RACIAL EQUITY WORKSHOP

PHASE 1
Foundations in Historical and Institutional Racism

May 27, 2018

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:

Racial Equity Institute: www.racialequityinstitute.org/

Deena Hayes-Greene: [email protected]

Suzanne Plihcik: [email protected]
Wanda Hunter: [email protected]

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8 The Legacy of White affirmative action
A short (and incomplete) history of race and racism in
the United States

If you are a citizen of the United States, part of the legacy you have inherited is the
historical, systematic, and pervasive way in which white race and the benefits,
privilege and power for those who came to be known as white have been
constructed in this country. Following is small sampling of dates related to
significant happenings, laws, court decisions, policies and other acts which have
contributed to institutionalization of racism.

1607 First permanent English colony in Virginia

1613 John Rolfe marries Pocahontas in the colony of Virginia.

1619 First Africans kidnapped and brought to the colonies

1640 John Punch, an African indentured servant, runs away from his
servitude with a Dutchman and a Scotsman. They are caught. The
colony of Virginia records that as punishment the Dutchman and the
Scot are given 4 increased years of indentured servitude. John Punch
is sentenced to perpetual servitude.

1676 Bacon’s Rebellion, a populist rebellion that organized poor people --

white frontiersmen, slaves, indentured servants, and a tribe of Indians
--against the colony of Virginia. Bacon and the rebels win the first
battle and the sitting government retreats to boats in the river. They
win two more skirmishes before English reinforcements arrive and
put down the rebellion.

1637 New England colonists massacre 500 Native Americans in Pequot

War, the first massacre of indigenous people by English colonists.

1662 Virginia enacts law stating that if an “Englishman” begets a child of a

“Negro woman,” the child will take on the woman’s status, e.g., that of
a slave; this law makes slavery hereditary.

1691 Virginia House of Burgesses defines “white man” as a man with no

African or Indian blood whatsoever except for the male descendants
of John Rolfe and Pocahontas who shall also be considered white men
(“the Pocahontas exemption”).

1705 Virginia law passed requiring masters to provide white indentured

servants 50 acres of land, 30 shillings, a musket and 10 bushels of
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 corn when they completed their servitude.

1712 “Act for the better ordering and governing of Negroes and slaves” in
South Carolina – “whereas, the plantations . . . of this province cannot
be well managed . . . without the labor of Negroes and other slaves,
[who] . . . are of barbarous, wild, savage natures, and such as renders
them wholly unqualified to be governed by the laws . . . of this
province; that such other laws and orders, should in this province be
made . . . as may restrain the disorders, rapines and inhumanity, to
which they are naturally prone and inclined. . . .”

1776 The Declaration of Independence is signed, stating that “all men are
created equal . . . with certain inalienable rights . . . Life, Liberty and
the pursuit of Happiness” while excluding Africans, Native Americans,
and all women.

1785 Land Ordinance Act, 640 acres offered at $1 per acre to white people

1787 In the U.S. Constitution, for the purposes of taxation and

representation, Negro slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person, “adding
to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service
for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all
other persons.” Slaves who couldn’t vote were not going to be counted
at all, but the Three-Fifths Compromise was agreed upon to give the
South more seats in Congress and more electoral votes. The effect
was that slaveholder interests largely dominated the government of
the US until 1865.

1790 Naturalization Law of 1790 specified that only free white

immigrants are eligible for naturalized citizenship. First generation
immigrants from Asia, the Caribbean, Central and South American and
Africa are expressly denied civil rights, the right to vote, and the right
to own land. This Act is not completely wiped off the books until the
McCarran Walter Act of 1952.

1790s The slavery abolition movement starts to grow. Blumenbach and

Buffon offer “scientific” justification for a hierarchical classification of
humankind (Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Australoid and Negroid)

1795 Treaty of Greenville, which Indian leaders are forced to sign, cedes
most of the Ohio Valley to the U.S. government.

1800 The Land Ordinance Act minimum lot was halved to 320 Acres.

1807 Thomas Jefferson states the US should “pursue (the Indians) into
extermination or drive them to new seats beyond our reach.”

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1812 Thomas Jefferson states white people should drive every Indian in
their path “with the beasts of the forests into the stony mountains.”

1830 An act prohibiting “the teaching of slaves to read” in North Carolina

and other states – “whereas the teaching of slaves to read and write
has a tendency to excite dissatisfaction in their minds and to produce
insurrection and rebellion, to the manifest injury of the citizens of this
state …” such teaching was illegal and severely punished.

1830 Indian Removal Act authorized the president to “negotiate” and

exchange lands . . . which actually meant . . . seize Indian land and
remove Native Americans from their ancestral and sacred lands;
territory of Oklahoma set aside as “Indian Territory.”

1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo signed between U.S. and Mexico, which
promises to protect the lands, language and culture of the Mexicans
living in ceded territory (future states of California, Texas, Utah, New
Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, parts of Colorado and Wyoming). Congress
substitutes a “Protocol” which requires Mexicans to prove in U.S.
courts that they have ‘legitimate’ title to their own lands; the
“Protocol” becomes the legal basis for the massive U.S. land theft from
Mexicans in conquered territories.

1850 Foreign Miners Tax in California requires Chinese and Latin

American gold miners to pay a special tax on their holdings not
required of European American miners.

1854 California law (People v. Hall) – “No black, or mulatto person, or

Indian shall be allowed to give evidence for or against a white
person.”

1862 Homestead Act allots 160 acres of western (i.e. Indian) land to
“anyone” who could pay $1.25 an acre and cultivate it for 5 years;
within 10 years, 85,000,000 acres of Indian lands had been sold to
European homesteaders. The last person received land under the
Homestead Act in 1988.

1863 Thirteenth Amendment. Slavery was abolished for all people except
for those convicted of a crime. “Black Codes” immediately emerged to
criminalize legal activity for African-Americans (loitering, breaking
curfew, being unemployed, etc). Created a new system of convict labor
and leasing that allowed former slave owners to again have access to
free labor from African-Americans.

1887 Dawes Act terminates tribal ownership of lands by partitioning

reservations and assigning each Indian a 160-acre allotment for
farming. “Surplus” reservation land is opened up to homesteaders.
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1887 Hayes Tilden Compromise removes federal troops from the South,
leaving Blacks totally unprotected from white violence and setting
stage for 50 years of intense repression, denial of political, civil, and
education rights that African Americans had struggled for and to some
extent won during Reconstruction after the Civil War.

1882 Chinese Exclusion Act passed by Congress to keep Chinese

immigrant workers from coming to the U.S., the first time a nationality
had been barred expressly by name.

1886 Apache warrior Geronimo surrenders to the U.S. army, marking the
defeat of Southwest Indian nations.

1893 Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii is overthrown by U.S. planter colonists in

a bloodless revolution. The Republic of Hawaii is established with
Stanford Dole (Dole Pineapple) as president.

1896 Supreme Court declares in Plessy v. Ferguson that separate but

“equal” facilities are constitutional.

1898 Treaty of Paris. After defeating Spain in the Spanish-American War,

the US acquires Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. Cuba, which
had already declared her independence from Spain, becomes a virtual
colony of the U.S.

1910 The Flexner Report. Five of seven medical schools educating black
doctors were closed, leaving only two medical schools, Meharry and
Howard to provide medical education for American Blacks. Although
now Blacks have graduated from every medical school in the United
States, the decades of exclusion have resulted in an insurmountable
manpower and opportunity gap.

1917 Immigration Act of 1917. Congress enacts another immigration act

creating an Asiatic Barred Zone, a “line in the sand” in Asia effectively
cutting off all immigration from India.

1922 Ozawa V. United States. Takao Ozawa, a Japanese-American,

assimilated after 20 years of living in the US, filed for United States
citizenship under the Naturalization Act of 1906 which allowed only
“free white persons” and "persons of African nativity or persons of
African descent" to naturalize. Ozawa did not challenge the
constitutionality of the racial restrictions. Instead, he claimed that
Japanese people were properly classified as “free white persons”.
The Court invoked "science," in finding a Japanese man could not be
defined as "Caucasian" (which the Court found synonymous with
"White"). It was easy for the Court to deny the petition of such a non-
Caucasian.
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1923 Thind v. United States. Based on Ozawa, Thind argues that he is
Caucasian and therefore white. The Supreme Court unanimously
decided that Bhagat Singh Thind, an Indian Sikh man who identified
himself as a "high caste Hindu, of full Indian blood," was racially
ineligible for naturalized citizenship in the United States. Asian
Indians who had already been granted citizenship, had their
citizenship revoked. In this case, the court said that while all whites
are Caucasian, not all Caucasians are white. In this case they eschew
science and say a white man is who the “common white man”
recognizes as a white man.

1924 Johnson Reed Immigration Act sets restrictive quotas on

immigrants from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

1933 New Deal legislation for “Relief, Recovery and Reform” made
available $120 billion (worth $1 trillion today) in loans—98% went to
white people. Also created jobs programs (e.g., FERA, CCC, PWA, WPA)
designed to put people to work and eradicate unemployment.

1933 Home Owners Loan Corporation created to help home owners and
stabilize banks, created detailed neighborhood maps that took into
account the racial composition of a neighborhood or likelihood of
racial infiltration, color coded these, neighborhoods in red and labeled
them “undesirable” resulting in a lack of investment in neighborhoods
with POC and enormous investment in white neighborhoods.

1934 The Federal Housing Act manuals and practices codify the
channeling of funds to white neighborhoods and collaborated with
block busters.

1935 The Social Security Act. New Deal programs would not have
survived the Southern voting block unless they were designed in a
way that preserved racial patterns. SSA did not extend coverage to
farm or domestic workers, disproportionately excluding blacks from
its benefits.

1935 The Fair Labor Standards Act of the same year also did not cover
agricultural or domestic workers.

1944 Supreme Court opinion upheld Roosevelt’s Executive Order

authorizing relocation and detention of all people of Japanese
ancestry, including U.S. citizens, in “war relocation centers” regardless
of “loyalty” to U.S. (during World War II).

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1944 The GI Bill: $95 billion of opportunities went mainly to returning
white soldiers. 2,255,00 veterans took advantage of the GI Bill which
is now considered the biggest transfer of economic advantage to
white people in the history of out nation.

1946 Hill-Burton Act. Also known as the Hospital Survey and Construction
Act. Contained a “separate but equal” clause, recognizing that most
participating Southern hospitals were reserved for whites only, and
closed to black physicians and patients.

1947 Taft Hartley Act seriously restricts the right to organize and requires
a loyalty oath aimed at the Congress of Industrial Organizations,
which had organized large numbers of workers of color.

1945-60 Suburban sprawl and white-flight to the suburbs became popular as

certain communities were officially red-lined and marked as
undesirable, de-voiding inner cities of essential tax dollars used for
schools, roads, parks, and other public necessities.

1964 Democratic Party refuses to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic

Party in place of the segregationist Mississippi Democrats at the
Party’s convention in Atlanta.

1969-72 Raids on Black Panther Party offices, assassinations of leading

Panthers, imprisonment of hundreds of others, resulting in
destruction of Black Panther Party.

1973 Federal and state police and FBI launch a military assault on American
Indian Movement activists and traditional Indians of the Lakota
Nation at Wounded Knee. Leonard Peltier is convicted on false
charges of murdering an FBI agent and sentenced to 2 consecutive life
sentences.

1978 Proposition 13 (The People’s Initiative to Limit Property Taxation)

created tax structures that greatly benefitted white homeowners.
Because of the benefits it bestows on the rich and powerful Prop 13 is
now considered “untouchable” by CA politicians, even though it has
been detrimental to the state economy.

1990 Supreme Court decision attacks the religious freedom of Native

Americans by ruling that states have the right to pass laws forcing
Native American church members to risk prison in order to practice
their religion.

1990 Congress passes a comprehensive new immigration law, which

includes “employer sanctions” for knowingly hiring a worker without
papers, discouraging employers from taking job applications from

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 Asian Americans or Latinos.

2009 The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the Stimulus):

$840 billion for schools, municipalities, infrastructure development,
energy, etc. Another race neutral act that has disproportionately
benefited white people because of who is able to meet qualifying
criteria.

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