Racial Definition: Background for Divergence

Abstract

A DESCRIPTION OF racial definition must appear to many to be an enterprise best left to physical anthropologists or other biologically based scientists. In the case of the United States, most assessments of the difficulties faced by blacks in housing, employment or education begin by describing the immediate problems themselves (e.g., inequities in black and white school systems during segregation) rather than factors which may have gone into the creation and maintenance of the problems. One way of perceiving the genesis and scope of what we call modern racism involves the very definitions of white and black which we take so much for granted. It is, in fact, a satisfactory way of addressing the question of how the impoverished masses of Eastern and Southern Europe became modern U.S. whites, with all the rights and privileges of that status, while descendants of those who may have helped unload the Europeans' belongings at the docks remain minority/blacks. Terms such as integration or desegregation of schools have meaning, in the U.S., only insofar as the racial definitional system of this country ensures separation of people.