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Structural Messages: A Historical Lineage

To understand how anti-Black hierarchy governs the present, we must trace its development across time. Each era produced new tools—legal, cultural, economic, and institutional—but all served the same purpose: to maintain Black subordination and require other groups to navigate or affirm this hierarchy. The details change, but the logic endures.

 

1. Enslavement as the Foundation (1619–1865)

Enslavement was the nation’s first racial institution and its most defining. It was not simply labor exploitation; it was a legal, cultural, and religious framework that assigned permanent inferiority to Black people and permanent authority to white people. This framework shaped courts, policing, land laws, property, inheritance, marriage, education, and citizenship.

Enslavement taught a foundational message: white identity depends on the subordination of Black people. Later systems—Black Codes, Jim Crow, convict leasing, lynching, and mass incarceration—did not invent new principles; they recycled the logic of slavery to meet new political needs.

 

2. The Naturalization Act of 1790: Citizenship as Whiteness

The first federal naturalization law restricted citizenship to “free white persons,” formally tying national belonging to whiteness. Black people—enslaved or free—were excluded by design. Indigenous, Asian, Middle Eastern, and many Southern and Eastern European peoples were also excluded or treated as racially suspect.

This law signaled that civic membership was not simply a legal status—it was a racial privilege. The message was clear: only those who could plausibly align with whiteness were entitled to the rights of citizenship.

 

3. Reconstruction Backlash (1865–1877)

The end of slavery initiated one of the most radical democratic experiments in U.S. history. Black Americans:

  • Built schools, businesses, churches, and political organizations

  • Won elections

  • Rewrote state constitutions

  • Created mutual-aid structures

  • Developed a multiracial democratic vision

But Black success destabilized the racial hierarchy, triggering violent and legal backlash:

  • KKK terrorism

  • Black Codes reimposing labor and mobility restrictions

  • Convict leasing as re-enslavement

  • Federal abandonment in 1877

The message was unmistakable: Black advancement is punished.

 

4. How Irish, Italian, and Jewish Immigrants Became “White” Through Anti-Blackness (Mid-1800s–Early 1900s)

Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants were not originally considered white. They were caricatured as biologically inferior, violent, uneducated, or unassimilable. Their path to whiteness required:

  1. Giving up cultural markers—languages, religious practices, ethnic identifiers

  2. Adopting white Protestant norms

  3. Demonstrating loyalty to white racial interests, often through participation in anti-Black policing, political coalitions, or labor exclusion

Whiteness was not a fixed identity; it expanded strategically when doing so reinforced Black subordination. Anti-Blackness was the gateway to belonging.

Immigration law reinforced these lessons, teaching newcomers that acceptance required proximity to whiteness and distance from Blackness.

 

5. Jim Crow: Legal and De Facto Apartheid Across the Nation (1877–1960s)

Jim Crow was not a Southern phenomenon; it was a national system of apartheid.

In the South, segregation was explicit: laws mandated separate schools, hospitals, transportation, housing, and public accommodations. Black voting was effectively eliminated. Violence enforced the order.

In the North, segregation operated through de facto mechanisms:

  • Restrictive covenants

  • Exclusionary zoning

  • Redlining

  • School boundary manipulation

  • Sundown towns

  • Discriminatory policing and mob violence

Black people who crossed racial boundaries risked violence or eviction even in states without segregation laws.

In the West, states such as Oregon embedded anti-Blackness directly into law—barring Black people from residing in the state, owning property, or entering contracts.

Across all regions, the aim was the same: protect the racial hierarchy that placed Black people at the bottom.

Mexican Americans in Texas experienced segregation, economic exclusion, and school discrimination. Yet when segregation cases threatened the Black–white binary, courts declared Mexican Americans “white” for legal purposes—demonstrating that racial categories were manipulated to preserve the anti-Black order.

 

6. Racial Eligibility for Immigration and the Battle to Be Declared “White” (1880s–1920s)

As immigration increased, courts were asked to determine which groups could join the category of “white.” Immigrants from Asia, the Middle East, and South Asia argued for whiteness using:

  • Claims of Caucasian ancestry

  • Assertions of civilizational history

  • Arguments about cultural similarity to Europeans

Courts issued contradictory rulings but maintained one purpose: preserve white dominance and the anti-Black hierarchy.

Those deemed non-white faced:

  • Deportation

  • Denial of citizenship

  • Loss of property rights

  • Exclusion from testifying against white people

  • Racial surveillance

Major cases:

  • Takao Ozawa (1922): whiteness required European ancestry

  • Bhagat Singh Thind (1923): whiteness defined by “common understanding,” not science

These cases exposed whiteness as a political category constructed to protect racial hierarchy.

 

7. Chinese Exclusion and Racial Measuring (1882)

The Chinese Exclusion Act banned Chinese laborers from immigrating and denied them citizenship. Racial theories of the era placed Chinese people above Black people but below whites, reinforcing the logic that Blackness belonged at the very bottom.

Exclusion was enforced through surveillance, interrogation, identification documents, and detention. It established the federal government’s template for race-based immigration control.

 

8. Japanese American Internment (1942)

During World War II, over 120,000 Japanese Americans—mostly U.S. citizens—were incarcerated. Their property was seized, their mobility restricted, and their rights suspended.

Yet federal officials repeatedly assured Southern politicians that internment would not disturb Jim Crow. Anti-Blackness remained the fixed anchor of the national racial hierarchy, even during wartime.

Internment demonstrated that state violence could expand dramatically, but the racial order—especially the position of Black people—remained constant.

 

9. Immigration Law and the Racial Ladder (1924–1965)

The 1924 Immigration Act established quotas to engineer the nation’s racial future. Northern and Western Europeans were favored; Southern and Eastern Europeans were restricted; Asians and Africans were excluded.

The 1965 Immigration Act ended formal racial quotas, but immigrants entered a society already structured around anti-Blackness. They quickly learned:

  • Proximity to whiteness eased integration

  • Distancing from Blackness signaled respectability

  • Assimilation required navigating the racial contract

Anti-Blackness remained the central organizing principle.

 

10. Modern Policing and Criminalization (1970s–Present)

Policing became the modern enforcement arm of racial hierarchy.

  • The War on Drugs targeted Black communities

  • Mandatory minimums fueled mass incarceration

  • “Broken windows” policing criminalized daily life

  • Stop-and-frisk normalized racial profiling

  • Militarized policing treated Black neighborhoods as occupied territories

Blackness became constructed as inherently criminal, dangerous, and disorderly. Other groups learned that distancing themselves from Black communities was often treated as the safer choice.