Since I’ve been young I have wondered why the main racial tensions are between those considered “white” and those referred to as “black.” I eventually dismissed it as a human tendency to not like what is different and I let it fade into the background noise of my life. When the race riots over police brutality were coming to a head, I began asking that question again. So, I took a few history classes that were progressively more detailed and a sociology class to tie it all together
Many civilizations in the past have enslaved others. This is usually due to conquest, such as was traditional in the Roman Empire, as a consequence of being unable to pay a large debt, for committing heinous crimes against a person or family and the like. In those civilizations, you had more of an “equal” chance of being enslaved, very rarely were a people enslaved for their skin color alone. This is what makes America special. Americans tried to enslave the Native Americans as a part of conquering the land; without previous exposure to European diseases, however, many Native Americans died off. The tribes would attack settlements if they held some of their tribesmen as slaves. Since cheap labor couldn’t be acquired locally, it was imported from different parts of the continent of Africa. Europeans had already traded with the indigenous people for resources and were colonizing much of it, so many of the people that were sold into slavery were accustomed to European diseases. People from the African continent were also viewed as savages due to their “primitive” and unfamiliar cultures and sturdy due to the nature of their outdoor lifestyles.
Fast forward to the Emancipation Proclamation. Although Lincoln was able to pass a document claiming all slaves to be free men, it only made slavery illegal. It didn’t teach the freed slaves new trades or protect them from discriminatory laws. Many freed slaves still worked for their masters, but as debtors; since most slaves had no money of their own, the master would charge them for housing, food, farming equipment and the like, which was to be paid off with labor. Thus the “free” slave was still a slave through debt. Jim Crowe laws also greatly restricted the life of African Americans.
Form a sociological perspective, the stratification system, which is the system of social inequality, changed from a slave-and-master system to a caste system. The most famous example of a caste system is considered unconstitutional in India, but is still regularly practiced there. The characteristics of a caste system are that a person is born into a certain strata and cannot move to a higher or lower class like those in a class system. People are very strongly encouraged to marry within their strata, which is referred to as endogamy. Also, ritual pollution means that certain interactions between people of different strata are strongly frowned upon and seen as “dirty.”
This lower strata was created as a means of controlling people of color as a substitute for slavery. Jim Crowe laws prohibited blacks and whites from marrying another race and prevented them from sharing many things, including drinking fountains, bathrooms, schools and restaurants because it was seen as dirty for whites to mingle with people of color.
Although there have been movements to help improve race relations, the impairments of years of oppression, disadvantage and prejudice have taken a great toll. Discrimination in housing has had an especially large toll on the black community. They were barred from a lot of public housing, and neighborhoods they lived in were devalued and seen as a risky investment. This undervaluing meant lower property taxes, which sounds like a benefit, but property taxes go toward public schooling. Poor education reduces the likelihood of going to college and being able to economically further one’s self. The economic and educational disadvantages only help enforce harmful stereotypes, which perpetuate a vicious cycle.
Although race riots seem to come from nowhere behind a single act of police brutality or other kind of discrimination, it is actually coming from an accumulation of years of mistreatment that is overlooked and taken for granted by the more privileged.
