The problem of race in America is one of the most intractable issues that the country has faced since it was founded. The question of race led to the bloody civil war and subsequent upheavals of the 60s and 70s which happened during the civil rights movement.
Even after the abolition of the slavery following the outcome of the civil war and emancipation of the blacks, racial bigotry and discrimination were rife in the South. So-called Jim Crow laws frustrated efforts at racial equality in the South (Sanders, 2003). In the meantime, subjugated races under the rule of Europeans began voicing their desire to be independent.
The black in the USA were becoming restless. Looking at the situation in America and the world on matters of race relation, DuBois felt that bloody confrontation was inevitable. Considering the racial struggles in America and elsewhere in the world, the concept of race is an artificial construct designed to perpetuate the domination of some racial groups and the exclusion of the others.
Dubois statement has proved to be prophetic. The recent effort to reform healthcare was made to provide health insurance to the poorest Americans, who happened to be people of color. Most of white Americans are privileged in many terms as they earn more and control much of America’s industrial capital base. Their privileged status has raised them to dominant positions at the expense of other racial groups. A number of policies adopted in the last century skewed racial balance in favor of whites.
Laws barring interracial marriages did a lot of damage to the US race relations. These laws also applied to people in the process of naturalization as American citizens in cases when they got married to racially ineligible foreigner (Sanders, 2003).
This law interfered with people’s procreation choices and their decisions on who they wanted to marry. This in turn reinforced segregation in commerce, housing, and public accommodations. In the US metropolitan areas, different races are congregated around the same areas due to the history of racial segregation in the country.
The areas in which the whites lived were better than those of other races. Segregation in commerce is responsible for the current dominant status of white racial group in business. They were also able to learn at elite schools while the others struggled in poorly equipped community colleges.
Immigration was initially based on race. Persons who were not whites were not granted citizenship. To determine belonging of a person to the white race, courts defined that the one is to be qualified as white European as per 1790. White people, who were descendants of emigrants from Europe but living elsewhere in the world, were qualified as white Europeans.
As a result, they were eligible for immigrating to the USA. Non-whites were viewed as impure and negative characteristics imputed on them. Thomas Jefferson’s one-drop rule to define whiteness suggested that non-white heritage deprived a biracial person of the privilege to belong to the white race (Sanders, 2003).
These were the negative characteristics associated with non-whites that based the American imperialism. The goal of American imperialism was to put white Americans and their white cousins in Europe in a position of political and economic dominance (Imperialism, n.d.).
Technological advances that had first started in Europe, and later spread to America, strengthened American and European dominance in world politics and commerce. The success of their political and economic systems reinforced the notion of European and America’s superiority over other races. In the racial scale, whites were ranked at the top. Such ideas of race in the world justified racism that was common in the US.
References
Imperialism . (n.d.). Imperialism. Retrieved from www.fordham.edu/Halsall/mod/modsbook34.asp#American Imperialism
Sanders, V. (2003). Race relations in the USA since 1900 (2nd ed.). London: Hodder & Stoughton.