Vernellia Randall, “The Coercive Contract: Why All Communities Are Pushed Into America’s Anti-Black Hierarchy,” Racism.org (December 4, 2025).
Anti-Black racism has shaped U.S. citizenship, belonging, and advancement from the nation’s founding to the present. It is not an accident of history or merely a matter of individual prejudice—it is a governing logic built into the nation’s institutions, laws, and cultural expectations. Even when unspoken, the message is the same: Black people occupy the lowest rung of the hierarchy, and advancement has long required distancing oneself from Blackness.
Most people do not consciously embrace this idea. Many reject it. But structural messages do not require belief to function. They operate through law, policy, housing, schooling, labor markets, policing, and media. They determine who is trusted, who is feared, who is entitled to protection, and who must justify their existence.
Understanding this lineage helps explain why anti-Black racism appears across all racial groups—including newcomers, long-established immigrant communities, and even descendants of Africans enslaved in the United States (DAEUS). The system pressures every community to uphold anti-Black norms because safety, acceptance, and advancement have been tied to this racial contract since the nation’s founding.
This essay uses the term “descendants of Africans enslaved in the United States (DAEUS)” to recognize the distinct historical, legal, and structural position created by chattel slavery and maintained across generations. Naming DAEUS explicitly honors that lineage and acknowledges how the racial hierarchy continues to shape their experience.
This essay traces that history, explains how the coercive racial contract operates, and ends with a call for the structural transformation the nation continues to avoid.
