Racial Hierarchy in The United States
By the last quarter of the 18th century, US' colonies were dominated by an English majority. The language, customs, and ideas of government were shaped by Anglo Americans. In this way, the standards of American life were set: to be politically recognized as American, one had to conform to the Anglo American model.
There were ethnicities in the USA other than English. European minorities included the Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Scottish-Irish, and German. Also living in the United States were Native Americans and Blacks. The Anglo American majority needed a kind of rubric in order to decide who could be granted citizenship and for whom it would be denied. The law of 1790 stated that only free white immigrants could become naturalized citizens.
"...all children born of any negro or other slave, shall be slaves as their fathers were for the term of their lives."
Anglo Americans made it most difficult for Blacks to become free. They, like the Native Americans, were not white and so could never become Americans. But they were higher than Native Americans in the hierarchy because they could speak English and so were suitable as slaves. This is a foreshadowing of interminority competition because the two minority groups are being ranked differently, compared to each other.
Every new ethnicity that came to the States had to be classified according to a hierarchy which held White on top Black on the bottom. It was the courts that decided in the end if a person was fit for naturalization. Therefore every court decision was different. During the first half of the 19th century, one's race could change simply by stepping over state lines. In Virginia a person was completely black if they had one eighth African descent or more. But in Alabama, any African ancestry made someone a non-white ineligible for citizenship, even if you were free. To appeal for a case for naturalization, a person had to conform as best he/she could to the White Protestant norm. Once of the best tactics in proving your American qualities was to compare yourself to "inferior" races.
The European ethnicities became accepted as American after a few generations, but Blacks, Native Americans, and Hispanic and Asian immigrants were minorities who suffered the most oppression. These are the groups that then and today face the most interminority racism.
Read more about this topic: Interminority Racism
Famous quotes containing the words united states, racial, hierarchy, united and/or states:
“The parallel between antifeminism and race prejudice is striking. The same underlying motives appear to be at work, namely fear, jealousy, feelings of insecurity, fear of economic competition, guilt feelings, and the like. Many of the leaders of the feminist movement in the nineteenth-century United States clearly understood the similarity of the motives at work in antifeminism and race discrimination and associated themselves with the anti slavery movement.”
—Ashley Montagu (b. 1905)
“I don’t think Dr. King helped racial harmony, I think he helped racial justice. What I profess to do is help the oppressed and if I cause a load of discomfort in the white community and the black community, that in my opinion means I’m being effective, because I’m not trying to make them comfortable. The job of an activist is to make people tense and cause social change.”
—Al, Reverend Sharpton (b. 1954)
“In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”
—Laurence J. Peter (1919–1990)
“It was evident that, both on account of the feudal system and the aristocratic government, a private man was not worth so much in Canada as in the United States; and, if your wealth in any measure consists in manliness, in originality and independence, you had better stay here. How could a peaceable, freethinking man live neighbor to the Forty-ninth Regiment? A New-Englander would naturally be a bad citizen, probably a rebel, there,—certainly if he were already a rebel at home.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I would rather be known as an advocate of equal suffrage than to speak every night on the best-paying platforms in the United States and ignore it.”
—Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919)