Racism in the United States

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Lynching of Black Will Brown in Omaha by a white mob , 1919

Racism in the United States has a centuries-long and varied history. From the 17th century through the 13 colonies through the 1960s, Americans of European descent, particularly WASPs , enjoyed exclusive privileges in the areas of education, immigration , voting, citizenship , land acquisition, and criminal justice. African-Americans were kept as slaves , especially in the southern states , until 1865 , and were subject to segregation even after slavery was abolished . Non- Protestant immigrants from Europe, particularly Irish , Poles and Italians , were often excluded from American society for nativist reasons and were not considered “completely white ”. Also, Asian Americans and " Hispanics " or " Latinos ", d. H. Immigrants and their descendants from Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries in America are exposed to manifestations of racism.

General

The concept of “race” has become unusable in political and social discourse in the German-speaking area since this term was discredited, especially by the Holocaust, during the National Socialist era . In the United States, however, the term “ race ” is officially used by the United States Census Bureau and the Federal Government's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in census surveys . As a rule, it is no longer perceived as a biological concept here, but the underlying cultural construction has always been included in scientific discourse since the 1960s.

The history of scientific racism can be traced back to the 18th century. In 1735 the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus divided humanity into four groups: red, yellow, white and black people. From the 10th edition of his Systema Naturae , published in 1758 , he also assigned a temperament and a posture to each of the four varieties : he described the red Americanus as choleric and upright, the white Europaeus as sanguine and muscular, the yellow Asiaticus as melancholy and stiff and the black afer as phlegmatic and limp. The Linnés system was expanded in 1781 by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach . Blumenbach, founder of zoology and anthropology , coined the term “ Caucasian ” to classify the “white race” ( White people ) and claimed that the aesthetically most beautiful specimens of this breed came from the southern slopes of the Caucasus in Georgia . In the United States, scientific racism, as propagated by Linnaeus, Blumenthal and the English doctor Charles White (1728–1813), was used to justify the enslavement of African Americans based on the argument of biological inferiority of the "black race".

The important Italian population geneticist Cavalli-Sforza , professor at Stanford University in California , comes to the conclusion in his monumental work "The History and Geography of Human Genes" (1994) that - apart from the genetic information for skin color and stature - the genetic Differences between individuals are so great that the biological concept of “race” becomes meaningless or empty in terms of content. The largest measurable genetic difference is between some African populations and Australian Aborigines , although both are deep black.

Indians

The Indian wars essentially describe the subjugation of the Indians of North America by the white settlers , which took place between the 16th and 19th centuries. Its beginning is usually dated with the war of the Virginia colonists against the Powhatan Federation from 1620, and its end with the Wounded Knee massacre in December 1890.

The Indian Removal Act was signed by US President Andrew Jackson in 1830 to create a legal basis for the expulsion of Indians . With the help of this law, the five civilized tribes of the Cherokee , Chickasaw , Choctaw , Muskogee and the Seminoles were expelled from their ancestral lands east of the Mississippi and settled in Indian territory (e.g. the present-day US state of Oklahoma ). This deportation is known as the Path of Tears . The number of Seminoles killed is unknown.

Indian reservations were created for the most part in the 19th century. Most of the US reserves, which are also the largest in terms of area, are located in the western part of the USA - concentrated in the mountainous states of Arizona , Utah and Montana as well as in South Dakota . Only three percent of the Indian reservations are east of the Mississippi. In general, there is high poverty in the reservations, and living conditions are compared with those of the Third World . Since 1980 the unemployment rate has leveled off between 40 and 80 percent. In 2002, more than 40 percent of families on the US reservations were living below the poverty line .

With the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, American Indians were granted full citizenship of the United States .

African American

Parade of the Ku Klux Klan in Virginia , 1922
Racial Segregation in School Education in the United States before 1954
Chicago Avenue, Minneapolis ,
May 30, 2020. Five days earlier, George Floyd's death occurred at this location .

Until the middle of the 19th century, theological arguments were mainly used to justify slavery in the United States , but from then on they were superseded by scientific theories.

The first laws restricting the human rights of African Americans were called black codes . After the completion of the Reconstruction , the so-called Jim Crow Laws were enacted from 1876, which prescribed racial segregation (especially between African Americans and whites ) until 1964 . This time is therefore called the Jim Crow Period or Era. Racial segregation was introduced in 1896 in the judgment of the Supreme Court in the Plessy v. Ferguson confirmed and legitimized. It declared separate bodies to be constitutional as long as they were of the same quality (“ separate but equivalent ”). The original court order did not provide for penalties in the event that the separate facilities were not equivalent, nor did it provide any guidelines on who should review this condition. This meant that facilities for blacks were always poorly equipped.

From 1910 to 1970 there was the Great Migration , in the course of which around six million African Americans left the rural areas of the southern states and moved to the cities of the Midwest , the Central Atlantic states and New England , but also to California . With the landmark judgment of the Supreme Court of May 17, 1954 in the Brown vs. The Board of Education was desegregated. This was a milestone in the history of the civil rights movement . The movement peaked in the 1960s under leaders such as Martin Luther King , Whitney Young, and Roy Wilkins . At the same time, Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X and later Stokely Carmichael of the Black Panther Party spoke out in favor of Black Power . The ideas of black nationalism and pan-Africanism were strongly supported by a section of the African American population.

The civil rights movement leads to a growth of the black middle class (athletes, musicians, actors and politicians like Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice ), while the living conditions of the poor majority have deteriorated rapidly since the late 1970s at the latest. African Americans made up a disproportionately high proportion of the rapidly growing prison population and were particularly hard hit by the decline in real incomes in the lower income brackets. The number of African Americans in custody has roughly quadrupled since 1980, but the number of college graduates is 30% due to the tightened US legislation, which is less aimed at rehabilitation than at deterrence ( "three-strikes-law" ) 1980 number decreased. The latent racism in the Rodney King case in the early 1990s led to massive unrest in Los Angeles . With Barack Obama the first African American was elected in 2008 president of the United States elected.

Asian Americans

The first wave of immigration by Sino-Americans began in 1848 during the California gold rush . Around 1880 there were about 130,000 Chinese living in the United States , the majority of them in California , where they mainly worked in railroad and mining . Many white workers saw them as undesirable competitors and wage pressers. In 1882, immigration from China was banned by Congress in the Chinese Exclusion Act for an initial ten years, extended with the Geary Act of 1892 and remained in place until 1943, when it was repealed with the Magnuson Act . See History of the Chinese in the United States .

The Immigration Act of 1917 extended the ban on Chinese immigration to include immigrants from much of Asia, including British India , Southeast Asia and the Middle East , and the Pacific Islands . Other groups of people ( “aliens )” who were not allowed to enter the country according to the immigration law of 1917 were “idiots, morons, criminals, homosexuals, epileptics, crazy people, alcoholics, professional beggars, homeless people, people with tuberculosis, mentally or physically disabled people , Polygamists and anarchists ”and illiterate people over the age of 16 .

At the beginning of the 20th century, Japanese immigrants in the western states were subject to increased restrictions: In the Californian Alien Land Law of 1913 (also: Webb-Heney Bill , tightened 1920) B. the purchase of land is forbidden, as the naturalization laws of the time only applied to “free white citizens” and they could not acquire American citizenship . During the Second World War , an estimated 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans were interned in eleven different camps, mostly in the western United States.

To this day, “Asian Americans” have to overcome special hurdles when enrolling at elite universities in the USA. In the admission test for Harvard University, for example, they need 140 result points more than white students and even 450 more than black students.

Latin American immigrants

Todos somos ilegales - We are all Illegals ("We are all illegal"), protest against the policies of the Immigration Service ( INS ) in California
Border security between San Diego (left) and Tijuana (right)

Chicano is a name for Mexicans living in the United Statesand their descendants ( Mexican Americans ). They belong to the group of Hispanics or Latinos . The term Chicano, originally used in a discriminatory way, is relatively new and is now used by Mexican immigrants to denote their special life situation. Chicano literature describes the entirety of narrative or lyrical works by authors who see themselves as members of the Chicano community. Well-known authors of this genre in the 20th century include Rudolfo Anaya , Oscar Zeta Acosta , Luis Valdez , John Rechy and Luis Alberto Urrea . María Ruiz de Burton (1832–1895) was the first Mexican-American author to publish in English. In her work she represents the point of view of the Mexican population, whose memberssuddenly became US citizens and thus predominantly Spanish-speakingafter the defeat of Mexico in the Mexican-American War and the subsequent cession of Mexico to the United States through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo Catholic minority in a country dominated by English-speaking Protestants, which in no way granted them legal equality.

In the US, cholo is a derogatory term for a criminal or gangster of Latin American descent, or derived from it for members of the social lower class with Latin American descent. Men are characterized by a bald head , a bandana (forehead), wide khaki pants ( chinos ), a white undershirt, an oversized flannel shirt that is only buttoned at the top and large, monochrome tattoos; For women ( cholas ) there are also eye-catching creoles , bandanas, pegs and thick make-up that emphasizes the eyebrows and lip contours.

Development since the 1960s

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made discriminatory election testing against African Americans and racial segregation illegal in public institutions. The Immigration and Naturalization Services Act of 1965 , a federal act, repealed the provisions of the Immigration Act of 1924 , which set the number of immigrants allowed to immigrate to the United States from each country annually to be 2 percent of the existing population was limited.

The ban on marriage between blacks and whites, which had been in force in many US states since 1924, was abolished in 1967 by the Supreme Court .

Today's organizations in the USA that represent racist ( White Supremacy or Black Supremacy ) and partly also anti-Semitic positions include Aryan Nations (“Aryan Nations”), Creativity Movement and the Christian Identity Movement .

African American people are clearly underrepresented in the film. As a study by the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles showed for the 100 most profitable films from 2007 to 2017, only 5.2% of the 1,100 films were made by African American directors. Of these, only four were women, which corresponds to less than 1% of the directors in the selection examined. It turned out that films with Afro-American directors featured significantly more Afro-American characters than in the others. According to the authors, this can be interpreted in two ways: Either African-American directors are selected for films with Afro-American characters, or African-American directors are more interested in directing films with Afro-American characters or design their films accordingly.

literature

  • Michelle Alexander : The New Jim Crow: Mass Imprisonment and Racism in the United States. From the American by Gabriele Gockel, Thomas Wollermann. A. Kunstmann, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-95614-128-7 .
  • Adrienne Brown, Valerie Smith (Eds.): Race and Real Estate. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2015, ISBN 978-0-19-997728-4 .
  • Norbert Finzsch : Scientific racism in the United States - 1850 to 1930. In: Heidrun Kaupen-Haas , Christian Saller (Hrsg.): Scientific racism: Analyzes of a continuity in the human and natural sciences. Campus, Frankfurt am Main and New York, 1999, ISBN 3-593-36228-7 , pp. 84-110 (partial online view) .
  • Winthrop D. Jordan: The White Man's Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States. Oxford University Press, New York 1974, ISBN 978-0-19-501743-4 .
  • Ibram X. Kendi : Branded. The real story of racism in America. From the American by Susanne Röckel and Heike Schlatterer. CH Beck, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-406-71230-2 .
  • Robbie WC Tourse, Johnnie Hamilton-Mason, Nancy J. Wewiorski: Systemic Racism in the United States: Scaffolding as Social Construction. Springer International, Cham 2018, ISBN 978-3-319-72232-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Norbert Finzsch: Scientific racism in the United States - 1850 to 1930. P. 84–85.
  2. ^ Norbert Finzsch: Scientific racism in the United States - 1850 to 1930. P. 88–89.
  3. ^ Norbert Finzsch: Scientific racism in the United States - 1850 to 1930. P. 87.
  4. ↑ See Grant Foreman, Angie Debo (ed.): Indian Removal: The Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians. University of Oklahoma Press, 1985, ISBN 0806111720 .
  5. ^ Living conditions , American Indian Relief Council website . The Arizona Daily Star from May 25, 2002 is given as evidence.
  6. ^ Chinese - Exclusion - Immigration Library of Congress, accessed October 9, 2014.
  7. ^ Immigration Act of 1917
  8. ↑ Part I, Chapter 6: The Relocation Centers from Personal Justice Denied. Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians , Washington DC, 1982.
  9. ↑ Viola Schenz: Asian Americans fail because of the “bamboo ceiling”. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , December 14, 2015, accessed on July 26, 2016.
  10. ↑ Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita: Conflicts of Interest: The Letters of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton.
  11. ↑ Essay 7: Marriage Laws , Eugenics Archive
  12. ^ List of Active White Nationalist Groups , March 2, 2015
  13. ↑ a b Stacy L. Smith, Marc Choueiti, Dr. Katherine Pieper, Ariana Case, Angel Choi: n lesbi Inequality in 1,100 Popular Films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race / Ethnicity, LGBT & Disability from 2007 to 2017 (PDF file)
  14. ^ Review notes at Perlentaucher , review by Armin Pfahl-Traughber .

See also