Racial Construction

in AmericaIn the United States race is socially constructed and has the capacity to produce racial categories placing people of color in painful disadvantages

Social scholar Michelle Alexander has challenged the long lasting conception of race as a biological phenomenon to say that race is socially constructed to maintain white supremacy despite the constitutional guarantee of the laws.

“The slave went free; stood a brief moment

in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”

W.E.B Du Bois

Alexander walks through the United States history to discover and analyze

how a racial caste system has remained and has been redesigned since the days of slavery until now.

Main Point in Alexander’s Perspective

The illusion of the Emancipation Proclamation has constitutionally

perpetuated race division in America; therefore, political and economic systems of

American society have produced and maintained racial hierarchy through which

has promoted and generated the reincarnation of new racial caste systems.

Reincarnation of New Racial Caste Systems

Race did not produce slavery;

rather, slavery brought about the idea of race and racial

differentiation as the result of the political and economic forces

1. The indentured servitude system or Slavery

Enforced the increasing demand of cheap labor on plantations implementing legalized intimidating

rules against Black and White poor people at the same time.

The big planter system as a way to increase their

economic benefits started to import more Africans as slaves for free labor because they were powerless as compared to the poor white

indentured servants.

The planter elite started to put poor White people in a racially privileged position to construct a gap between Whites and slaves in order to prevent

future coalitions and maintain dominance. As a result, the conception of white supremacy was the foundation of the existence of a race-

based system of slavery, which was the fundamental structure of race differentiation.

Even though the racial caste of slavery would end with the

Civil War, the persistent notion of white supremacy redesigned the racial caste system from slavery to the

Jim Crow as the new system of racial differentiation.

2. The Jim Crow System

Jim Crow was born in the slaveholding states as a new racial caste to preserve and sustain the

economy and to prevent respectable Whites from racial mixing with perverse and violent Blacks.

They embraced a set of black codes and passed police laws such as convict laws to control and

unfairly criminalize the powerless and poor freedmen for trivial offenses.

Brown v. Board of Education put an end to

segregation in schools but, in addition, it strongly

started to debilitate the racial caste system of Jim

Crow.

The emergence of the Civil Right Movement put an

end to the Jim Crown legislation.

3. Reconstruction Time

In which Black people stood only a short time ‘in

the sun’ because once again the Conservative

whites reacted against the new interracial alliance

seeking to establish a new racial caste system

according to the new rules of American democracy.

4. Mass Incarceration System

Defined by the new racial caste system, which is made up of a race neutral

language, policies, rules, and customs through which the Criminal Justice system

seeks to control criminals.

The mass incarceration system reacted against the accomplishments of the Civil

Rights Movement insisting that racial integration brings about criminality and

therefore, segregation is the perfect solution to solve crime.

Thus, politicians and presidential candidates identified Blacks-‘welfare

queens and criminal predators-’ as the problem of American society in order to obtain the votes of anti-black and poor

and working-class people, who resented the Black for having to support them

while they are undeserving and criminal.

These political and economic forces made Blacks to be conceived as criminals and drug sellers, thus,

being Black meant being criminal.

President Reagan in 1987 instituted a ‘colorblind’ War on Drugs to

overcome the undeserving black ‘others.’

The mass incarceration is now the new racial caste system in America

society, which has been the result of politicians competing for political power and through which severe

crime policies have been implemented to incarcerate in prisons the largest number of

people, most of them Black and Latino, in American history.

Blacks are today “free” slaves under the Criminal Justice system of the

United States being unjustly criminalized, diminished and

excluded from society.

The New Jim Crow was born.

ReferencesAlexander, M. (2010). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New

York, NY: The Ne w Press.

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