Learning Outcomes
- Describe the historical context and current experience of Blacks and African Americans in the United States
African Americans
As discussed in the section on race, the term African American can be a misnomer for many individuals, and needs to be carefully examined when applied in scholarly contexts. Many people with dark skin may have more recent roots in Europe, the Caribbean, or South America, and are, for example, Haitian, Afro-Puerto Rican (also known as Afro Borinquen), or Brazilian. The African diaspora refers to the scattering of people with African ancestry all over the world, but predominantly to populations in North and South America.
Further, African immigrants themselves may feel that African American is a misclassification that does not apply to their own identity and does not accurately describe the identity of Blacks who have been in the western hemisphere for generations. In academia, the distinction between “African-American Studies,” “Black Studies,” and “Africana Studies” (among other names in departments ranging from history to humanities to English) is hotly debated, and holds importance not only to the faculty who dedicate their lives to this work, but also to those individuals and groups that identify as Black or African American. Because race is a social construction with real consequences, it is important to closely scrutinize the language we use to categorize people.
This section will focus on the experience of the slaves who were transported from Africa to the United States, and their progeny. Currently, the U.S. Census Bureau (2014) estimates that 13.2 percent of the United States’ population is Black or African American.
How and Why They Came
If Native Americans are the only minority group whose subordinate status occurred by conquest, African Americans are the exemplar minority group in the United States whose ancestors did not come here by choice. A Dutch sea captain brought the first Africans to the Virginia colony of Jamestown in 1619, and sold them as indentured servants. This was not an uncommon practice for either Blacks or whites, and indentured servants were in high demand. For the next century, Black and white indentured servants worked side by side, but the growing agricultural economy demanded greater and cheaper labor. By 1705, Virginia passed the slave codes declaring that any foreign-born, non-Christian could be a slave, and that slaves were considered property.
The next 150 years saw the rise of U.S. slavery, with Africans being kidnapped from their own lands and shipped to the New World on the trans-Atlantic journey known as the Middle Passage. Once in the Americas, the Black population grew until U.S.-born Blacks outnumbered those born in Africa. Early colonial slave codes, which were eventually replaced by U.S. laws, declared that the child of a slave was a slave, thus ensuring the practice of intergenerational slavery.
History of Intergroup Relations
There is no starker illustration of the dominant-subordinate group relationship than that of slavery. In order to justify their discriminatory behavior, slaveholders and their supporters had to view Blacks as innately inferior. Slaves were denied even the most basic rights of citizenship, a crucial enabling factor for slaveholders and their supporters. Slavery poses an illustrative example of conflict theory’s perspective on race relations, as the dominant group needed complete control over the subordinate group in order to maintain power. Extreme corporal punishments were common, including whippings, lashings, and branding. Crimes of war such as rape, family separation, and public executions were part of a larger system of social control, and slaves were prohibited from reading or obtaining an education. In the 1848 U.S. Supreme Court case Dred Scott v. Sandford, the court declared that slaves were property and that slave owners and protected in this legal arrangement by the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment (which effectively meant that slaves were still considered property even in free territories). The Dred Scott decision also established that persons of African descent (whether freed or enslaved) had no legal standing as citizens, and therefore could not sue–for their freedom or anything else–in federal court.
Slavery eventually became an issue over which the nation divided into geographically and ideologically distinct factions, which among other factors led to the Civil War (1861-1865). The institution of slavery was crucial to the Southern economy, whose production of crops like rice, cotton, and tobacco relied on the virtually limitless and cheap labor that slavery provided. In contrast, the North’s economy did not directly depend on slavery, though Northern banks did handle capital derived from the practice of slavery. Thus, it should be noted that segregation and discrimination, to varying degrees, were common in both the North and the South. During the post-Civil War Reconstruction period, the Thirteenth Amendment (1863) was ratified to abolish involuntary servitude, the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) to guarantee birthright citizenship, and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) to bar racial discrimination in voting.
In the South, what developed in the aftermath of the war was essentially slavery by a different name. Some of the practices that enabled the continuation of disenfranchisement and economic oppression included sharecropping, tenant farming, the convict lease system, voter suppression (i.e., the Black Codes), outright violence and intimidation, and gerrymandering, which is the drawing of Congressional districts in a way that reduces the power of Black votes.
Watch It
In 2010, Michele Alexander published a book titled The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, in which she argues that Blacks and other minority populations are kept in an inferior position in the United States because of the disproportionate and unfair number of minorities who are imprisoned.
The twentieth century (1900s) included a number of social movements that worked to create equality for Blacks in the United States. Sociologist W.E.B. DuBois was at the forefront of the Niagara Movement (1905-1909), which sought to bring about legal change and equal economic and educational opportunities for African Americans. The 1908 Springfield Race Riot galvanized a group of activists including white Jewish socialists (male and female), white suffragists, and African Americans (including DuBois and Ida B. Wells) to create the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. The NAACP still exists today and continues its mission to “ensure a society in which all individuals have equal rights without discrimination based on race.”[1] DuBois also served as editor of The Crisis, a journal that reported news on civil rights activism and Black art, writing, and poetry, “with the vision of challenging mainstream stereotypes of African Americans”[2].
Current Status
The National Urban League’s Equality Index reports that Blacks’ overall equality level with whites was 72.5 percent in 2018, which means that rather than having a whole pie (100 percent), or full equality with whites, over a quarter of the pie is missing. The Index, which has been published since 2005, notes very little change in total equality over time (.4% less in 2018 than in 2005) within categories like economics, health, education, social justice, and civic engagement.
To what degree do racism and prejudice contribute to this continued inequality? The answer is complex. The year 2008 saw the election of this country’s first African American president: Barack Hussein Obama. Despite being popularly identified as Black, former President Obama is of mixed heritage; his mother was a white anthropologist from Kansas and his father was Kenyan. Obama was raised in Hawaii and Indonesia, so culturally his background is steeped in Pacific Islander and Southeast Asian influences. The fact that Obama is referred to as “the first Black president” reflects the logic of the “one-drop rule,” or the tendency to view someone’s racial status as wholly corresponding to the minority status within the individual’s heritage.
Although all presidents have been publicly mocked at times (Gerald Ford was depicted as a klutz, Bill Clinton as someone who could not control his libido), a startling percentage of the critiques of Obama have been based on his race. The most blatant of these was the controversy over his birth certificate, where the “birther” movement questioned his citizenship and thus his right to hold office. Although Blacks have come a long way from slavery, the echoes of centuries of disempowerment are still evident.
Glossary
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[glossary-term]African diaspora:[/glossary-term]
[glossary-definition]the dispersion of African peoples into other communities, especially those in North and South America, from the 16th to the 19th centuries[/glossary-definition]
[/glossary-page]
<a style="margin-left: 16px;" href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vy-T6DtTF-BbMfpVEI7VP_R7w2A4anzYZLXR8Pk4Fu4" target="_blank"
- "What is the Mission of the NAACP?" NAACP. https://www.naacp.org/about-us/ ↵
- Bragg, S. 2009. "The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People," BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/national-association-advancement-colored-people-and-long-struggle-civil-rights-united-s/ ↵