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• 1 2017-03-24T02:32:44-07:00 History of Racism Codified in Law 10 plain 2017-03-24T20:42:06-07:00

   

  
  Discrimination codified in the law has created a roadblock by making marginalized groups suffer from exploitation, and overall disempowerment. It has made it nearly impossible for people to be on an even semi-equal playing field.
  
  

   

  The start of this discrimination can be traced back to slavery days and policy-makers starting eugenic practices. The idea was that “feebleminded” people were more likely to commit crimes. In 1927, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. “put the constitutional stamp of approval on forced sterilization” with the Supreme Court case of Buck v. Bell meaning the court approved these sterilizations to eliminate “feeble-minded” people from the gene pool (Calavita). The case was ruled constitutional as it was claimed to not be violating the fourteenth amendment, and by 1941 “over sixty thousand people, disproportionately African Americans and recent immigrants, had been subjected to the procedure” (Calavita). Since then, this feeblemindedness theory dissolved as it was centered around negligent science, but the basis has helped to form racial biases and methodological problems that have worked in criminal justice practices and immigration restrictions for many decades overall reinforcing racist assumptions.

   

  
  
  This isn’t the only area where the law has completely discriminated against a group putting them in a subservient position. After the Central Pacific Railroad was completed in the late nineteenth century cheap Chinese labor wasn’t as needed. There was then a conflict between the Chinese immigrant workers and American workers as American workers feared competition, so they resulted in lashing out at the racialized immigrants. It was expressed by Michelle Alexander that lawmakers in California and the United States congress “fueled the flames” (Alexander). Members of Congress pronounced the Chinese “an inferior race” and “a distinct race of people...wholly incapable of assimilation” (Alexander). this obvious discrimination led to the creation of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which was the first significant law restricting immigration into the United States. This race narrative is constantly repeated. The exploitation of the Chinese already here was basically a given with our nation’s historical patterns; they were paid less as it was claimed that “Chinese workers had the biological capacity to subsist on below-subsistence wages and so were unfair competitors to American working men and women” (Alexander). This is a common pattern of exploitation of racialized groups for own personal gain of one particular group.