Racism In The United States
Racism and ethnic discrimination in the United States has been a major issue since the colonial era and the slave era. Legally sanctioned racism imposed a heavy burden on Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latin Americans. European Americans (particularly Anglo Americans) were privileged by law in matters of literacy, immigration, voting rights, citizenship, land acquisition, and criminal procedure over periods of time extending from the 17th century to the 1960s. Many non-Protestant European immigrant groups, particularly American Jews, Irish Americans, Italian Americans, as well as other immigrants from elsewhere, suffered xenophobic exclusion and other forms of discrimination in American society.
Major racially and ethnically-structured institutions included slavery, Indian Wars, Native American reservations, segregation, residential schools (for Native Americans), and internment camps. Formal racial discrimination was largely banned in the mid-20th century, and came to be perceived as socially unacceptable and/or morally repugnant as well, yet racial politics remain a major phenomenon. Historical racism continues to be reflected in socio-economic inequality, and has taken on more modern, indirect forms of expression, most prevalently symbolic racism. Racial stratification continues to occur in employment, housing, education, lending, and government.
Many people in the U.S. continue to have some prejudices against other races. In the view of the US Human Rights Network, a network of scores of US civil rights and human rights organizations, "Discrimination permeates all aspects of life in the United States, and extends to all communities of color." Discrimination against African Americans, Latin Americans, and Muslims is widely acknowledged. Members of every major American ethnic minority have perceived racism in their dealings with other minority groups.
Read more about Racism In The United States: History By Region, Racism As A Factor in U.S. Foreign Policy, Institutional Racism, Current Hate Groups, Anti-racism
Famous quotes containing the words racism in the, united states, united and/or states:
“Few white citizens are acquainted with blacks other than those projected by the media and the so—called educational system, which is nothing more than a system of rewards and punishments based upon one’s ability to pledge loyalty oaths to Anglo culture. The media and the “educational system” are the prime sources of racism in the United States.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“What lies behind facts like these: that so recently one could not have said Scott was not perfect without earning at least sorrowful disapproval; that a year after the Gang of Four were perfect, they were villains; that in the fifties in the United States a nothing-man called McCarthy was able to intimidate and terrorise sane and sensible people, but that in the sixties young people summoned before similar committees simply laughed.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“Hollywood ... was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“That Cabot merely landed on the uninhabitable shore of Labrador gave the English no just title to New England, or to the United States generally, any more than to Patagonia.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)