Post-racialism is simply broken down to mean that racial preference and discrimination no longer exist. Post-racial America is this theoretical society that is thought to have no racial prejudice. It is the goal to be liberated from this idea of “race”. The election where Barack Obama became the President of our country, in the year 2008, is where the idea of post-racial America spread like wild-fire all over the news. The term was being used by news anchors everywhere to express this concept that America had come so far from its corrupt slavery days to put an African-American in office. The fact that one had to point this out as a success speaks volumes to the fact that the frequent use of the term post-racialism is very premature and inaccurate, more it’s the dream society to be working toward. But in order to understand post-racialism one has to understand the idea of “race”.

Where did the idea of  “race” come from?

Modern scholars mostly agree that “race” has very little to do with science, and more to do with social views. It is an invention to classify groups of people. Audrey Smedley, from PBS, says “race was institutionalized beginning in the 18th century as a worldview, a set of culturally created attitudes and beliefs about human group difference” (Smedley). Until the beginning of the 18th century, African Americans were viewed as a whole positively. However, with the huge introduction of slave trade during this century, by the end their image shifted dramatically. In the PBS newsletter about the origin of the idea of race Smedley states, “the term ‘race,’ which had been a classificatory term like ‘type,’ or ‘kind,’ but with ambiguous meaning, became more widely used in the eighteenth century, and crystallized into a distinct reference for Africans, Indians and Europeans” (Smedley). This is where a slave trade system was created in America that was the only one in the world that was exclusively “racial”. This horrible social idea has sadly been a part of the very foundation of our country. The one-drop rule was a social and legal principle that essentially states that an individual with even one ancestor who is of sub-saharan african descent is regarded as “black”. The one-drop rule was deemed law in the 20th century, first with Tennessee (1910) and then Virginia (1924) under the racial integrity act. This concept has developed through time and is essentially codified into American law today. So how can one consider our country post-racial if our own law is subconsciously racist.