995. Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation . Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

---. 2005. "From Nominal to Ordinal: Reconceiving Racial and Ethnic Hierarchy in the United States." in  The Politics of Democratic Inclusion . Christina  Wolbrecht and  Rodney Hero, Ed. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, xxx.

Hochschild, Jennifer and Traci Burch. forthcoming 2007. "Contingent Public Policies and Racial Hierarchy: Lessons from Immigration and Census Policies " in Political Contingency: Studying the Unexpected, the Accidental, and the Unforeseen Ian  Shapiro and  Sonu  Bedu, Ed. New York: NYU Press.

Hochschild, Jennifer and Brenna Powell. 2007. Mulattos, Half-Breeds, Mixed Parentage, Hindoos, and the Mexican Race:  Inventing Racial and Ethnic Classifications in the US Census 1850-1930. Cambridge MA: Harvard University, Department of Government.

Hochschild, Jennifer and Vesla Weaver. 2003. From Race to Color: Does Skin Color Hierarchy Transform Racial Classification . Color Lines: Segregation and Integration in America's Present and Future, Harvard University, Cambridge MA:

---. 2007. The Skin Color Paradox and the American Racial Order. Cambridge MA: Harvard University, Department of Government.

Hodes, Martha. 2006. "Fractions and Fictions in the United States Census of 1890." in  Haunted by Empire: Race and Colonial Intimacies in North American History . Ann Laura Stoler, Ed. Durham NC: Duke University Press, xxxx.

Horowitz, Donald. 2000. Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Revised Edition . Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hunter, Margaret. 2002. ""If You're Light You're Alright": Light Skin Color as Social Capital for Women of Color." Gender & Society 16 (2): 171-89   CHECK PP.

Jackson, James and Gerald Gurin. 1987. National Survey of Black Americans, 1979-1980 [machine-readable data file]. 1st ICPSR ed.   Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research.

Jacobson, Matthew. 1998. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race . Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Jones, Trina. 2000. "Shades of Brown: The Law of Skin Color." Duke Law Journal 49 (xx): 1487-557.

Katznelson, Ira. 2005. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America . New York: W.W. Norton.

Keith, Verna and Cedric Herring. 1991. "Skin Tone and Stratification in the Black Community." American Journal of Sociology 97 (3): 760-78.

Kennedy, Randall. 2003. Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption . New York: Pantheon Books.

Key, V. O. 1984 [1949]. Southern Politics in State and Nation . Nashville: University of Tennessee Press.

King, Desmond. 2000. Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy . Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Krieger, Nancy, Stephen Sidney, and Eugenie Coakley. 1998. "Racial Discrimination and Skin Color in the CARDIA Study: Implications for Public Health Research." American Journal of Public Health 88 (9): 1308-13.

Lee, Sharon and Barry Edmonston. 2005. New Marriages, New Families: U.S. Racial and Hispanic Intermarriage. Washington D.C.: Population Reference Bureau.

Lieberman, Robert. 1998. Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State . Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Ma'rquez, Benjamin. 1993. LULAC: The Evolution of a Mexican American Political Organization . Austin: University of Texas Press.

Mack, Kenneth. 1999. "Law, Society, Identity, and the Making of the Jim Crow South." Law & Social Inquiry 24 (XX): 377-XX.

Maddox, Keith and Stephanie Gray. 2002. "Cognitive Representations of Black Americans: Reexploring the Role of Skin Tone." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28 (2): 250-59.

Massey, Douglas and Camille Charles. 2006. National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen . Princeton University, Office of Population Research.

Matthews, Donald and James Prothro. 1961. The Negro Political Participation Study . University of North Carolina. March-June.

McDougall, Harold. 1997. Statement at Hearings on "Federal Measures of Race and Ethnicity and the Implications for the 2000 Census" .  Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office , xxx.

Miller, Kelly. 1926. "Is the American Negro to Remain Black or Become Bleached?" South Atlantic Quarterly 25 (3): 240-52.

Morgan, Edmund. 1975. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia . New York: Norton.

Murguia, Edward and Edward Telles. 1996. "Phenotype and Schooling among Mexican Americans." Sociology of Education 69 (4): 276-89.

Murray, Pauli. 1997 [1950]. States' Laws on Race and Color . Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Newsweek . 1995. Newsweek Poll .

Nobles, Melissa. 2000. Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics . Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.

Obama, Barack. 2004. Democratic National Convention Speech . 2004.

Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. 1994. Racial Formation in the United States . New York: Routledge.

Perlmann, Joel. 2001. 'Race or People':  Federal Race Classifications for Europeans in America, 1898-1913. Annandale-on-Hudson, NY: Bard College, Levy Economics Institute.

---. 2002. The Intermingling of Peoples in the United States: Intermarriage and the Population History of Ethnic and Racial Groups since 1880 .  Levy Economics Institute of Bard College: Proposal to Russell Sage Foundation.

Quadagno, Jill. 1994. The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty . New York: Oxford University Press.

Reich, Michael. 1981. Racial Inequality: A Political-Economic Analysis . Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Reuter, Edward. 1917. "The Superiority of the Mulatto." American Journal of Sociology 23 (1): 83-106.

Roach, Ronald. 2004. "Obama Rising." Black Issues in Higher Education : 20-23.

Roediger, David. 2005. Working Toward Whiteness . New York: Basic Books.

Schor, Paul. 2000. Changing Racial Categories: The United States Bureau of the Census and Racial Minorities, 1900-1940 . Organization of American Historians, XX:

Seltzer, Richard and Robert Smith. 1991. "Color Differences in the Afro-American Community and the Differences They Make." Journal of Black Studies 21 (3): 279-86.

Shelby, Tommie. 2005. We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sollors, Werner, Ed. 1989. The Invention of Ethnicity .  New York: Oxford University Press.

State v. Treadaway. 1910.  126 La. 300.

Stone, Alfred Holt. 1908. Studies in the American Race Problem, with an Introduction and Three Papers by Walter F. Willcox . New York: Doubleday, Page & Company.

Tichenor, Daniel. 2002. Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America . Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind . 1923.  261 U.S. 204.

Wallenstein, Peter. 1999. "Law and the Boundaries of Place and Race in Interracial Marriage: Interstate Comity, Racial Identity, and Miscegenation Laws in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, 1860s-1960s." Akron Law Review 32 (xx): 557-76.

Warren, Mark. 2001. Dry Bones Rattling: Community Building to Revitalize American Democracy . Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Washington Post , Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University School of Public Health. 2001. Survey of Biracial Couples .

Waterston, Adriana. 2004. The Dawning of Multicultural America. Larchmont NY: Horowitz Associates Inc./Surveys Unlimited.

Weaver, Vesla. 2005. Race, Skin Color, and Candidate Preference . Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago IL:

---. 2007. Dark Prison:  Race, Rights, and the Politics of Punishment .  Cambridge MA: Harvard University.

Williams, Kim. 2006. Mark One or More: Civil Rights in Multiracial America . Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press.

Wilson, William J. 1999. The Bridge over the Racial Divide: Rising Inequality and Coalition Politics . Berkeley CA: University of California Press.

Woodward, C. Vann. 2002. The Strange Career of Jim Crow . Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.

Wright, Carroll and William Hunt. 1900. The History and Growth of the United States Census, Prepared for the Senate Committee on the Census . Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office.

Acknowledgments: The project of which this paper is a part is jointly co-authored with Traci Burch, of the Government and Social Policy Program at Harvard University.  She has been fully involved in developing these arguments, but bears no responsibility for the content of this paper.  We thank Gwen Clark, Ariel Huerta, Tiffany Jones, Frankie Petrosino, Brenna Powell, Robert Young, and Jasmine Zhang for heroic research assistance.  We also thank Lisa Garcia Bedolla, Melissa Nobles, the editors of this volume, and the anonymous reviewers for insightful comments.  Finally, we are grateful to the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies for their financial and institutional support. 

Please send comments and queries to [email protected] and [email protected] . 

[1] After a first usage which is often in quotations, we continue by using the terminology common to the time period about which we are writing.  We do not thereby endorse these terms, which are often offensive to contemporary ears.  But endless quotation marks or phrases such as “so-called …” are tedious to read.  Following the same logic, we do not capitalize “negro” until the census bureau itself started to do so, in a 1918 volume

[2] Before the Civil War, mulattos were sometimes permitted to testify in court cases although Blacks were not, and in carefully specified circumstances, they were permitted to marry Whites (Finkelman 1993).

[3] Throughout the nineteenth century, “instead of grouping mulattoes into the undifferentiated category of Black, the Lower South treated mulattoes as a third category, an intermediate class between Blacks and Whites.  Pragmatic reasons drove southern Whites to maintain this buffer class” (Jones 2000): 1508).  South Carolina and Louisiana were especially slow and reluctant to adopt a one-drop rule, preferring often to give special status to mulattos of good reputation.

[4]   The 1930 census enumerated Mexicans separately, after variously categorizing them as White or mulatto in earlier censuses.  However, after the Mexican government and members of Congress from districts in Texas protested that Mexican Americans were White, the separate category was dropped

[5] The Supreme Court similarly recognized deep ambiguity in defining races, even a decade later:  “It may be… that a given group cannot be properly assigned to any of the enumerated grand racial divisions.  The type may have been so changed by the intermixture of blood as to justify an intermediate classification”  [ ( United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind 1923): 212].

[6] Almost all Asians were excluded from the United States, so continuing muddlement about Asian nationalities and “races” had little impact on American society in general.  There is a separate, fascinating, story about racial classification of American Indians in the same period, but we save that for another day.

[7] The legislature, however, had to backtrack from this assertion of white racial purity to accommodate the First Families that claimed descent from Pocohantas.

[8] But not without a great deal of confusion:  “Between 1910 and 1924, for example, a mixed-race person less than one-fourth, who, before 1910, could marry only a white person – barred from marrying a ‘colored person’ under penalty of indictment for a felony – could now marry only another person of color and, if marrying a white person, would be subject to prosecution for that choice.  Two mixed-race people who, under the previous dispensation, might have legally married each other as white people (if, for example, each were seven-eighths European and one-eighth African), might now marry each other just as legally as nonwhite people” (Wallenstein 1999): 572 ).

[9] So did White poverty. Southern elites’ commitment to keep Blacks poor through inadequate schooling, deprivation of public services, and economic peonage kept the south in a state of deep economic underdevelopment, thus harming poor Whites almost as much.  White workers, sharecroppers, farm workers, and domestic servants were prevented from unionizing and deprived of most the New Deal benefits either intentionally or as a side effect of keeping Black workers poor and powerless [(Katznelson 2005); (Key 1984 [1949]); (Reich 1981)].

[10] For example, when the census first allowed for self-definition in 1960, there was no “noticeable fluctuation in the number of blacks, thus indicating that black Americans generally apply the one-drop rule to themselves” (Davis 2001): 7). 

[11] Although not immigrants, well over half of Native Americans marry outside their race, and that proportion also is rising (Lee and Edmonston 2005).

[12] Obama refers to his African father and White American mother in many political speeches, as in, “I stand here today, grateful for the diversity of my heritage.... In no other country on earth is my story even possible,” or “it’s [my biracial background] been entirely to my benefit.  One of the things that I’m proud of is that I can move between many worlds and I think that’s broadened my perspective” [(Obama 2004); (Roach 2004)].

[13] These results are based on one-way ANOVAS.  The differences in means are statistically significant at the p = .01 level.  See also (Edwards 1972); (Keith and Herring 1991); (Hunter 2002); (Allen et al. 2000); (Seltzer and Smith 1991); and (Krieger et al. 1998).

            In the 1992-94 Multi-city Study of Urban Inequality (MCSUI), dark-skinned Blacks received on average 12.2 years of schooling; medium-skinned Blacks received 12.5, and light skinned Blacks enjoyed 12.9 years of schooling. These results are based on one-way ANOVAS; p = .000 (for data, see (Bobo et al. 2000).

[14] p = .001 for Blacks.  See also (Edwards 1972; Keith and Herring 1991); (Seltzer and Smith 1991); (Murguia and Telles 1996); (Cotton 1997); (Krieger et al. 1998); (Hill 2000); (Gomez 2000);  (Allen et al. 2000); (Hunter 2002); (Bowman et al. 2004).

In MCSUI, the mean Black family income rose from $23,191 for the dark-skinned, to $24,773 for the medium-skinned, to $25,886 for the light-skinned.  That is, families of dark-skinned African Americans enjoyed about 90 percent as much income as families of light-skinned African Americans, in a year when the mean family income for Blacks was 64 percent of that of Whites. Based on one-way ANOVAs, for Blacks:  p = .114.

[15] In MCSUI, for example, when asked if other Blacks “treated them differently because of their color,” the lightest set of Blacks were more likely to say yes.  Blacks of all shades were equally likely to say that Whites treated them differently based on color.

[16] Roger Clegg, of the Center for Equal Opportunity, made a similar argument to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights: “Insisting that people embrace a racial identity is bad for civil-rights progress and, therefore, bad for civil-rights enforcement.  Discrimination is more likely to occur in a society in which people have strong racial identities and an us-them mentality”(Clegg 2002): 2).

[17] Thanks for Lydia Saad of the Gallup Organization for providing the relevant cross-tabulations. 

Race/Class Conflict and Urban Financial Threat

Do Facts Matter?: Information and Misinformation in American Politics

Outsiders No More?: Models of Immigrant Political Incorporation

Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America

Bringing Outsiders In: Transatlantic Perspectives on Immigrant Political Incorporation

The American Dream and the Public Schools

The New American Dilemma

Racial Classification

Video interviews.

Web Documents

Suggested films.

• Tools and Resources
• Customer Services
• Conflict Studies
• Development
• Environment
• Foreign Policy
• Human Rights
• International Law
• Organization
• International Relations Theory
• Political Communication
• Political Economy
• Political Geography
• Political Sociology
• Politics and Sexuality and Gender
• Qualitative Political Methodology
• Quantitative Political Methodology
• Security Studies
• Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Article contents

Race, ethnicity, and nation.

• Polly Rizova Polly Rizova Center for Governance and Public Policy Research, Willamette University
•  and  John Stone John Stone Department of Sociology, Boston University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.470
• Published in print: 01 March 2010
• Published online: 11 January 2018
• This version: 26 April 2021
• Previous version

The term “race” refers to groups of people who have differences and similarities in biological traits deemed by society to be socially significant, meaning that people treat other people differently because of them. Meanwhile, ethnicity refers to shared cultural practices, perspectives, and distinctions that set apart one group of people from another. Ethnic differences are not inherited; they are learned. When racial or ethnic groups merge in a political movement as a form of establishing a distinct political unit, then such groups can be termed nations that may be seen as representing beliefs in nationalism. Race and ethnicity are linked with nationality particularly in cases involving transnational migration or colonial expansion. Anthropologists and historians, following the modernist understanding of ethnicity, see nations and nationalism as developing with the rise of the modern state system. This culminated in the rise of “nation-states,” in which the presumptive boundaries of the nation coincided with state borders. Thus, the notion of ethnicity, like race and nation, developed in the context of European colonial expansion, when mercantilism and capitalism were promoting global movements of populations at the same time that state boundaries were being more clearly and rigidly defined. Theories about the relation between race, ethnicity, and nationality are also linked to more general ideas concerning globalization and populist nationalism.

• nationalism
• transnational migration
• colonial expansion
• globalization
• populist nationalism

Updated in this version

Updated references, enhanced discussions of globalization and populist nationalism.

Introduction: Three Variations on a Theme

The three terms—race, ethnicity, and nation—represent forms of group identification that may be the result of internal choice, external categorization, or some combination of the two perspectives. “Race” is the most controversial term since it is based on a false biological premise that there are distinct groups of genetically similar human populations and that these “races” share unique social and cultural characteristics. This assumption was common among many thinkers during the 19th and much of the 20th centuries and still has a considerable following in folk theories and everyday discourse, but it has been completely discredited by scientific knowledge in biology and genetics. The popularity of such racist thinking is linked to its utility in justifying all types of group oppression and exploitation, exemplified by slavery, imperialism, genocide, apartheid, and other systems of stratification and segregation. Ethnicity, or the sense of belonging to a community based on a common history, language, religion, and other cultural characteristics, is a central concept that has been used to understand an important basis of identity in most societies around the world and throughout human history. When ethnic or “racial” groups combine in a political movement in order to create or maintain a distinct political unit, or state, then such groups can be termed nations and such movements may be seen as embodying ideologies or beliefs in nationalism.

In reality, there is a considerable overlap between racism, ethnicity, and nationalism. Extreme forms of nationalism often have a racial ideology associated with them, as was the case with German nationalism during the Nazi period ( 1933–1945 ) or Afrikaner nationalism in the era of apartheid ( 1948–1990 ). While some scholars use the term “ethnonationalism” (Connor, 1993 ) to merge the forces of ethnicity and nationalism, others draw a distinction between ethnic and civic forms of nationalism. The former comprises a sense of belonging based on common ancestry, while the latter focuses on membership in a shared political unit that can include citizens from diverse ethnic origins. However, the types of identity associated with these two variants of nationalism are rarely clear-cut and empirical cases usually consist of a mixture of features drawn from both phenomena (Brubaker, 2004 , pp. 132–146). Academic studies of racism, ethnicity, and nationalism reveal the same imprecise boundaries between them, which suggests they should be treated as variations on similar social and political themes.

Historians have argued at length concerning the legitimate application of the terms to different forms of social relationships and intergroup attitudes. While slavery has existed in many societies throughout human history, a question remains as to whether it is reasonable to regard the position of Greek slaves in the Roman Empire as on a par with that of African slaves in North America, the Caribbean, or Latin America. If the specific form of “racism” in the United States was a product of a particularly vicious system of chattel slavery, to what extent then can we make generalizations about this term m to cover other historical cases of group domination? Many of the same problems arise in the case of nationalism, but here the arguments have centered on the issue of the origins of the phenomenon. When can we say that a sense of national identity first arose: in the Ancient World, during the 16th century in England (Greenfeld, 1992 ), or as an outcome of the American and French revolutions? Was nationalism a deeply rooted and continuous force in human history, or a relatively recent “invention” that acts as a convenient cover for other, more fundamental changes (Gellner, 1983 ; Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983 ; Smith, 1986 , 2008 )? Volumes have been written attempting to date the origins of nationalism and the types of forces that can be seen as central to its emergence as a major factor in the modern world. Like so many academic debates, much depends on one’s definition of nationalism—whether, for example, it is viewed as a mass or an elite phenomenon—and what combination of causal variables one chooses to include in its formation.

It is partly the association with difficult-to-change biological properties that has made racism so controversial and yet so attractive for dominant groups. In the middle of the 19th century , Gobineau’s ( 1853–1855 ) Essay on the Inequality of Human Races set out an analysis of human society and history using a racist model, and its popularity and widespread adoption by other thinkers served to reinforce the political realities of group domination for almost a century. It was cited approvingly by several influential American sociologists and historians in order to justify Southern slavery in the United States and acted as a precursor to the influential theory of an “Aryan” master race destined to rule or exterminate “inferior” racial groups, which underpinned the cultural and political thinking of such figures as Richard Wagner, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Adolf Hitler. Similar conclusions developed along parallel tracks in Anglo-American intellectual circles that employed a distortion of Darwin’s ideas of natural selection introduced by an influential group of thinkers, the Social Darwinists. Perhaps the best refutation of Gobineau’s assumptions was found in the critique by his friend and colleague Alexis de Tocqueville, the author of Democracy in America ( 1835–1840 ) and The Ancien Regime and the Revolution ( 1856 ). Tocqueville pointed to the historical tendency of all-powerful groups to assume the permanent nature of their superiority over those whom they had conquered and continued to dominate. A simple understanding of the rise and fall of empires and nations showed how improbable the assumption was that any particular system of group domination would last indefinitely. This implicit power model of race relations, while by no means the only system of thought designed to account for racial hierarchies in nonracial terms found among scholars, nevertheless recurred in the writings of social scientists and historians during the latter half of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th centuries . Despite their often less than progressive ideas on many issues affecting the society of their day, prominent thinkers such as Herbert Spencer and Vilfredo Pareto understood the political basis of imperialism and colonialism and were very much opposed to both of them. Thus, the former referred to European imperialist policies as “social cannibalism,” and the latter attacked the hypocrisy of the so-called civilizing mission of the colonial powers as nothing more than an excuse for exploiting their superior force (Stone & Rizova, 2014 ).

One of the clearest developments of this type of explanation of race, ethnicity, and nation can be seen in the writings of the influential German sociologist Max Weber (see Stone & Dennis, 2003 ). In keeping with his general framework that stressed the analogies between economic and social life, Weber conceived of these three types of group formation as another manifestation of the general tendency toward monopolization frequently found in economic life as well as in society as a whole. Such a formulation helped to explain the variety and often quite arbitrary nature of group boundaries—in one situation it would be religion, in another it would be language, or in a third it could be “race”—which happened to be used as the markers defining membership or exclusion from the group. Sometimes all three factors might be superimposed on each other to create the boundaries separating the dominant from the subordinate groups; on other occasions these characteristics appeared to cut across group membership in one or another combination. Nevertheless, the defining feature of this historical process was to establish increasingly strict criteria for membership and exclusion that, once set in motion, became a self-reinforcing process. Just as economic competition in the long run often results in monopolies under market capitalism, so too do groups seek to monopolize the life chances and other benefits of social hierarchy within multiethnic and multiracial states, or between states in the international arena.

In the middle of the 20th century , the defeat of the Axis powers of Germany and Japan, and the unraveling of colonialism, combined with powerful protest movements such as the civil rights struggle in the United States and the antiapartheid campaign in South Africa, were some of the forces diminishing the crude divisions between racially defined groups on a global scale. That said, the importance of ethnicity and the persistence of nationalism have proved to be surprisingly resilient. Premature declarations that modernity and globalization would inevitably undermine peoples’ allegiance to ethnic attachments, or spell the end of national sentiment, have turned out to be unfounded. This is not to claim that in certain spheres the influence of ethnicity and nationalism has become relatively less powerful, or indeed that racism has been abolished, but rather to point to the protean character of these basic types of identity and their ability to adapt, mutate, and reemerge as historical conditions unfold. Thus, the end of the Cold War reduced the ability of ideological rivalries to mask and submerge all manner of ethnic and national divisions in a wider global struggle. As a result, toward the final decades of the 20th century , a Pandora’s box of previously muted national sentiments burst open in the Balkans (Rizova, 2007 ) to provide a counterexample to the surprisingly peaceful transition from apartheid to nonracial democracy in South Africa.

Race: Biology as Destiny

In spite of the intellectual demolition of the genetic basis of racial theorizing since the second half of the 20th century , the legacy of racism lives on. This is hardly surprising given the coalescence of European colonialism, the slave trade, and the imbalances of global power over the past 500 years. All of this began to unravel during the 20th century in a way that first questioned and then started to undermine the customary hierarchies of half a millennium. The intellectual evolution of human biology initially provided what appeared to be a simple explanation for the apparent correlation between power and race. In the 19th century , biology rivaled theology as the perfect way to legitimize group domination. Subordinate groups no longer had to be damned by the Almighty to perpetual inferiority when they could be damned by their genes. In some ways the utility of biological excommunication was rather less than that justified by faith since the former was always subject to empirical refutation. As knowledge in the biological sciences progressed, greater evidence supported the view that all human population groups shared an overwhelmingly common genetic heritage and what was even more compelling was the fact that variations within so-called races were far more significant than any variations between these categories. As biological explanations seemed harder to sustain, a new consensus started to emerge in academic circles that races were social constructions and therefore that differences were the product of cultural traditions and historical circumstance that could, and no doubt would, change with time. The biological explanations of racial differences were thus false and so other factors needed to be used to explain the social reality behind group differences.

What Alexis de Tocqueville understood as a result of his historical perspective, and Max Weber appreciated by his comparative research, was increasingly supported by the scientific advances in the field of human biology. Not that this was a smooth transition from a paradigm of racial theorizing to an understanding of human difference in terms of resources and power. The elegance of justifying inequality as a consequence of scientific inevitability continually reoccurred in one form after another. Often the proponents were not “racist” in a direct sense of the term, and some had strongly antiracist credentials, but the result of this form of theorizing was almost indistinguishable from earlier biological arguments. Thus sociobiology, based on the twin concepts of kin selection and inclusive fitness, might be seen as entirely divorced from vulgar racial thinking. However, by elevating the “selfish gene” to the master explanation of all human activity and creation, this argument had the potential to offer an approach uncomfortably close in its implications to the theory that Gobineau had proposed a hundred years earlier. It is no surprise that the experience of biological theorizing and its consequences throughout the 20th century have subjected such ideas to a far more skeptical appraisal and caused their proponents to be rather more cautious in linking genetic characteristics to cultural and social outcomes.

Nevertheless, racism has been a persistent and powerful influence on social life for much of the 20th century . The frequently quoted prediction of W. E. B. Du Bois ( 1903 ) in The Souls of Black Folk , that the color line would be a defining division in human society for the following hundred years and that it would be not merely an American conflict but global in its reach, has been more than fulfilled by the passage of time. Against the backdrop of the history of the 20th century , which witnessed the decline of European domination over much of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the struggle for civil rights in the United States and South Africa, and a succession of genocidal massacres that stretched from the gas chambers of Auschwitz to the killing fields of Rwanda and Darfur, it is often hard to imagine why racist ideas have not been totally discredited. Although some people, perhaps those coming from societies less conscious of the civil rights and liberation struggles of the 20th century , may still believe in the fallacy of racial difference, among the educated populations of the world these beliefs appear to be of diminishing significance. That said, it would be completely wrong to regard racism, and antagonism based on racial divisions, to be no longer a significant element in the conflicts that continue to tear apart much of the fabric of contemporary global society. This paradox, of greater understanding of the nature of “racial” conflict on the one hand, and yet the continuing persistence of race on the other hand, requires a careful dissection of the meaning of “race” in contemporary society. The complexity of the topic and the manner in which such thinking has subtly shifted has led some social scientists to write about “racism without racists” (Bonilla-Silva, 2006 ) and still others to devote much scrutiny to a related, counterintuitive phenomenon, “ethnicity without groups” (Brubaker, 2004 ) and the “slippery nature” of contemporary racisms (Solomos, 2020 ).

It is already generally accepted that race is a social construct, an idea—in this case a scientifically erroneous one—that is in the minds of people. The enormous variability of racial systems from one society to another, and in different historical periods, demonstrates that racial background has little intrinsic importance, and that racial identity is rather a powerful legacy of cultural tradition and social inertia. Nevertheless, the changes that still need to take place in order for all white Americans to accept their black fellow citizens not only as governors, leading officials, and even as their President, but also as residential neighbors, remain to be realized. Despite the two-term Obama presidency ( 2008–2016 ) and the premature use of the term “post-racialism” to describe it, such unexpected progress has been quickly put to rest by the arrival of the explicitly racist language and actions of the Trump administration (Stone & Rizova, 2020 ). The Black Lives Matter movement (Dennis & Dennis, 2020 ), along with the rise of white nationalism, part of a global trend toward populist nationalism, provide widespread evidence of the continuing significance of race throughout the world.

The long-term difficulty in overcoming this legacy can be explained in part by what Charles Tilly and Thomas Shapiro have termed “opportunity hoarding,” the passing on of assets between generations that favors whites over blacks at a ratio of 10 to one (Shapiro, 2004 ; Tilly, 1998 ). Another historical perspective that helps to explain the entrenchment of racial privilege is the manner in which the discussion about “affirmative action” has been framed. Increasingly, scholars are linking dominant “affirmative action” to the New Deal and to those policies designed to assist white veterans, notably the GI Bill, after World War II (Katznelson, 2006 ). A parallel discussion is to view the implementation of apartheid in South Africa, between 1948 and 1990 , as another type of affirmative action for the benefit of the dominant (white) political group. Its demonstrated effectiveness in raising the lower class of Afrikaners—the bywoners —out of poverty helps to explain some of the subsequent levels of racial inequality in postapartheid South Africa.

Returning to the American case, one only needs to drive through the heart of major, or for that matter minor, American cities, examine the student populations of so many of the worst American public schools, or simply consider the statistics describing the inmates of the American penal system (Alexander, 2010 ), and the reality of the continuing significance of race is hard to deny. Furthermore, the health disparities exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 revealed the heavily disproportionate numbers of black and brown casualties among the infection and death rates in America. These figures, together with the often lethal police violence exposed, yet again, by the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis, show how black and white lives are by no means subject to the same opportunities and risks in contemporary America.

To focus on the American case is to survey only part of the problem. However, because of its high ideals—crafted by the slave-owning proponents of democracy for a “civilized” elite that did not include either women or minorities—the United States has been at the center of a storm of ethical debates about who should be granted full membership of, and who should be excluded from, the rights and privileges of freedom. The problematic nature of this debate can be seen in the preference of so many black slaves to join and fight with the British colonial forces in the 1770s against the advocates of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Given the bias toward white property-owning males, this decision was based on a rational calculation that London was more likely to end the “peculiar institution” than the slave-owning “democrats” meeting in Philadelphia (Schama, 2006 ). This is not to glamorize the motives of the British who, no sooner had they lost the fight in North America, went on to pillage Africa, Asia, and other exploitable parts of the globe as they scrambled to “civilize” the rest of humanity.

But racism is certainly not confined to the Anglo-American world. The evolution of rather different patterns of racial hierarchy and group conflicts can be seen in Latin America, Africa, and Europe. As Edward Telles ( 2004 ) has argued in Race in Another America , Brazil has been plagued by powerful traditions of racial distinction, but the dynamics of race relations follow a different logic from that underlying the pattern found in the United States. Despite the ideology of “racial democracy,” formulated in its classical manner by Gilberto Freyre’s ( 1933 ) The Masters and the Slaves , few social scientists or historians would seriously deny that Brazilian society is permeated by considerations of color (Bailey, 2020 ; Fritz, 2011 ). The fundamental difference is, in some cruel paradox, that individuals, under the rules of the Brazilian system, can, so to speak, “change their race,” while blacks in America, conforming to the pressures of the one drop rule, cannot.

Individualism in the United States may be characterized the philosophy of social mobility, but it does not breach the color line. The very fluidity of the Brazilian system has made it in the past a more subtle and complex problem to solve, although the election of President Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 —the “Trump of the Tropics”—revealed a new, and hardly nuanced, slant on racial democracy. The Brazilian case can be seen as a cautionary tale concerning the strengths and weaknesses of a comparative perspective. On the one hand, viewing the patterns in one society in isolation from a wider lens invites a form of myopia that greatly diminishes the value of the exercise; on the other hand, embarking on elaborate comparative analyses without a close understanding of the complexities of each situation invites another type of bias. Nevertheless, trying to place rather different systems within a wider framework has become increasingly necessary as the forces of globalization continue to foster closer links between virtually all societies as they are bound together by the ties of an interlinked global system. The exercise becomes even more challenging when one recognizes that there are “many globalizations” (Berger & Huntington, 2003 ) and that no society is ever static as far as its intergroup relationships, or indeed most other aspects of its structure and culture, are concerned. In many of the classic attempts to formulate such broadly comparative models of racial conflict—Pierre van den Berghe ( 1967 ) and Anthony Marx ( 1998 ), for example—the United States, Brazil, and South Africa are often the key reference points. But the shifting nature of race relations in all three of these societies reveals how difficult it is to predict the future direction of multiracial societies.

From being the bastion of racial oppression under the apartheid regime, South Africa has been regenerated as a society where nonracial democracy is the dominant political consensus.

The full implications of this profound and, in many respects, surprising transformation of a rigid racial hierarchy raised enormous hopes for the future direction of the country. However, understanding the nature of social change and how far it has affected the lives of most citizens of the new South Africa is an important illustration of the dynamic nature of most racial systems over time. It is also an excellent way to develop insights into the generation of racial conflict by analyzing those situations where, despite the presence of so many of the characteristics that are often associated with violence, it simply did not take place on anything like the scale that most experts, politicians, and ordinary people predicted. Nevertheless, a quarter of a century later, we have a more realistic assessment of the degree to which “Mandela’s miracle” has transformed South African society or rather has replaced one elite, which was racially defined, with another system of privilege, but one less loosely linked to racial divisions. A succession of disastrous political leaders following Mandela, from Thabo Mbeki, with his tragic refusal to address the AIDS crisis, to the rampant corruption of Jacob Zuma, has squandered much of the promise of a democratic South Africa (Moodley & Adam, 2020 ).

Ethnicity: Group Divisions Rooted in Culture

The power of race as a boundary marker has been continuously demonstrated for the past two centuries in many societies throughout the globe. Its persistence, despite the intellectual bankruptcy of its genetic rationalization, cannot be attributed solely to ignorance, and this explains why education alone is often an insufficient antidote to racial thinking and hierarchies built on racial divisions. Economic, social, and political changes are all part of the process by which racial stratification is challenged, modified, and in some cases overturned. Claims about the relative significance of race or class, and whether strategies emphasizing political mobilization or economic self-sufficiency and advancement hold the key to transforming racial disadvantage and oppression, have been at the core of racial debates throughout the 20th century . Another complication is the overlap between racial markers and ethnic boundaries that often exacerbates such conflicts. Ethnic divisions can be just as deep-seated and ethnic conflicts just as violent as those linked to a racial divide. Language, religion, history, and culture merge and intersect in varying degrees in many of these conflicts. Which factors prove to be salient in any one situation largely depends on the particular historical circumstances that frame the subsequent patterns of ethnic relations.

Among the critical events that influence ethnogenesis and ethnic conflict are patterns of global migration and the related forces of conquest, genocide, settlement, and types of assimilation, integration, and pluralism. Migration has been an endemic force in most societies and in recent centuries has even been incorporated into the founding myths of states that view themselves as based on migration, rather than being derived from some claim of indigenous ownership of a specific land. Such migrant societies include not simply the United States—a self-proclaimed “Society of Immigrants”—but also Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, and Canada. In reality, most societies over time have experienced considerable influxes of new peoples and large outflows of population groups motivated by a variety of factors including the search for economic opportunities, flight from political persecution or military destruction, and the quest for freedom of religious practice and expression, to mention just a few. Some societies encounter inflows and outflows simultaneously, while others include migrants and settlers of varying lengths of time—seasonal migrants, “guest workers” ( gastarbeiter ), transnational communities, nomadic peoples, diasporas, “global cosmopolitans,” undocumented workers, and refugees—and most change the composition and scale of migrant flows and influence over time. Thus, Italy and Ireland were major sources of global migration, particularly the transatlantic movements to North and South America, for much of the 19th and most of the 20th centuries . However, by the turn of the 21st century , it was the impact of migrants trying to enter these two parts of the prosperous European Union (EU), as opposed to the previous tradition of sympathizing with poor migrants escaping famine and rural poverty, that became the salient issue in both societies (O’Dowd, 2005 ). A similar dramatic reversal in perception could be seen in the opposition and violence directed at refugees and economic migrants from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and other sub-Saharan African states living in urban townships around Johannesburg in 2008 .

Different societies have different mechanisms for accommodating ethnic diversity. Some seek to assimilate newcomers as rapidly as possible, while others have more fluid systems of differential incorporation—segmented assimilation, to use one of the common terms employed in the North American literature—with a variety of possible forms. Not all migrant groups wish to become completely integrated into the mainstream of the dominant society; many do but are not accepted without a long period of acculturation and a fierce struggle for structural inclusion. The constant interaction between racism and ethnicity can also be seen in the manner in which some ethnic groups are more readily accepted than others and, in certain cases, migrant groups of one ethnic background may receive advantages denied to oppressed indigenous minorities. In the United States, many of the white ethnic groups, in order to achieve greater acceptance by the core society, quite specifically distanced themselves from blacks and Native Americans, who had been living as stigmatized sectors in the society for centuries prior to their arrival. How the Irish “became white” (Ignatiev, 1995 ; Roediger, 2007 ) was a pattern repeated by many other immigrants, such as the Italians, Poles, and Eastern European Jews, who arrived toward the end of the 19th and in the first two decades of the 20th centuries . Other ethnic groups were also assimilated in patterns that reflected the particular set of characteristics that they possessed, in terms of human and social capital, as well as the economic, social, and political conditions prevailing during the period of their arrival. Thus, Cubans fleeing the Castro revolution in 1959 , and for the duration of the Cold War, benefited greatly from the ideological struggles of the period. Haitians, arriving in Florida at much the same time and escaping the murderous regimes of the Duvaliers, received far less support. Although color may have been part of the equation, the political advantage of being fervent anticommunists was probably an even more important factor.

While North America and Western Europe shared many similar patterns of migration and assimilation during the first two decades of the 21st century —unlikely parallels between Mexican and Muslims having been raised by social scientists on both continents (Huntington, 2004 ; Zolberg & Woon, 1999 )—even societies with a strong ideology of ethnic homogeneity were forced to confront their actual diversity. Germany’s powerful ethnic nationalist tradition (Alba & Foner, 2015 ; Alba et al., 2003 ) has had to be modified by the increasing integration of the European Union, so that second- and third-generation Germans of Turkish ethnic background could no longer be regarded as permanent aliens. Much the same is true of Japan, and not only Ainu and Burakumin, but also Koreans, Chinese, and Okinawans are increasingly self-conscious minorities that have started to challenge the monoethnic ideology of post-World War II Japan (Lie & Weng, 2020 ; Tarumoto, 2020 ). In China, with its enormous population of 1.3 billion, relatively small numbers of ethnic and religious minorities nevertheless constitute a group of approximately 100 million people, and the situation of the Uighurs, Tibetans, and Hui have started to receive greater scholarly and political attention (Hou & Stone, 2008 ). This is hardly surprising given the monumental transformation of Chinese society as the workshop of the modern world, and the types of pressures that such an economic transition creates for all peoples involved in this historic process. Not only are there massive internal migratory movements linked to rapid industrialization and urbanization (Luo, 2020 ), but the adaptation of minorities to these forces almost inevitably results in language change and perceived threats to traditional ways of life. As for the Tibetan case, China’s vast population has allowed a pattern of outside migration of Han Chinese that for the nationalist critics is seen as tantamount to “ethnic swamping,” a variant on ethnic cleansing with a veneer of democratic legitimacy. Contemporary China is facing yet another policy dilemma between playing an increasing global role on the one hand, and using the forces of rising nationalism on the other hand (Hou, 2020 ).

In Africa, ethnic divisions have been a continuing legacy of imperialism that has followed on into the postcolonial era and resulted in much conflict and bloodshed. Even decades after independence, many African states are still permeated by political systems closely linked to ethnic (tribal) loyalties, making a winner-takes-all electoral system unsuited to resolving the problems of state-building and economic development. Nigeria’s war to prevent the Biafran secession ( 1967–1970 ), the genocidal massacres in Rwanda ( 1994 ), and the killings in the Darfur region of Sudan ( 2003 –) are some prominent examples of independent Africa’s struggles with the impact of ethnic conflict. The South African situation was another case where a society that was deeply divided by racial and ethnic boundaries managed to resolve these conflicts in a remarkably peaceful form of negotiation. The society simply redefined the racial and ethnic boundaries to include all groups on the basis of full citizenship for everyone. Whether the South African model, with its distinctive use of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission and many other unique features, can be a successful long-term experiment in nonracialism remains to be seen. However, some of the lessons learned from the South African case have been applied to other conflict-torn areas of the world, such as Northern Ireland and the Basque region of Spain.

The last two cases illustrate the diverse boundary markers that can be found in regions plagued by ethnic conflicts. In Northern Ireland, “religion” was the ostensible ground for group solidarity and division, the centuries-old difference between the Protestant ruling group and the Catholic minority being the manner in which the conflict was framed. However, the underlying struggle appeared to most analysts to have little or nothing to do with doctrinal matters and much more to be based on those who regarded themselves as part of Britain (the “Protestants”) and those who identified with Ireland and being Irish (the “Catholics”). In the Basque case, language and cultural divisions, closely tied in with feelings of historical separation, represented the ethnic glue behind a strong sense of Basque identity and the movement for separation from Spain (Conversi, 1997 ). For both situations, however, many social scientists interpret the struggle as one between groups divided on the basis of nationalism. Once an ethnic group moves toward mobilization with the goal of creating a separate state, or joining a different state from the one that it is currently a part, then ethnicity is transformed into nationalism.

The nature of these movements has been explored by scholars who emphasize a variety of different factors to account for the changing salience of ethnic and national struggles over time (Fearson & Laitin, 2003 , 2005 ). Most of these factors are related to the relative power of ethnonationalist movements compared with the state structures they are fighting against. The components of the power equation can include many influences, including the legitimacy of the groups’ claims for national independence; whether such movements are united or consist of a coalition of conflicting parties; the extent to which ethnic groups and nationalist movements are spread across multiple state boundaries and are geographically concentrated or dispersed; the strength and resilience of the states that oppose them; and the geopolitical context in which the conflict is taking place. The situation of the Kurds illustrates several of these elements, such as the opposition to statehood from Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, and the opportunities for greater autonomy presented by the collapse of centralized political control that emerged as a consequence of the 2003 Iraq war (O’Leary et al., 2005 ). While the Kurds played a significant military role in the defeat of ISIS during the Syrian civil war ( 2011 –) after the Russian support for President Bashar al-Assad proved decisive, the Kurdish forces were rapidly abandoned by their former allies, reflecting the number of states opposed to any idea of an independent Kurdish state.

The Continuing Significance of the Nation

Thus, ethnicity and nationalism form different stages along a continuum. Some ethnic groups, particularly those living in explicitly multinational states, are content to remain as part of a wider political unit. In certain cases, such as Switzerland, the state is fundamentally based on these separate group components, coexisting in various types of federal structures. The Swiss canton system is a long-established version of federalism that has been able to contain at least three major linguistic groups—German, French, and Italian speakers—in a united state structure.

However, the Swiss example is in many respects exceptional. The clear recognition that these types of arrangements may combine a high degree of autonomy for each national group while retaining the cohesiveness of the overarching political unit is but one way to manage ethnic diversity. Much depends on the perceptions of equal treatment and a just division of power and resources, which explains why these federal solutions are often difficult to maintain. Conflicts between Canada and Quebec, between Flemings and Walloons in Belgium, between Muslims and Christians in Lebanon, and between Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds in post-Saddam Iraq all point to the complexities of trying to contain the aspirations of diverse ethnonational groups within a single political structure. Lebanon was once regarded as the “Switzerland of the Middle East” before it descended into religious divisions amid corruption and outside interference.

Europe in the postcommunist period provides some interesting examples of failed federalism and federalist expansion taking place simultaneously. The collapse of Yugoslavia, which under Josip Broz Tito had been one of the most genuinely devolved, ethnically diverse states in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, demonstrates how rapidly such arrangements can disintegrate in the aftermath of political change (Sekulic, 2020 ). With the initial breakaway of Slovenia, followed by the wars between Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, what had once been a unified power-sharing arrangement rapidly degenerated into a power struggle articulated in nationalist terms. The split with Montenegro, and the declaration of independence by Kosovo in 2008 , finally left Serbia on its own, thus completing the total disintegration of what had been a unified state since 1918 . While Yugoslavia was falling apart, much of the rest of Eastern Europe, having emerged from the political control of the Soviet system, was involved in a scramble to join the European Union. Just as one part of the continent was fragmenting into an increasing number of units defined by their dominant ethnic population, other parts, comprising firmly established states, were voluntarily surrendering some of their sovereignty in order to enjoy the benefits of an enlarged economic and political community. Thus, a continuing dialectic of national fission and fusion demonstrates that there is nothing inevitable about the strength and direction of nationalist sentiment, which can wax and wane depending on a range of economic, social, and political factors. The component parts of the former Yugoslavia would also join the scramble for EU membership in the early decades of the 21st century .

While European consolidation during and after the 1990s was a remarkable transition from centuries of rivalry and warfare, even this has to be seen as an ever-changing development. After having narrowly defeated the Scottish independence referendum in September 2014 , the United Kingdom was locked in a struggle to leave the EU in June 2016 , after almost half a century of membership. While this was in part a political miscalculation by Prime Minister David Cameron designed to silence critics within his party, the surprising outcome and the protracted negotiations to work out an exit from the EU—Brexit—came to a head with the electoral victory of Boris Johnson in 2019 . This outcome resonated with other global trends, including the unexpected electoral victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 American presidential election together with a string of parallel political movements from Turkey to Brazil, from India to Indonesia, and including Russia and China. This revival of populist nationalism can be seen in part as a massive reaction to the uneven outcome of accelerated globalization (Brubaker, 2017 ; Stone & Rizova, 2020 ).

Furthermore, the expansion and internal dynamics of Europe were also influencing the types of internal “national” conflicts taking place between member states. Thus, the gradual solution of the centuries-old Northern Ireland struggle can in part be attributed to the lower salience of national boundaries resulting from the increasing influence of Brussels and Strasbourg. While many Unionists (Protestants) and Nationalists (Catholics) had a visceral dislike of dealing with Dublin and London respectively, the prospect of a fundamental shift in the European political center of gravity meant that both groups could increasingly bargain with a third party. This was the politically neutral European Parliament and Commission (bureaucracy), which rendered their traditional foes much less important and prevented compromise from looking like capitulation. No one would suggest that this was the only factor involved in the lessening of tensions and facilitating the historic power-sharing arrangement. The phenomenal growth of the Irish economy—the emergence of the Celtic Tiger—and the changed attitude of the American public toward “terrorism” (and hence financial support for the Irish Republican Army) in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon were also critical developments pushing the parties in Northern Ireland toward completing the negotiations. However, given the earlier emphasis on the ever-changing nature of these group relationships, the arrival of Brexit raised a totally new obstacle to sustained peace in Northern Ireland. Whether peaceful cooperation can withstand the complex border issues resulting from the United Kingdom’s exit from the EU remains to be seen.

The academic scholarship on nationalism has involved a series of debates about the fundamental nature of the phenomenon that is being analyzed. Proponents of primordialism, ethnosymbolism, and modernism, the three most influential perspectives in the literature, have argued extensively about the content and origin of nationalism. Some maintain that this form of identity is rooted in a long and continuous association of specific peoples, whether it is tied to a perceived cultural history often stretching back over centuries, if not millennia, or whether it is, in fact, a relatively recent form of identity. Others date nationalism to the Industrial Revolution and/or the political revolutions in America and France in the late 18th century and claim it was largely “invented” by modernizing elites in an attempt to unify political structures. There are a large number of permutations and combinations of these basic perspectives. Most primordialists avoid the genetic mechanisms associated with sociobiological arguments—Pierre van den Berghe being a notable exception—for the same reason that the overwhelming majority of scholars analyzing “race” are careful to emphasize that they are describing a fictitious construction based on a poor understanding of biological processes. Thus, sociologists such as Edward Shils and Steven Grosby stress cultural and social mechanisms that bond human groups together on the basis of family, culture, and territory. While not biologically programmed, these cultural affiliations are deeply felt and are often experienced with great intensity, which helps to explain the power and resilience of nationalist sentiments. A related emphasis on the strong psychological basis of much nationalism can be found in Walker Connor’s analysis of what he calls ethnonationalism (Connor, 1993 ). Connor draws a firm distinction between two closely related, but he would insist distinct, sources of identification: nationalism, which refers to loyalty to an ethnic group or nation; and patriotism, which is defined as political identification with the state.

The fact that the nation-state, a perfect overlap between one specific ethnic group and a given political unit, only exists in a few cases, and even then is only an approximation to reality, explains the nature of so many types of nationalist conflict. States often seek to incorporate minority ethnic groups into the structures and culture of the dominant group, and this can often result in reactive resistance by the minority group(s): subordinate nationalism to counter dominant nationalism. A related distinction that is frequently made is between ethnic and civic nationalism, a difference between those states that explicitly attempt to fuse the nation and the state and those that try to maintain an ethnically neutral political organization. In practice, this too is an analytical dichotomy that was initially developed to contrast the types of nationalism found in Eastern Europe and those typically prevailing in the Western states of the continent. Once again, no matter how much the civic ideal-type is professed, it is rarely pure in form, and many of the cultural characteristics of the dominant group are subtly, or often less than subtly, incorporated into the basic assumptions of the state.

Other theorists of nationalism tend to emphasize the modern nature of the phenomenon, insisting that none of the forms of identity that characterized society for long periods of human history share the vital ingredients of the modern understanding of the term. There are several variations on this perspective, some coming out of the Marxist tradition that dismisses nationalism, like religion, as yet another form of false consciousness, and others that view the emergence of nationalism as an integral element of modernity. The former perspective regards nationalism as an ideological smokescreen hiding the “true” interests of the working classes so that the owners of the means of capitalist production can better exploit them. It is a variant on the divide and rule strategy that promotes ideological confusion and pits worker against worker on the basis of a totally irrelevant set of distinctions. Modernity theorists, meanwhile, do not link the rise of nationalism with the growth of capitalism alone but see it as stemming from a combination of political, social, and economic forces generated by the Enlightenment. One result of the economic and political revolutions of the 18th and early 19th centuries , and the scientific and technological advances associated with these historical transformations, is the need for mass education to build a culturally homogeneous platform to sustain these developments (Gellner, 1983 ). Central to these changes, and resulting as an unintended consequence of the functional requirements of a modern lifestyle, are conditions that encourage and sustain nationalism.

The ethnosymbolists, exemplified by the writings of Anthony Smith ( 1986 , 2008 ) and John Hutchinson ( 2005 , 2017 ), take a middle position between modernist social construction and the sense of historical continuity. While Smith and his colleagues are fully aware of the cultural foundations of nations, they are also equally cognizant of the role of myths, symbols, and the frequently distorted collective memory that underpins all the major forms of nationalist movements. This middle path between the extremes of construction and continuity provides a valuable balance that helps us to understand a wider range of nationalist movements, from those with a pedigree stretching back millennia to the nationalisms of the postimperial era during the 19th and 20th centuries . With the emergence of a variety of interpretations of how and when nationalism developed in modern society, much of the current debate concerns an assessment of the impact of such forces as globalization, religious fundamentalism, and international nonstate terrorism as factors that may shape the continuing importance, growing salience, or declining significance of nationalism in the future.

Globalization and Populist Nationalism

Is it possible that racism, ethnicity, and nationalism will become much less salient in the coming decades? If so, what would be the explanation for such trends? Social scientists do not have a particularly good record in predicting far into the future. While W. E. B. DuBois was remarkably prescient in seeing the power of the color line throughout the 20th century , other predictions have proved to be far less accurate. For example, a claim that the advance of science and technology, as a crucial component of the “rationality” of modernization, would make religion obsolete in the latter half of the 20th century has not turned out to be correct. The particular forms of identity that are likely to be salient or, in contradistinction, may quite probably diminish in significance in the decades to come remains an enduring question.

Of the three elements, racism seemed, until the arrival of Trump, to be the least likely candidate for a rapid revival as a basis of group categorization. There are several forces that could strengthen a general antiracist trend in modern global society. Olzak ( 2006 ) has stressed the need to integrate the changing nature of international organizations and processes into the analysis, particularly the complex ramifications of globalization with its impact on migration, transnational communities, suprastate institutions, and transnational corporations. Increased diversity in all the major societies as a result of the global transformation of the world economy, and the interconnections of capital and labor, can be expected to increase during the successive decades of the century. This will apply not only to the postindustrial societies of the First World, but also to the intermediate developing economies and to the Third World. The sheer diversity of migration patterns, internal flows within regional free trade areas, transnational communities whose dynamics will be enhanced by accelerated innovations in communication technologies and transportation, growing groups of highly skilled global migrants, and the unpredictable flows of refugees from political persecution, famines, and genocidal massacres, will all combine to increase the multiracial complexion of states and federations throughout the world. No one would expect these trends to be entirely in one direction, or to be without the potential for strong backlashes or reactive political movements against the type of social changes that such developments represent.

Ethnicity and nationalism, meanwhile, will probably be rather more persistent markers of group boundaries. There are several reasons for this conclusion. While the United Nations, as a global organization for political governance, has a role to play in trying to respond to crises and catastrophes that cut across state boundaries or involve multiple state conflicts, its structure is fundamentally state-bound. The Security Council’s veto power means that a coordinated response is extremely difficult when a particular state, or power bloc, deems such action to be a threat to their “national interests” or to set a precedent that can be viewed as “interference in the internal affairs of a member state.” Thus, on issues such as genocide, torture, brutal ethnic repression, and the blatant disregard for human rights, UN conventions are invariably ignored when geopolitical interests are involved.

If one overarching political structure is unlikely to reduce ethnic and nationalist sentiments, what about the impact of intermediate-scale organizations that bunch together clusters of states in regional groupings? What will be the net effect of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the African Union, the EU, NAFTA, and related supranational, but not global, institutions and treaties? Will they, on balance, help to diminish the types of ethnic and national mobilization as increased cooperation and mutual dependency in economic, social, and political ties start to extend the traditional boundaries of group interaction? Or will they lead to strong opposition, with political parties appealing to xenophobic solidarity, to setting up “Fortress Europe,” or building fences to try to curtail the increasing flows of illegal economic migrants that are a direct outcome of the trade and economic policies forcing capital and labor to seek out a new equilibrium? If we add the factors of international terrorism, environmental pressure resulting from global climate change, the worldwide implications of drug policies, and the competitive rivalries of major religious faiths, a volatile mix of influences will undoubtedly be unleashed.

Some sociologists such as Richard Alba ( 2008 ) point to demographic factors that could exert pressure on societies such as the United States to move toward greater economic and social justice for ethnic minorities. Given the differential fertility rates of dominant whites and those of minorities, particularly minorities of color, Alba suggests these trends will have a tendency toward minority inclusion in the upper levels of the U.S. stratification system. While in the past immigration from Europe was one mechanism that provided an alternative reservoir of talent to fill a range of positions in the economic hierarchy, since the 1960s the shortfall in the supply of scientific, technical, and managerial talent has often been filled by foreigners, either those directly recruited by U.S. corporations or American-trained aliens who choose to remain in the country and work after completing their higher education. Alba argues that this pool of talented individuals will be subject to increasing competition from many other growing economies and that, combined with the domestic demographic shortfall, the result will be the incorporation of more American minorities into professional, managerial, and technical positions. What is true of the United States is likely to be repeated in Europe with its even lower demographic rates of reproduction and similar patterns of migration both within the enlarged economic community and from the peripheral regions surrounding it.

None of these macro sociopolitical trends necessarily diminish the tensions that arise from increasing globalization that can be channeled along ethnic and nationalist grooves. In fact, the very success of the integrative economic forces may exacerbate ethnonational mobilization as a way to maintain meaningful identity in a world subject to mounting anomic strains associated with rapid and discontinuous social change. What Mann ( 2005 ) has characterized as “the dark side of democracy” is simply a further elaboration of the argument about the dual-edged sword of modernity, which has its intellectual roots in Weber’s pessimistic analysis of “rationality.” From the “banality of evil,” to cite Hannah Arendt’s classic formulation, genocide and ethnic cleansing are not so much a reversion to primitive violence as a logical outcome of many of the forces inherent in modern society. While it is true that there may also be a “banality of good” that can, on occasions, help to counter such threats (Casiro, 2006 ), it is unlikely that this will be the dominant outcome. “Rational” bureaucratic techniques tend to be harnessed to the goals of modern states, multistate alliances, and nonstate global actors such as multinational corporations. These modern methods can combine the destructiveness of scientific means with the tenacity of group identity to attain highly particularistic ends. Regrettably, there is nothing intrinsically benign in the forces underpinning the societal changes that have taken place during the first two decades of the 21st century . The precise balance between racism, ethnicity, and nationalism remains unclear but their possible eradication from future social, economic, and political conflicts seems highly unlikely.

Further Reading

• Acosta, D. (2018). The national versus the foreigner in South America: Two hundred years of migration and citizenship law . Cambridge University Press.
• Boucher, A. , & Gest, J. (2018). Crossroads: Comparative immigration regimes in a world of demographic change . Cambridge University Press.
• Cramer, K. (2016). The politics of resentment . University of Chicago Press.
• Elias, S. , & Feagin, J. (2016). Racial theories in social science: A systemic racism critique . Routledge.
• Esch, El. (2018). The color line and the assembly line: Managing race in the Ford empire . University of California Press.
• Favell, A. (2015). Immigration, integration and mobility: New agendas in migration . ECPR Press.
• Hanchard, M. (2018). The spectre of race: How discrimination haunts Western democracy . Princeton University Press.
• Noble, S. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce RACISM . New York University Press.
• Stone, J. , Rutledge, D. , Rizova, P. , & Hou, X. (Eds.). (2020). The Wiley-Blackwell companion to race, ethnicity and nationalism . Wiley-Blackwell.
• Suarez-Orozco, M. (2019). Humanitarianism and mass migration : Confronting the world crisis . University of California Press.
• Tesler, M. (2016). Post-racial or most racial? Race and politics in the Obama era . University of Chicago Press.
• Alba, R. (2008). Blurring the color line: Possibilities for ethno-racial change in early 21st century America . Harvard: The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures.
• Alba, R. , et al. (Eds.). (2003). Germans or foreigners ? Attitudes toward ethnic minorities in post-reunification Germany . Palgrave Macmillan.
• Alba, R. , & Foner, N. (2015). Strangers No More: Immigration and the Challenges of Integration in North America and Western Europe . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness . The New Press.
• Bailey, S. (2020). Latin America. In J. Stone , D. Rutledge , P. Rizova , & X. Hou (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell companion to race, ethnicity and nationalism (pp. 183–201). Wiley-Blackwell.
• Berger, P. , & Huntington, S. (Eds.). (2003). Many globalizations: Cultural diversity in the contemporary world . Oxford University Press.
• Bonilla-Silva, E. (2006). Racism without racists : Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States . Rowman & Littlefield.
• Brubaker, R. (2004). Ethnicity without groups . Harvard University Press.
• Brubaker, R. (2017). Why populism? Theory and Society , 46 , 357–385.
• Casiro, J. (2006). Argentine rescuers: A study in the “banality of good.” Journal of Genocide Research , 8 (4), 437–454.
• Connor, W. (1993). Ethnonationalism : The quest for understanding . Princeton University Press.
• Conversi, D. (1997). The Basques, the Catalans, and Spain: Alternative routes to nationalist mobilization . University of Nevada Press.
• Dennis, R. , & Dennis, K. (2020). Confrontational politics: The Black Lives Matter movement. In J. Stone , D. Rutledge , P. Rizova , & X. Hou (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell companion to race, ethnicity and nationalism (pp. 11–27). Wiley-Blackwell.
• Du Bois , William E. B. (1903) The Souls of Black Folk . A.C. McClurg & Co.
• Fearson, J. , & Laitin, D. (2003). Ethnicity, insurgency and war. American Political Science Review , 97 , 75–90.
• Fearson, J. , & Laitin, D. (2005). Primary commodity exports and civil war. Journal of Conflict Resolution , 49 , 483–507.
• Fritz, C. (2011). Brazilian immigration and the quest for identity . LFB Scholarly Publishing.
• Freyre, G. [1933] (1986). The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of the Brazilian Civilization . University of California Press.
• Gellner, E. (1983). Nations and nationalism . Cornell University Press.
• Gobineau, Arthur de [1853–1855] (1915). [ An Essay on] The Inequality of Human Races . G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
• Gordon, M. (1964). Assimilation in American life . Oxford University Press.
• Greenfeld, L. (1992). Nationalism: Five roads to modernity . Harvard University Press.
• Hobsbawm, E. , & Ranger, T. (Eds.). (1983). The invention of tradition . Cambridge University Press.
• Hou, X. (2020). The paradox of nationalism and globalism: China’s participation in global capitalism. In J. Stone , D. Rutledge , P. Rizova , & X. Hou (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell companion to race, ethnicity and nationalism (pp. 119–128). Wiley-Blackwell.
• Hou, X. , & Stone, J. (2008). The ethnic dilemma in China’s industrial revolution. Ethnic and Racial Studies , 31 (4), 812–817.
• Huntington, S. (2004). Who are we? The challenges to America’s national identity . Simon & Schuster.
• Hutchinson, J. (2005). Nations as zones of conflict . SAGE.
• Hutchinson, J. (2017). War and nationalism . Oxford University Press.
• Ignatiev, N. (1995). How the Irish became white . Routledge.
• Katznelson, I. (2006). When affirmative action was white: An untold history of racial inequality in the twentieth century . Norton.
• Lie, J. , & Weng, J. (2020). East Asia. In J. Stone , D. Rutledge , P. Rizova , & X. Hou (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell companion to race, ethnicity and nationalism (pp. 129–146). Wiley-Blackwell.
• Luo, X. (2020). New patterns of internal migration: Movement with Chinese characteristics. In J. Stone , D. Rutledge , P. Rizova , & X. Hou (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell companion to race, ethnicity and nationalism (pp. 307–320). Wiley-Blackwell.
• Mann, M. (2005). The dark side of democracy : Explaining ethnic cleansing . Cambridge University Press.
• Marx, A. (1998). Making race and nation: A comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil . Cambridge University Press.
• Moodley, K. , & Adam, H. (2020). Transforming settler colonialism in South Africa. In J. Stone , D. Rutledge , P. Rizova , & X. Hou (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell companion to race, ethnicity and nationalism (pp. 211–226). Wiley-Blackwell.
• O’Dowd, A. (2005). Establishing boundaries : A comparative analysis of immigrants as outsiders in Ireland and Italy . [Ph. D. Dissertation, University College, Dublin.]
• O’Leary, B. , McGarry, J. , & Salih, J. (Eds.). (2005) The Future of Kurdistan in Iraq . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Olzak, S. (2006). The global dynamics of race and ethnic mobilization . Stanford University Press.
• Rizova, P. (2007). Balkanization. In G. Ritzer (Ed.), Blackwell encyclopedia of sociology (Vol. 1) (pp. 239–240). Blackwell.
• Roediger, D. (2007). The wages of whiteness: Race and the making of the American working class . Verso.
• Schama, S. (2006). Rough crossings : Britain, the slaves and the American Revolution . HarperCollins.
• Sekulic, D. (2020). The creation and dissolution of multi-national states. In J. Stone , D. Rutledge , P. Rizova , & X. Hou (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell companion to race, ethnicity and nationalism (pp. 457–468). Wiley-Blackwell.
• Shapiro, T. (2004). The hidden cost of being African American . Oxford University Press.
• Smith, A. (1986). The ethnic origins of nations . Blackwell.
• Smith, A. (2008). The cultural foundations of nations: Hierarchy, covenant, and republic . Blackwell.
• Solomos, J. (2020). The changing nature of global racial and ethnic relations. In J. Stone , D. Rutledge , P. Rizova , & X. Hou (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell companion to race, ethnicity and nationalism (pp. 61–76). Wiley-Blackwell.
• Dennis, R. (Eds.). (2003). Race and ethnicity : Comparative and theoretical approaches . Blackwell.
• Stone, J. , & Rizova, P. (2020). From Obama to Trump: The dialectics of race and nationalism in contemporary America. In J. Stone , D. Rutledge , P. Rizova , & X. Hou (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell companion to race, ethnicity and nationalism (pp. 29–42). Wiley-Blackwell.
• Stone, J. , … Rizova, P. (2014). Racial Conflict in Global Society . Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Tarumoto, H. (2020). Immigrant acceptance in an ethnic country. In J. Stone , D. Rutledge , P. Rizova , & X. Hou (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell companion to race, ethnicity and nationalism (pp. 379–401). Wiley-Blackwell.
• Telles, E. (2004). Race in another America : The significance of skin color in Brazil . Princeton University Press.
• Tilly, C. (1998). Durable inequality . University of California Press.
• Tocqueville, Alexis de [1835–1840] (1956) Democracy in America (ed. Richard Heffner ) New York, NY: Mentor Booksn & Co.
• Tocqueville, Alexis de [1856] (1966) The Ancien Regime and the Revolution . Fontana
• van den Berghe, P. (1965). South Africa : A study in conflict . Wesleyan University Press.
• van den Berghe, P. (1967). Race and racism: A comparative perspective . John Wiley.
• Zolberg, A. , & Woon, L. (1999). Why Islam is like Spanish: Cultural incorporation in Europe and the United States. Politics and Society , 27 (1), 5–38.

Related Articles

• Ethnic Identities and Boundaries: Anthropological, Psychological, and Sociological Approaches
• Ethnicity and Nationalism in Wars of Secession
• Wars for Ethnic or Nationalist Supremacy

Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, International Studies. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 30 August 2024

• Cookie Policy
• Privacy Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility
• [185.80.149.115]
• 185.80.149.115

Character limit 500 /500

National Museum of African American History & Culture

• Plan Your Visit
• Group Visits
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Accessibility Options
• Sweet Home Café
• Museum Store
• Museum Maps
• Our Mobile App
• Search the Collection
• Initiatives
• Museum Centers
• Publications
• Digital Resource Guide
• The Searchable Museum
• Exhibitions
• Freedmen's Bureau Search Portal
• Early Childhood
• Being Antiracist
• Community Building

Historical Foundations of Race

• Race and Racial Identity
• Social Identities and Systems of Oppression
• Why Us? Why Now?
• Digital Learning
• Strategic Partnerships
• Ways to Give
• Internships & Fellowships
• Today at the Museum
• Upcoming Events
• Ongoing Tours & Activities
• Past Events
• Host an Event at NMAAHC
• About the Museum
• The Building
• Meet Our Curators
• Founding Donors
• Corporate Leadership Councils
• NMAAHC Annual Reports

The world got along without race for the overwhelming majority of its history. The U.S. has never been without it. DAVID R. ROEDIGER

What is a Social Construction

A social construct is an idea or collection of ideas that have been created and accepted by the people in a society. These constructs serve as an attempt to organize or explain the world around us.

For example:  For example, “childhood” is a social construct. All human beings begin their lives being young. Still, the idea that the very young, defined by a specific period of time should be given to access to toys, playgrounds, and juice boxes, is a creation of our American society. Nature determined that all human beings would be young before maturing. However, nature did not specify how older people should treat young people during this stage of life. Our ideas about how to raise children are beliefs decided and shared by the social community.

Race is a human-invented, shorthand term used to describe and categorize people into various social groups based on characteristics like skin color, physical features, and genetic heredity. Race, while not a valid biological concept, is a real social construction that gives or denies benefits and privileges. American society developed the notion of race early in its formation to justify its new economic system of capitalism, which depended on the institution of forced labor, especially the enslavement of African peoples. To more accurately understand how race and its counterpart, racism , are woven into the very fabric of American society, we must explore the history of how race, white privilege, and anti-blackness came to be.

THE INVENTION OF RACE The concept of “race,” as we understand it today, evolved alongside the formation of the United States and was deeply connected with the evolution of two other terms, “white” and “slave.” The words “race,” “white,” and “slave” were all used by Europeans in the 1500s, and they brought these words with them to North America. However, the words did not have the meanings that they have today. Instead, the needs of the developing American society would transform those words’ meanings into new ideas.

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. During the 17th century, European Enlightenment philosophers’ based their ideas on the importance of secular reasoning, rationality, and scientific study, as opposed to faith-based religious understandings of the world. Philosophers and naturalists were categorizing the world anew and extending such thinking to the people of the world. These new beliefs, which evolved starting in the late 17th century and flourished through the late 18th century, argued that there were natural laws that governed the world and human beings. Over centuries, the false notion that “white” people were inherently smarter, more capable, and more human than nonwhite people became accepted worldwide. This categorization of people became a justification for European colonization and subsequent enslavement of people from Africa.

Slavery, as a concept has existed for centuries. Enslaved people, “slaves,” were forced to labor for another. We can point to the use of the term slave in the Hebrew Bible, ancient societies such as Greece, Rome, and Egypt, as well as during other eras of time. Within the Mediterranean and European regions, before the 16th century, enslavement was acceptable for persons considered heathens or outside of the Christian-based faiths. In this world, being a slave was not for life or hereditary - meaning the status of a slave did not automatically transfer from parent to child. In many cultures, slaves were still able to earn small wages, gather with others, marry, and potentially buy their freedom. Similarly, peoples of darker skin, such as people from the African continent, were not automatically enslaved or considered slaves.

"White" Identity

The racial identity of “white” has evolved throughout history. Initially, it referred only to Anglo-Saxon people. Historically, who belonged to the category of “white” would expand as people wanted to push back against the increasing numbers of people of color due to emancipation and immigration.

The word “white” held a different meaning, too, and transformed over time. Before the mid-1600s, there is no evidence that the English referred to themselves as being “white people” This concept did not occur until 1613 when the English society first encountered and contrasted themselves against the East Indians through their colonial pursuits. Even then, there was not a large body of people who considered themselves “white” as we know the term today. From about the 1550s to 1600, “white” was exclusively used to describe elite English women, because the whiteness of skin signaled that they were persons of a high social class who did not go outside to labor. However, the term white did not refer to elite English men because the idea that men did not leave their homes to work could signal that they were lazy, sick, or unproductive. Initially, the racial identity of “white” referred only to Anglo-Saxon people and has changed due to time and geography. As the concept of being white evolved, the number of people considered white would grow as people wanted to push back against the increasing numbers of people of color, due to emancipation and immigration. Activist Paul Kivel says, “Whiteness is a constantly shifting boundary separating those who are entitled to have certain privileges from those whose exploitation and vulnerability to violence is justified by their not being white.”

European colonists’ use of the word “white” to refer to people who looked like themselves, grew to become entangled with the word “race” and “slave” in the American colonies in the mid-1660s. These elites created “races” of “savage” Indians, “subhuman” Africans, and “white” men. The social inventions succeeded in uniting the white colonists, dispossessing and marginalizing native people, and permanently enslaving most African-descended people for generations. Tragically,  American culture, from the very beginning, developed around the ideas of race and racism.

The Historical Evolution of Race (and Racism) in Colonial and Early America

Fueled by the Enlightenment ideas of natural rights of man, spurred by the passion for religious freedom, in search of property, and escaping persecution, European colonists came to North America in search of a place to create a new society. The ideals of Enlightenment spread to the North American colonies and formed the basis of their democracy as well as the most brutal kind of servitude - chattel slavery.

In the world before 1500, the notion of hierarchy was a common principle. Every person belonged to a hierarchical structure in some way: children to parents, parishioners to churches, laborers to landowners, etc. As the ideas of the natural rights of man became more prevalent through the 18th century, the concept of equality becomes a standard stream of thought. By categorizing humans by “race,” a new hierarchy was invented based on what many considered science.

Race is the child of racism, not the father. TA-NEHISI COATES Author of "Between the World and Me"

Slavery in the Colonies

Below is the year when enslaved Africans were first documented in some of the American colonies:

1619 - Virginia 1625 - Massachusetts ​Early 1600s - New Jersey 1626 - New York 1638 - Connecticut 1639 - Pennsylvania 1642 - Maryland 1645 - New Hampshire 1670 - Carolinas 1751 - Georgia

Within the first decades of the 1600s, the first Africans were captured and brought to the American colonies as enslaved labor (most colonies had made enslavement legal). At this time in colonial America, enslaved Africans were just one source of labor. The English settlers used European indentured servants and enslaved indigenous people as other forms of coerced labor. These groups of enslaved and forced labor often worked side-by-side and co-mingled socially. The notion of enslavement changed throughout the 1600s. In this early period, enslavement was not an automatic condition, nor did it uniformly apply to all African and African-descended people. Very importantly, being enslaved was not necessarily a permanent lifetime status. The boundaries between groups were more fluid but began to shift over the next few decades to make strict distinctions, which eventually became law.

Indentured Servitude

Indenture was a means for mainly English and Irish people who could not afford passage to the British colonies to enter into a labor contract.  They would sell their labor for a term, generally 4-7 years. Upon the completion of their indenture, the person was to be given land to begin a life.

Indentured servitude was hard, and many laborers did not survive their contract term and subsequently did not receive their land. For planters, indentured servants were economically more optimal in the early colonial period.

By the late 1600s, significant shifts began to happen in the colonies. As the survival of European immigrants increased, there were more demands for land and the labor needed to procure wealth. Indentured servitude lost its attractiveness as it became economically less profitable to utilize servants of European descent. White settlers began to turn to slavery as the primary source of forced labor in many of the colonies. African people were seen as more desirable slaves because they brought advanced farming skills, carpentry, and bricklaying skills, as well as metal and leatherworking skills. Characterizations of Africans in the early period of colonial America were mostly positive, and the colonists saw their future as dependent on this source of labor.

We use the video player Able Player to provide captions and audio descriptions. Able Player performs best using web browsers Google Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. If you are using Safari as your browser, use the play button to continue the video after each audio description. We apologize for the inconvenience.

What is Chattel Slavery?

Chattel slavery was a form of slavery in the U.S. in which enslaved people are legally considered and socially treated not as human beings, but as the personal property, or commodities, of free people.

The trajectory of Virginia’s development of chattel slavery highlights how the system of chattel slavery and, along with it, anti-blackness (opposed to or hostile toward black people) , was codified in colonial America. Labor status was not permanent nor solely connected to race. A significant turning point came in 1662 when Virginia enacted a law of hereditary slavery, which meant the status of the mother determined the status of the child. This law deviated from English common law, which assigned the legal status of children based on their father’s legal status. Thus, children of enslaved women would automatically share the legal status of “slave.” This doctrine, partus sequitur ventrem  (see below), laid the foundation for the natural increase of the enslaved in the Americas and legitimized the exploitation of female slaves by white planters or other men. In 1667, the last of the religious conditions that placed limits on servitude was erased by another Virginia law. This new law deemed it legal to keep enslaved people in bondage even if they converted to Christianity. With this decree, the justification for black servitude changed from a religious status to a designation based on race. See more information about the timeline of “ Slavery in the Making of America .”

Partus Sequitur Ventrem

Before 1660, in English common law, the legal status of children followed the status of the father. In the colonies, this doctrine followed the colonists. Elizabeth Key, an enslaved, bi-racial woman sued for her freedom in Virginia on the basis that her father was white.  The court granted freedom to her and her child in 1656.

In response to this case, Virginia instituted partus sequitur ventrem making children's legal status follow the mother.

Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 was a short-lived but had a long-reaching effect of deepening the racial divide in the colonial Chesapeake region. Coalitions of poor white people, free and enslaved Africans, rebelled against the rising planter class because they wanted to acquire land reserved for Virginia’s indigenous people. Elite colonists determined that they needed to amass more native lands for their continued expansion, to pacify poor European colonists who sought economic advancement, and to keep a dedicated labor force to do the grueling agricultural work. By the mid-1700s, new laws and societal norms linked Africans to perpetual labor, and the American colonies made formal social distinctions among its people based on appearance, place of origin, and heredity.

The Africans physical distinctiveness marked their newly created subordinate position. To further separate the social and legal connections between lower-class whites and African laborers (enslaved or free), laws were put into place to control the interaction between the two groups. These laws created a hierarchy based on race.

Paradox of Liberty in America’s Consciousness Colonists’ belief in natural laws produced revolutionary political thought in the last part of the 18th century. New generations of Americans, many born in the colonies, seized upon ideas like that of John Locke’s “Social Contract” which argues that all people naturally had a right to life, liberty and property, and that any created government is legitimate only with the consent of those people being governed. Thomas Jefferson built upon these ideas in the Declaration of Independence by proclaiming that “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” were inalienable, God-given rights to all men.  After the Revolution, the U.S. Constitution strongly encoded the protection of property within its words. It is within these twin founding documents that the paradox of liberty - the human right to freedom and the socially protected rights to property - became the foundation and essence of the American consciousness. The question(s) of who could - and can - claim the unalienable rights has been a question for America through time.

Colonists’ belief in natural laws produced revolutionary political thought in the last part of the 18th century. New generations of Americans, many born in the colonies, seized upon ideas like that of John Locke’s “Social Contract.” It argues that all people naturally had a right to life, liberty, and property and that any created government is legitimate only with the consent of the people it governs. Thomas Jefferson built upon these ideas in the Declaration of Independence by proclaiming that “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” were inalienable, God-given rights to all men. After prevailing in the American Revolution, our founders created the U.S. Constitution, which contains strongly-worded property rights. It is within these twin founding documents that the paradox of liberty - the human right to freedom and the legally protected rights to property - became the foundation and essence of the American consciousness. The question(s) of who could - and can - claim unalienable rights has been an American debate since our inception.

The scars and stains of racism are still deeply embedded in the American society. John Lewis Congressman and Civil Rights Pioneer

America would come to be defined by the language of freedom and the acceptance of slavery. Along with the revolutionary ideas of liberty and equality, slavery concerns began to surface as black colonists embraced the meaning of freedom, and the British abolished slavery within their lands. The fledgling United States sought to establish itself and had to wrestle with the tension borne from the paradox of liberty. It became necessary to develop new rationales and arguments to defend the institution of slavery. How does one justify holding a human as property? Major political leaders and thinkers of American history promoted theories of difference and degeneracy about nonwhite people that grew in the late-18th century. Physical differences were merged with status differences and coalesced to form a social hierarchy that placed “white” at the top and “black” at the bottom. By the beginning of the 19th century, “white” was an identity that designated a privileged, landholding, (usually male) status. Having “whiteness” meant having clear rights in the society while not being white signified your freedoms, rights, and property were unstable, if not, nonexistent. Ironically, Jefferson and Locke also both made arguments for the idea of inferior “races,” thereby supporting the development of the United States’ culture of racism. Their support of inferior races justified the dispossession of American Indians and the enslavement of Africans in the era of revolution. It was this racial ideology that formed the foundation for the continuation of American chattel slavery and the further entrenchment of anti-blackness.

Excerpts from Thomas Jefferson's "Notes of the State of Virginia"

"I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstance, are inferior to the whites in the endowment both of body and mind."

"Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior...and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait, of painting or sculpture." Read More

The successful American Revolution and the new Constitution resulted in fierce debates about the future of slavery and the meaning of freedom. However, the nation did not end slavery nor the uses of racial ideology to separate groups, choosing to maintain the existing hierarchy. The U.S. outlawed the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, but the institution of slavery and its connection to African descendants remained. Boosted by the Louisiana Purchase, cotton agriculture (made profitable by the invention of the cotton gin), and seized American Indian lands, a new internal slave trade reinvigorated slavery, justified by 19th-century pseudo-scientific racist ideas.

Stop and Think!

Watch "The Origin of Race in the USA," and reflect...

How was the evolution of race connected with the rise of commerce and capitalism?

How were racial categorizations merged into law?

How did the revolutionary ideas of equality and rights of man also harden ideas of race?

In the mid-19th century, science and the scientific community served to legitimize society’s racist views. Scientists argued that Africans and their descendants were inferior - either a degenerate type of being or a completely separate type of being altogether, suitable for perpetual service.  Like the European scholars before them, American intellectuals organized humans by category, seeking differences between racial populations. The work of Dr. Samuel Morton is infamous for his measurements of skulls across populations. He concluded that African people had smaller skulls and were therefore not as intelligent as others. Morton’s work was built on by scientists such as Josiah Nott and Louis Agassiz. Both Nott and Agassiz concluded that Africans were a separate species. This information spread into popular thought and culture and served to dehumanize African-descended people further while fueling anti-black sentiment.

"Types of mankind or ethnological researches, based upon the ancient monuments, paintings, sculptures, and crania of races, and upon their natural, geographical, philological, and biblical history" (Nott, Gliddon, 1854) (J.C. Nott and Geo. R. Gliddon/Google Books). License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

By the 1850s, antislavery sentiment grew intense, in part, spurred by white Southerner’s aggressive attempts to protect slavery, maintain national political dominance and to spread the “peculiar institution” to newly acquired American lands. Proslavery spokespeople defended their position by debasing the value of humanity in the people they held as property. They supported much of this crusade through the racist scientific findings of people like Samuel Morton, which was used to argue the inferiority of people of African descent. As the tension between America’s notion of freedom and equality collided with the reality of millions of enslaved people, new layers to the meaning of race were created as the federal government sought to outline precisely what rights black people in the nation could have.

Dred Scott v Sanford

Taney wrote in the majority decision, "[black people] are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word "citizens" in the Constitution, and can, therefore, claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time [of America's founding] considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them." — Dred Scott, 60 U.S. at 404–05.

It was in this philosophical atmosphere that the Supreme Court heard one of the landmark cases of U.S. history, the Dred Scott v. Sanford. Dred Scott and his wife claimed freedom on the basis that they had resided in a free state and were therefore now free persons. The Supreme Court ruled that Scott could not bring a suit in federal court because Black people were not citizens in the eyes of the U.S. Constitution. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney also ruled that slaves were property based on the Constitution, and therefore owners could not be deprived of their property. Ultimately, Taney declared with the full force of law that to be black in America was to be an “inferior being” with “no rights” which the white man was bound to respect,” and that slavery was for his benefit. Taney used the racist logic of black inferiority that saturated American culture of the time to argue that African descents were of another “unfit” race, and therefore improved by the condition of slavery. The court’s racist decision and affirmation that African descendants were mere property would severely harm the cause of black equality and contribute to anti-black sentiment for generations to come.

Illus. in: Frank Leslie's illustrated newspaper, v. IV, no. 82 (1857 June 27), p. 49, photo: Fitzgibbon, John H., 1816?-1882. Top-left: Eliza and Lizzie, children of Dred Scott, Bottom-left: Dred Scott, his wife, Harriet. [New York: Frank Leslie] Photograph. Source: Library of Congress

More on Dred Scott

Read " The Human Factor of History: Dred Scott and Roger B. Taney ," on the NMAAHC blog.

The nation fiercely defended slavery under the guise of property rights because the forced labor of black people was extremely profitable to the entire country. America further developed its concept of race in the form of racist theories and beliefs - created to protect the slavery-built economy. These beliefs also resulted in the establishment of widespread anti-black sentiments, which would influence the American consciousness long after slavery ended.

In 1847, Frederick Douglass responded to prominent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, “ I have no love for America as such; I have no patriotism. I have no country. What country have I? The Institutions of this country do not know me - do not recognize me as a man."

What do you think he meant? How did the “institutions of this country” see him?

There is no Negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own constitution. Frederick Douglass

Segregation & Jim Crow

Segregation was a formal system of separating people in U.S. society based on race, achieved by discriminating against black Americans in particular, on all aspects of social life including, for example, limiting access to public accommodations, to housing, health care, education, and job opportunities.

Jim Crow Laws The segregation and disenfranchisement laws known as "Jim Crow" represented a formal, codified system of racial apartheid that dominated the American South for three-quarters of a century beginning in the 1890s. The laws affected almost every aspect of daily life, mandating segregation of schools, parks, libraries, drinking fountains, restrooms, buses, trains, and restaurants. "Whites Only" and "Colored" signs were constant reminders of the enforced racial order. Source: PBS, The American Experience

Reconstructing Race in the Nadir When the Civil War ended slavery, the entire nation shifted its economic reliance to free labor. Still, the damage of anti-blackness and the hierarchy of race continued to shape how people related to one another and how the government would regard and legislate to various “races.” The U.S. came to depend on the exploitation of cheap labor, especially that of those considered nonwhite people, but also that of poor whites, including women and children. White society, particularly in the South, were reluctant to shift their views of black Americans and sought ways to continue exploiting the labor of African descended people while simultaneously remaining privileged. The debt-bonded labor system called sharecropping and hierarchical social order of segregation called Jim Crow would lay the foundation for a deepening racial divide.

Keeping the Concept of Race Alive

The abuse of Chinese immigrant labor in the West was another example of American exploitation defended by the nation’s beliefs of “racial difference” in the late 19th century. When white Americans started to fear economic competition from the immigrants, the nation's racist logic resulted in the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. In an era of waves of new immigration from Europe, the law specifically blocked the legal arrival of the Chinese.

After the Civil War and Reconstruction, many localities and states enacted laws and social norms that would re-establish the social order where whiteness was supreme. The U.S. legally affirmed the practices of segregation through the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case [see video below] . By law, Americans could lawfully separate people in society and discriminate against black Americans based on race. The Plessy v. Ferguson decision of “separate but equal” legitimized the idea of white supremacy in America as well as the de facto segregation already occurring in the nation outside the South. It resulted in the creation of a multitude of new racist laws and practices whose ramifications are still impacting the country today. American society drew upon centuries of racist ideas to justify this new form of exclusion and exploitation, especially that of scientific racism and Social Darwinism. Newly elaborated racist concepts reinforced the societal belief in supposedly inherent differences between black and white people – helping keep alive the concept of race and racial difference for all people in America.

African Americans and the Chicago World's Fair

African Americans were excluded from the planning of the world's fair and from substantial roles during the fair. Leading voices of the African America community - Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells-Barnett among them - wrote a pamphlet excoriating the racist decisions made, which excluded blacks from sharing the world stage as American citizens.  Read More

Backed by the scientific racism of the mid-19th century, a branch of pseudoscience called eugenics contributed to further legitimizing societal belief in the biological superiority of those people considered white and the subjugation of other groups in descending order as skin tones darkened. Eugenics argued that people could be divided up into various races of people according to their genetic descent and were predisposed to be either superior or inferior by nature and in culture. As the 19th century drew to a close, one of the most elaborate displays of this new scientific belief was the Anthropology Exhibition at Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. In this very public forum, people were displayed in various arrangements of progress and reinforcing to the general and visiting public the racial hierarchy of the time.

Racial Integrity Laws

Racial integrity laws were passed by the General Assembly to protect "whiteness" against what many Virginians perceived to be the negative effects of race-mixing. They included the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which prohibited interracial marriage and defined as white a person "who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian"; the  Public Assemblages Act of 1926 , which required all public meeting spaces to be strictly segregated; and  a third act , passed in 1930, that defined as black a person who has even a trace of African American ancestry. Read More

Similar to earlier decades, the category of white expanded or contracted during the early 20th century to include various groups of people such as the Italians and the Eastern European immigrants that were coming to America. Other groups, such as the Chinese, Indigenous people, and black people, would remain outside the world of whiteness. As a result, they would struggle to gain the same privileges afforded to whites, such as voting, education, citizenship, and a share in the nation’s wealth. Acceptance into American culture was closely linked with the assimilation of whiteness, thereby creating an unconscious connection between who is American and whiteness .

How did 19th and 20 th -century scientific racism create and reinforce notions of racial hierarchy?

Take a moment to reflect

Let's Think

Listen: “How Did Famous Philosophers Promote Racism in America?” A new book by Joel Edward Goza examines the ideologies of Adam Smith, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke and how they perpetuated racist ideas and inequalities . Listen to this conversation with Goza and Houston Public Radio .

Read and Reflect:

• " Created Equal: How Benjamin Banneker Challenged Jefferson on Race and Freedom "  
• “ The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson ," A new portrait of the founding father challenges the long-held perception of Thomas Jefferson as a benevolent slaveholder. By Henry Wiencek, Smithsonian magazine.
• After reading this article, what do you think were the primary reasons that “Enlightened” thinkers, like Jefferson, remained slaveholders and enablers of the slave system?

It can be tempting to believe that the way to encourage Americans to stop believing in the concept of race is to simply stop talking about race. But American society has had generations of ideas about race that still circulate, and legal and social policies that have profoundly shaped the lives of nonwhite and white people. However, ignoring these ideas and policies does not end their effects.

Find a willing partner and start a discussion. Imagine you lived in America during three different periods (1808, 1908, 2008), considering the race ideas circulating at these times, what opportunities do you believe might be open to you, what opportunities might not? Would not talking about race during each of these periods have changed your situation? Discuss it with your partner.

EDUCATORS: Access the Color Line Activity from Zinn Education Project to help teach your class about the shift in legal status which divided white indentured servants and conferred lifetime enslaved status on black people.

What do you think is the importance of Thomas Jefferson’s twin legacies of forwarding radical notions of democracy and social equality AND racism in America?

Join others committed to talking openly and honestly about the role race plays in shaping your lives and access to opportunities to heighten your awareness. Recognize the racial stereotypes and myths discussed above and challenge them when you encounter them in your own thinking, or during conversations in your communities.

Why Us, Why Now?

Subtitle here for the credits modal.

South Africa's Apartheid Era Population Registration Act

Thisabled/Pixabay

• American History
• African American History
• Ancient History and Culture
• Asian History
• European History
• Latin American History
• Medieval & Renaissance History
• Military History
• The 20th Century
• Women's History
• Postgraduate Certificate in Education, University College London
• M.S., Imperial College London
• B.S., Heriot-Watt University

South Africa's Population Registration Act No. 30 (commenced on July 7) was passed in 1950 and defined in clear terms who belonged to a particular race. Race was defined by physical appearance and the act required people to be identified and registered from birth as belonging to one of four distinct racial groups: White, Coloured, Bantu (Black African), and Other. It was one of the "pillars" of Apartheid. When the law was implemented, citizens were issued identity documents and race was reflected by the individual's Identity Number.

The Act was typified by humiliating tests which determined race through perceived linguistic and/or physical characteristics. The wording of the Act was imprecise, but it was applied with great enthusiasm:

A White person is one who is in appearance obviously white — and not generally accepted as Coloured — or who is generally accepted as White — and is not obviously Non-White, provided that a person shall not be classified as a White person if one of his natural parents has been classified as a Coloured person or a Bantu...

A Bantu is a person who is, or is generally accepted as, a member of any aboriginal race or tribe of Africa...

A Coloured is a person who is not a White person or a Bantu ...

Racial Test

The following elements were used for determining the Coloureds from the Whites:

• Facial features
• Characteristics of the person's hair on their head
• Characteristics of the person's other hair
• Home language and the knowledge of Afrikaans
• The area where the person lives
• The person's friends
• Eating and drinking habits
• Socioeconomic status

The Pencil Test

If the authorities doubted the color of someone's skin, they would use a "pencil in hair test." A pencil was pushed in the hair, and if it remained in place without dropping, the hair was designated as frizzy hair and the person would then be classified as colored. If the pencil dropped out of the hair, the person would be deemed white.

Incorrect Determination

Many decisions were wrong, and families wound up being split and/or evicted for living in the wrong area. Hundreds of colored families were reclassified as white and in a handful of instances, Afrikaners were designated as colored. In addition, some Afrikaner parents abandoned children with frizzy hair or children with dark skin who were considered outcasts.

Other Apartheid Laws

The Population Registration Act No. 30 worked in conjunction with other laws passed under the apartheid system. Under the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 , it was illegal for a white person to marry someone of another race. The Immorality Amendment Act of 1950 made it a crime for a white person to have sex with someone from another race.

Repeal of The Population Registration Act

The South African Parliament repealed the act on June 17, 1991. However, the racial categories set forth by the act are still ingrained in the culture of South Africa. They also still underlie some of the official policies designed to remedy past economic inequalities.

"War Measures Continuation. Population Registration." South African History Online, June 22, 1950.

• South African Apartheid-Era Identity Numbers
• Apartheid Era Signs - Racial Segregation in South Africa
• The End of South African Apartheid
• Racial Classification Under Apartheid
• Group Areas Act No. 41 of 1950
• What Was Apartheid in South Africa?
• Understanding South Africa's Apartheid Era
• Grand Apartheid in South Africa
• Biography of Martin Thembisile (Chris) Hani, South African Activist
• Pass Laws During Apartheid
• Women's Anti-Pass Law Campaigns in South Africa
• Pre-Apartheid Era Laws: Natives (or Black) Land Act No. 27 of 1913
• Biography: Joe Slovo
• The Origins of Apartheid in South Africa
• Chief Albert Luthuli
• Biography of Sir Seretse Khama, African Statesman

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center
• Introduction
• The many meanings of “race”

North America

South africa, the difference between racism and ethnocentrism.

• The problem of labour in the New World
• The enslavement and racialization of Africans
• Human rights versus property rights
• Building the myth of Black inferiority
• Immigration and the racial worldview
• Enlightenment philosophers and systematists
• Scientific classifications of race
• The institutionalizing of race
• Transforming “race” into “species”
• The false assumptions of anthropometry
• The influence of Franz Boas
• Mendelian heredity and the development of blood group systems
• “Race” and intelligence
• Hereditary statuses versus the rise of individualism
• The Germanic myth and English constructions of an Anglo-Saxon past
• Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of Human Races
• Galton and Spencer: The rise of social Darwinism
• European conquest and the classification of the conquered
• India’s caste system
• Japan’s minority peoples
• Race in Asia
• The colonial period
• Postcolonial society
• “Race” and the reality of human physical variation
• Modern scientific explanations of human biological variation
• The scientific debate over “race”

“Race” as a mechanism of social division

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• Academia - The concept of race in anthropology
• National Center for Biotechnology Information - PubMed Central - Biological Races in Humans
• Humanities LibreTexts - The Development Indentured Servitude and Racial Slavery in the American Colonies
• Social Sciences Libretexts - Defining Race
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Race
• BCcampus Open Publishing - Society: A Global Introduction, 2nd Edition - Race and Ethnicity
• race - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
• Table Of Contents

Racial classifications appeared in North America , and in many other parts of the world, as a form of social division predicated on what were thought to be natural differences between human groups. Analysis of the folk beliefs, social policies, and practices of North Americans about race from the 18th to the 20th century reveals the development of a unique and fundamental ideology about human differences. This ideology or “ racial worldview ” is a systematic, institutionalized set of beliefs and attitudes that includes the following components:

• All the world’s peoples can be divided into biologically separate, discrete, and exclusive populations called races. A person can belong to only one race.
• Phenotypic features, or visible physical differences, are markers or symbols of race identity and status. Because an individual may belong to a racial category and not have any or all of the associated physical features, racial scientists early in the 20th century invented an invisible internal element, “racial essence,” to explain such anomalies .
• Each race has distinct qualities of temperament, morality , disposition , and intellectual ability. Consequently, in the popular imagination each race has distinct behavioral traits that are linked to its phenotype .
• Races are unequal. They can, and should, be ranked on a gradient of inferiority and superiority. As the 19th-century biologist Louis Agassiz observed, since races exist, we must “settle the relative rank among [them].”
• The behavioral and physical attributes of each race are inherited and innate—therefore fixed, permanent, and unalterable.
• Distinct races should be segregated and allowed to develop their own institutions, communities , and lifestyles, separate from those of other races.

These are the beliefs that wax and wane but never entirely disappear from the core of the American version of race differences. From its inception, racial ideology accorded inferior social status to people of African or Native American ancestry. This ideology was institutionalized in law and social practice, and social mechanisms were developed for enforcing the status differences.

Although race categories and racial ideology are both arbitrary and subjective, race was a convenient way to organize people within structures of presumed permanent inequality. South Africa’s policy of apartheid exhibited the same basic racial ideology as the North American system but differed in two respects: the systematic state classification of races and the creation of an intermediate “racial” category; the Coloured category, for historical reasons, was made distinct and defined as those who were neither Blacks (called Bantus or natives), most of whom retained their own traditional cultures , nor whites (Europeans), who brought different cultural forms to South Africa. The relative exclusiveness of South Africa’s race categories was compromised by an institutionalized mechanism for changing one’s race, the Race Classification Board established by the Population Registration Act of 1950. This body, unique to South Africa, adjudicated questionable classifications and reassigned racial identities to individuals.

Although they are easily and often confused, race and racism must be distinguished from ethnicity and ethnocentrism. While extreme ethnocentrism may take the same offensive form and may have the same dire consequences as extreme racism, there are significant differences between the two concepts. Ethnicity , which relates to culturally contingent features, characterizes all human groups. It refers to a sense of identity and membership in a group that shares common language, cultural traits (values, beliefs, religion, food habits, customs, etc.), and a sense of a common history . All humans are members of some cultural (ethnic) group, sometimes more than one. Most such groups feel—to varying degrees of intensity—that their way of life, their foods, dress, habits, beliefs, values, and so forth, are superior to those of other groups.

The most significant quality of ethnicity is the fact that it is unrelated to biology and can be flexible and transformable. People everywhere can change or enhance their ethnicity by learning about or assimilating into another culture . American society well illustrates these facts, consisting as it does of groups of people from hundreds of different world cultures who have acquired some aspects of American culture and now participate in a common sense of ethnic identity with other Americans.

Ethnic identity is acquired, and ethnic features are learned forms of behaviour. Race, on the other hand, is a form of identity that is perceived as innate and unalterable. Ethnicity may be transient and even superficial. Race is thought to be profound and grounded in biological realities. Ethnocentrism is based in a belief in the superiority of one’s own culture over others, and it too may be transient and superficial. Racism is the belief in and promotion of the racial worldview described above. Ethnocentrism holds skin colour and other physical features to be irrelevant as long as one is a member of the same culture, or becomes so. The racial worldview holds that, regardless of behaviour or cultural similarities, a member of an inferior race (who is usually perceived to be so by means of physical features) can never be accepted. Race is an invented, fictional form of identity; ethnicity is based on the reality of cultural similarities and differences and the interests that they represent. That race is a social invention can be demonstrated by an examination of the history of the idea of race as experienced in the English colonies.