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A description of the racial hierarchy that has governed American society since its beginnings in the 17th century. Rather than seeing racism as the product of isolated beliefs or actions, removed from a broader social and historical context, the theory of racial caste argues that racism is a hierarchical system that has maintained white supremacy throughout American history by giving different kinds of rights, protections, opportunities, and services to members of different racial groups. Specifically, institutions like slavery and de jure residential segregation are designed to ensure that African Americans remain an inferior and subservient “caste” in relation to white people. The term was popularized by legal scholar Michelle Alexander in her landmark book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, in which she argues that, by labeling black Americans as “criminals,” the government and society at large justify systematically disempowering them and depriving them of rights and privileges they should be afforded by the Constitution. Following Alexander, Richard Rothstein sees his topic—housing discrimination—in the context of the United States’ long history of depriving African Americans of freedom and civil rights. Just as it is impossible to understand mass incarceration in the United States without examining the history of systematic antiblack racism and oppression in the United States, Rothstein considers it impossible to study the history of American residential segregation without recognizing its role in a longstanding campaign (by government and economic elites) to preserve the racial caste system.
Racial Caste System Quotes in The Color of Law
The The Color of Law quotes below are all either spoken by Racial Caste System or refer to Racial Caste System. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 8
Quotes
The Milpitas story illustrates the extraordinary creativity that government officials at all levels displayed when they were motivated to prevent the movement of African Americans into white neighborhoods. It wasn’t only the large-scale federal programs of public housing and mortgage finance that created de jure segregation. Hundreds, if not thousands of smaller acts of government contributed. They included petty actions like denial of access to public utilities; determining, once African Americans wanted to build, that their property was, after all, needed for parkland; or discovering that a road leading to African American homes was “private.” They included routing interstate highways to create racial boundaries or to shift the residential placement of African American families. And they included choosing school sites to force families to move to segregated neighborhoods if they wanted education for their children.
Taken in isolation, we can easily dismiss such devices as aberrations. But when we consider them as a whole, we can see that they were part of a national system by which state and local government supplemented federal efforts to maintain the status of African Americans as a lower caste, with housing segregation preserving the badges and incidents of slavery.
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Racial Caste System Term Timeline in The Color of Law
The timeline below shows where the term Racial Caste System appears in The Color of Law. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Preface
...Rothstein will use “African American,” occasionally “black,” and, when historically appropriate, “Negroes.” While language changes, racial caste remains a constant structuring force in America’s history and present.
(full context)
Chapter 8: Local Tactics
...“a national system” that tried “to maintain the status of African Americans as a lower [racial] caste ” and “preserv[e] the badges and incidents of slavery.”
(full context)
