How do you think the “knowledge” (those are scare quotes, meaning I don’t really think it was knowledge but scientific racism) created by biological determinists and white supremacists in the Supreme Court effected the laws crafted and applied to US territories?
Brian Bailie, PhD
Biological determinists incited further divisions among races in America by convincing their discourse communities that anything different from the “purebred white Americans” was evil and dangerous. The science discourse community attempted to prove, through flawed and biased, experiments and evidence that anything not white was not worth human worth. It also did not help that historically, slaves (who were not exclusively african-americans) were treated as less than human by the very government itself. Think back to the 3/5 Compromise of 1787; the compromise solution was to count three out of every five slaves as people for the purpose of the National Convention. That wasn’t the beginning of American government treating them as less than a whole person and worth every bit as much as the person next to them, no matter the skin color. Jim Crow laws became the modern day normal for the American people, freeing slaves from their literal shackles only to latch on figurative, yet very real legal shackles. All of these instances, of constantly holding back the rest of our country based on their cultural or visual differences, this bred ignorance, and long held stereotypes. Stereotypes that a lot of our legal constitution is based on, and stereotypes that continuously linger in the attitudes of many Americans in today’s society.
Lets’ think about this. For example, in this year (2020), if a white male American has safely reached the age of 80 years old…the have lived through the single most ignorant and dividing laws our nation could pass.
- Starting in the 1930s, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation conspired to create maps with marked areas considered bad risks for mortgages in a practice known as “red-lining.” The areas marked in red as “hazardous” typically outlined black neighborhoods. This kind of mapping concentrated poverty as (mostly black) residents in red-lined neighborhoods had no access or only very expensive access to loans. This process did not begin to end until 1970.
- In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled that a black family had the right to move into their newly-purchased home in a quiet neighborhood in St. Louis, despite a covenant dating back to 1911 that precluded the use of the property in the area by “any person not of the Caucasian race.”
- The Housing Act of 1949 was proposed by Truman to solve a housing shortage caused by soldiers returned from World War II. The act subsidized housing for whites only, even stipulating that black families could not purchase the houses even on resale. The program effectively resulted in the government funding white flight from cities.
- Segregation of children in public schools was struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education.
- When Rosa Parks was arrested in 1955 after refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama, the Civil Rights Movement began in earnest
- Through the efforts of organizers like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the resulting protests, the Civil Rights Act was signed in 1964, outlawing discrimination, though desegregation was a slow process, especially in schools.
- The state had passed the Elimination of Racial Balance law in 1965, but it had been held up in court by Irish Catholic opposition. Police protected the black students as several days of violence broke out between police and Southie residents. White crowds greeted the buses with insults, and further violence erupted between Southie residents and retaliating Roxbury crowds. State troopers were called in until the violence subsided after a few weeks.
I think I have made my point with this small history lesson; but this is exactly what the ignorance and fear mongering of government politicians, supported by biased, false scientific claims, did to this country. They incited racial divide, racial violence, and ignorance being carried throughout history. Lets’ go back to our 80 year old white male American example; his early teenage years would have been spent watching his country restrict non-white rights and lives, he would’ve watched the Civil Rights movement in his teenage years, most likely listened to his strong, white, American father mumble about how “those people do not deserve to be treated as equals”…the racism and ignorance has already been imprinted on our old man’s mind. A stereotype that will never escape the back of his consciousness, that will effect his entire life and how he makes decisions and decides to project onto his own family. It is like a chain reaction of bred ignorance, passed from generation to generation without any ability to see beyond their predesignated characters built in their heads.
It also does not help, that with a mostly male, mostly white, and mostly older group of people running our government…it will probably take another 100 years before anyone even attempts to change that majority think that runs our government offices.
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