POLICING: The first police departments in the South evolved from slave patrols. When slavery ended in 1865, many ex-slave patrollers and bounty hunters formed the South’s first police departments. Systemic racism also played a role in the rise of police departments in the North. The first police departments in the North were responsible for keeping the growing Black and immigrant populations in line. Tensions between police and Black communities have been fraught ever since. Today, Black communities continue to be disproportionately policed, and Black people continue to be disproportionately stopped, searched, killed, arrested, and jailed by police, compared to white people with similar criminal histories and charges.

THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE: Slavery is one of the main reasons America uses the Electoral College to elect a president. In 1787 delegates at the Constitutional Convention decided that population should determine the number of congressional representatives for each state. Delegates for Northern states wanted to count only free people as part of the population. Delegates from Southern states wanted to include enslaved people in the counts so that slave states could get more representation. So the convention adopted the Three-Fifths Compromise, which took into account only 3/5 of the slave population in the South when determining how many representatives slave states could get in Congress. As a result, Southern leaders also pushed for the Electoral College system so that their non-voting slave populations could also boost their voting power.

Since then, there have been numerous calls to do away with the Electoral College and adopt a popular vote system, but, again, racism played a role in preserving it. After slavery was abolished in 1865 and the Reconstruction period ended in 1877, Black people were counted as whole people in population counts. However, racist Jim Crow policies meant Black people couldn’t always vote in the South. This gave white Southerners more representation than Black Southerners, even though they used the Black population to gain that representation. In 1969, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to amend the Constitution to abolish the Electoral College. However, many white segregationists in the Senate wanted to maintain their electoral influence in the South and blocked the amendment via filibuster.

POLITICAL PARTIES AND AFFILIATIONS: Slavery and systemic racism helped shape America’s two leading political parties and the people who support them. The Republican party formed in 1854 to prevent the expansion of slavery. The Democratic Party, at that time, was split on the issue, with Southern Democrats wanting to expand slavery and Northern Democrats refusing. Another party, the Whig Party, died because of the debacle, leaving the Democrats and the Republicans as the two prominent political parties. Slavery became one of the top issues that distinguished the two groups. Southern Democrats went on to fight the Civil War to preserve slavery. After the war, and once slavery was abolished, many Democrats opposed Civil Rights for Black people, while Republicans pushed for them. But the roles started changing in the 1960s, during the Civil Rights Movement, when Democratic leaders started supporting Civil Rights legislation. Southern Democrats started flaking away from the party because of it. Many became Republicans, marking a major ideological shift. Meanwhile, many Black people started backing Democrats. Today, the overwhelming majority of Black voters still vote Democrat. 

Meanwhile, a Harvard study found that slavery still shapes white Southerners’ political and social views. It showed a strong correlation between areas that had higher concentrations of enslaved people in the past and current political and ideological attitudes toward Black people. In other words, white Southerners’ close affiliation with the Republican Party seems strongly correlated with the prevalence of slavery in their areas.

PRISON LABOR: Many government agencies and private corporations benefit from cheap prison labor. Convict labor in America has been used throughout the country’s history to extract free and cheap work from inmates who have disproportionately been people of color. A lot of these labor systems were intentionally designed to target Black people. When the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, the language exempted penal labor. Southerners used this as a “loophole” to continue to get free labor from African Americans. Racist policies like “black codes” and vagrancy laws created a pipeline for African Americans to enter the prison system and then be leased out to landowners and plantations for forced manual work—much like during slavery. This system, known as convict leasing, became a lucrative business for several Southern states through the 1890s. In the 1920s, Southern states began replacing the leasing system with chain gangs—shackled-up groups of prisoners forced to build public structures, like roads and railroads. Prison labor became so lucrative that it competed with traditional labor, causing laborers to push for restrictions on what prisoners could produce and sell over state lines. By the 1980s, the U.S. government loosened the interstate commerce restrictions for prison-made goods, paving the way for prison-labor-backed enterprises. Today, there are two major ways prison labor is used in enterprises: a federally owned corporation known as UNICOR, which uses cheap federal prison labor to make and sell goods, and the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIECP), which allows local and state prisons to contract with private businesses and sell prisoner-made goods across state lines. 

The politically and racially charged “war on drugs” popularized private prisons, which have also incorporated prison labor into their business models. This relationship between prisons and the private sector became known as the prison industrial complex. Today, many prisons, private and public, create goods and services to sell to the government and private sectors. Some states require certain organizations to buy certain products made by inmates or offer tax incentives to those that do. Some private corporations have incorporated prison labor into their supply chain models, relying on them for agriculture and manufacturing work. Despite criticism, some prisoners actually enjoy the benefits, experience, and change of pace that prison jobs offer. However, prisoners are not always paid, and when they are, they’re paid just a few cents to a couple dollars per hour (on average $0.25 and $1.30 an hour, according to a 2022 ACLU analysis).

VOTER SUPPRESSION: Voter suppression has a long, racialized history. Ever since the 15th Amendment gave Black men the right to vote, bad actors have used a number of laws and intimidation tactics to prevent Black people from voting. Black Codes, literacy tests, and poll taxes were all tactics designed to suppress Black votes. Vigilante groups, like the Ku Klux Klan, added violence and terror to the mix. Throughout American history, as civil rights measures, like the 19th Amendment and the 24th Amendment, expanded and protected voting rights, people have created new suppression tactics that disproportionately target Black voters and voters of color (gerrymandering, ID requirements, felon disenfranchisement, language requirements, etc.). 

STREET GANGS: “Gangs” have existed in America since the 19th century, but modern, urban street gangs, as we know them today, have roots in racial tensions, housing discrimination, and segregation. When millions of Black people arrived in Northern cities during the Great Migration, sometimes white gangs formed to keep Black and Hispanic migrants out of white communities. The primary reason Black and Hispanic gangs formed in Northern cities was to defend Black and Hispanic communities from territorial white gangs. Segregation, racist housing policies, such as redlining, urban renewal efforts that ransacked poor neighborhoods, and public housing projects, pushed Black gangs together, causing drug and turf wars, and more violence. Today, gang violence continues to be a major public safety issue in many segregated, low-income urban communities.

MASS INCARCERATION/WAR ON DRUGS: Throughout the 20th century, housing discrimination practices, such as redlining, isolated Black people inside urban districts, allowing poverty and underinvestment to become major issues. Black communities became associated with drugs and crime. This led to more policing in these communities. In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs,” which echoed a “tough on crime” movement in politics. Both efforts targeted Black and Hispanic communities, particularly for drug crimes. Even though, statistically, Black people didn’t use or sell drugs more than white people, since the “war on drugs” movement, they have been incarcerated for drug crimes at much higher rates. In 1994, the Crime Bill increased funding for prisons and policing, leading to more drug-related arrests that disproportionately targeted Black and minority communities. Even today, Black people are disproportionately admitted into jail and stay longer than white people. Attorney and legal scholar Michelle Alexander famously called mass incarceration the “New Jim Crow.”

POLICE MILITARIZATION: Since its inception in the 1800s, American policing has slowly become more and more militarized. This has happened in notable waves, and systemic racism has played a prominent role in most of them. One of the first waves happened following the United States’s military actions in foreign countries, such as Haiti, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Hawaii. In this “Reform Era,” several prominent leaders in police departments were veterans who served in the military during America’s imperialistic missions in foreign countries. These leaders started modeling local policing tactics and department structure after U.S. military practices, comparing the people in the communities they policed with the people in the countries America had targeted. The second wave came in the 1960s when civil unrest in Black communities over racial tensions and police shootings dominated headlines. Police departments began using SWAT teams and military tactics in Black communities to handle the unrest. President Lyndon B. Johnson passed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, which gave police departments federal funds to buy military equipment to deal with Black protests. Another wave began when President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs,” which disproportionately targeted Black communities. Nixon’s war on drugs paved the way for future legislation that allowed police departments to buy military equipment. This includes the 1033 Program, which still gives billions of dollars worth of military equipment to police.

AMERICAN MUSIC: Most American music genres—country, jazz, rock, pop, and EDM—are rooted in the gospel and blues genres. African Americans’ experience with racism significantly shaped gospel and blues. Black gospel came from “negro spirituals—Christian hymns that enslaved people created and sang. Blues also derived from “negro spirituals,” gospel, and work songs that formerly enslaved people sang in work camps and plantations.

The banjo, a popular instrument in country music, is an African instrument that enslaved Black people taught to white enslavers. Many white artists then used the instrument to build on folk and country sounds. Ironically, many also used the banjo to create “coon songs” and minstrel songs, which became some of the earliest versions of American pop music, still sung today in kindergartens, camps, and childrens tv shows (i.e. “Turkey in the Straw” and “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad”). 

Jazz came from the intermingling of classically trained Black musicians and working class blues musicians in New Orleans—their communities pushed together by the growth of segregation. 

Black southerners also created rock n’ roll, which led to rock. But white artists have dominated the genres because in the mid-20th century the industry found them to be more marketable. Rock n’ roll was popular with young white teenagers, but industry producers believed that kids’ parents wouldn’t want them listening to “race music,” so they recruited white singers like Elvis and Pat Boone to cover Black songs, and pushed them to the forefront of the industry. The Beatles, The Animals, and the Rolling Stones also began their rock band careers singing covers of R&B and soul songs.

Later, between the 1970s and 1990s, queer Black youth who were forced into the underground, used funk music to create disco, house, techno, and other electronic dance music.

Even though the Black experience heavily influenced most American music genres, systemic racism often shut Black artists out of the industry or relegated them to specific genres, such as hip-hop, soul, and R&B. Racialized gatekeeping still shapes the industry. Black artists are still underrepresented in certain genres, and in industry leadership. When hip-hop artists, like Beyonce or Lil Nas X,  attempt to cross over into country or rock, they are sometimes met with backlash, while white artists like Taylor Swift or Post Malone freely bounce from genre to genre with far less criticism.

STATE FLAGS:  At least three U.S. states still have Confederate imagery in their state flags—there once were more. This is partially because of the Lost Cause, a post-Civil War movement in which a lot of white Southerners tried to popularize the Confederacy and clean up its image. A part of the goal was also to intimidate Black people with symbols of pro-slavery and the Confederacy. From the end of the Civil War and into the Civil Rights Movement, Lost Cause supporters re-wrote textbooks, spread rumors about the true cause of the Civil War, erected statues of Confederate soldiers, and popularized the Confederate Battle Flag, re-branding it as a symbol of “Southern pride.” During the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras many Southern states re-designed their state flags to honor the Confederacy in spite of civil rights activism. Some have since been re-designed, but Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina still have Confederate tributes in their flags (Georgia’s was adopted in 2004, after the Lost Cause, but the new design was to undo a decision to replace an older design that was adopted in response to the Civil Rights Movement). 

NAMESAKES AND MONUMENTS: Dozens of U.S. towns, counties, military bases, parks, and schools are still named after Confederates or “Dixie” (a nickname usually referring to Confederate states). Statues and monuments commemorating Confederates still stand in public spaces, including the U.S. Capitol building. A lot of these tributes were created during Lost Cause movements, in which white Southerners pushed to re-brand the Confederacy as something to celebrate or honor. It also served to intimidate Black people. For instance during the Civil Rights Movement some schools were re-named after Confederate leaders to promote white-only schools. Recently, white nationalists and extremists, like Dylann Roof (who killed nine Black people in a church in South Carolina in 2015) and protestors at the deadly 2017 Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, have been linked to pro-Confederate ideology. The Unite the Right Rally was actually a protest against the removal of a Lost Cause era (1924) statue honoring Confederate general Robert E. Lee.

Source: THE SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER Whose Heritage? dataset • Data as of 2021

MEMORIAL DAY(s): Holidays honoring fallen soldiers started after the Civil War. Former enslaved African Americans, Union supporters, and Confederate supporters celebrated their own “decoration days,” honoring fallen soldiers who fought for their respective sides. It later became a tradition for each war after that, leading to the U.S. making Memorial Day a national holiday in 1971. Despite the national holiday, today, several Southern states still observe Confederate Memorial Days and other days that honor Confederate soldiers or leaders like Robert E. Lee. Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas still observe these kinds of holidays. In some cases public employees and students get the day off.

NURSERY SONGS: A lot of the first songs American children learn in school are old minstrel songs and “coon songs.” These were tunes performed by blackface entertainers and/or intentionally written with coded stereotypes about Black people. These songs endure because they were extremely popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and have become fixtures in the American songbook. They were the earliest forms of pop music in America. Sometimes plantation songs and “negro spirituals” became equally as popular. 

Here are some famous minstrel, coon, and plantation songs that can still be heard from ice cream trucks, classrooms, and kids shows today:

• “Doo-Dah” (‘Camptown Races’)
• “Do Your Ears Hang Low?”
• “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad”/”Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah”  
• “I Wish I Was in Dixie”  
• “Jimmy Crack Corn”
• “Oh! Susanna”
• “Polly Wolly Doodle” 
• “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round The Mountain When She Comes”  
• “Shoo Fly, Don’t Bother Me”
• “Shortnin’ Bread”
• “Ten Little Indians” 
• “Turkey In The Straw”

ANIMATION/CARTOONS: Blackface strongly influenced American animation studios. Blackface was extremely popular throughout the 1800s and early 1900s. American audiences became accustomed to the images and comedic format they’d see in blackface minstrel shows and Vaudeville acts. So when cartoons became popular in the 1920s and 1930s, animators, many of whom were former Vaudeville performers, modeled many of their cartoons on blackface minstrelsy. Bosko, the first Looney Tunes character at Warner Bros. studio, for example, was understood by audiences to be a Black child who dressed and behaved like a minstrel. When the character spoke, he used African American Vernacular English.

Mocking Black people was a standard entertainment trope in those days that translated to animation. When animators depicted Black people in cartoons, the characters often looked like blackface figures and common racist caricatures, with pitch black skin and white, ape-like mouths. Some wore white gloves, top hats, and rags like the “coon” stereotype. Like minstrel shows, early cartoons focused on slapstick, and simple-minded characters. These were tropes taken directly from blackface acts and Vaudeville. Many of these tropes live on in today’s cartoons.

Bosko references appear in an 1990s episode of the Warner Bros. cartoon Tiny Toon Adventures (Season 1, Episode 30), and in an episode for the 1990s cartoon The Animaniacs (Season 3, Episode 11). Both appearances celebrate Bosko’s impact on modern animated comedy. The titular characters in The Animaniacs—which was rebooted 2020 and lasted for three more seasons—still bear striking resemblance to Bosko and early animated minstrels.

How blackface minstrels became animated

The first image shows a poster for a blackface minstrel show. The second shows Bosko from a 1932 ad in an edition of Film Daily. Bosko (1929) was modeled after blackface performers. The third, fourth, and fifth images are depictions of Black people in Fleischer Studios’s “Making Stars,” (1935), Disney’s Silly Symphony’s “Egyptian Melodies”(1931), Universal Pictures’s “Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat,”(1940) Warner Bros.’s “Fresh Hare” (1940). Each are depicted using the ape-ish humanoid and blackface aesthetic. Bosko and his girlfriend Honey (sixth picture: “Sinkin’ In The Bathtub” (1930)) have similar features, and so do more contemporary Warner Bros. cartoons, like the 1990s and 2020s The Animaniacs. The Animaniacs openly inherit many of their features from early minstrel-esque cartoons like Bosko, as shown in the last image.

PROFESSIONAL SPORTS TEAMS:  Some people have pointed to the number of Black athletes in certain sports, like basketball and football, and have argued that Black people excel in those sports because of biological differences between them and other racial groups. This has been debunked. Most scholars agree, racial discrepancies in sports have little to do with genetics. As molecular anthropologist Jonathan Marks told PBS for a series on race and biology: “I happen to have seen a lot of white guys who jump quite well. They’re all in ballet, not in basketball.” 

In reality, sports like basketball and football are more popular in Black communities because, historically, they have been more accessible to Black athletes than other sports—that’s because of systemic racism. Even though Black people excelled in sports like horse racing, cycling, and baseball during the post-Civil War and Reconstruction eras, during the Jim Crow era professional sports became very segregated. Even as sports started integrating following the Civil Rights Movement, residential segregation and housing discrimination created isolated, underinvested Black communities that had fewer resources and spaces to practice certain sports. Sports like tennis and golf were more expensive to take up. Basketball, football, and track have been more accessible, more affordable, and therefore more popular in Black communities.
Today, even though Black athletes excel in professional basketball and football, they remain underrepresented in management, coaching, and team ownership. This is because those positions are often filled though small networks of wealthy people who are disproportionately white and male. One study even found that racial discrimination has played a role in the NFL’s hiring practices for head coaches, shutting out qualified Black professionals.

SWIMMING AND PUBLIC POOLS: Black children today are less likely to know how to swim well, if at all, and drown at higher rates than white children. These discrepancies have ties to a history of discrimination and segregation. Historical records suggest that many enslaved Black people in the South were skilled swimmers. In fact, many West African communities had strong aquatic cultures, and historians believe that before the Civil War more enslaved people from West Africa knew how to swim than white Americans. 

That shifted during the Jim Crow and Great Migration eras. By the 1940s, there were thousands of public swimming pools across the country. But Black people were usually banned from them and were often restricted to smaller indoor pools, if anything. If Black swimmers tried to swim in public pools that white people used, they could be beaten, arrested, or chased away. In some incidents people poured bleach and nails into pools when Black swimmers got in. In 1964, the manager of the Monson Motor Lodge in St. Augustine, Florida infamously poured acid in the hotel swimming pool when a group of Black and white activists tried to swim together. Segregation affected beaches, too. The Chicago race riot in 1919 began after a Black swimmer crossed an imaginary barrier separating Black and white swimmers at a Chicago beach.

When civil rights legislation outlawed segregation and discrimination, many communities simply shut down their public pools, and white people found alternatives. Some communities opened private pools just for white families. White families that moved to the suburbs had access to private and backyard pools. Black families couldn’t access these amenities because racist housing discrimination tactics, like redlining, sundown towns, home loan discrimination, and racial covenants, shut them out of most suburbs. 
So publicly accessible pools in large cities are no longer as prevalent as they once were. Black people have therefore had fewer opportunities to learn to swim. Studies show that when parents don’t know how to swim, it’s more likely that their children will have poor swimming skills or never learn, highlighting a link between limited pool access in the past and limited swimming ability generations later.

LANGUAGE, IDIOMS, AND SLANG: Some popular American slang and idioms are connected to racialized moments in America’s past:

• Antebellum: Latin for “before war.” It typically refers to the American South during the pre-Civil War slavery era.
• Bougie: Before it became a mainstream way to refer to something considered high-brow, African Americans in the late 20th century used the word as a pejorative for other Black people who seemed high-maintenance, snobby, pretentious, or otherwise judgmental toward other working class Black people. It’s a linguistic play on the French words “bourgeois” and “bourgeoisie.”
• Cakewalk: References a competitive dance by enslaved African Americans that was called the “Cakewalk” because the winner received a cake. 
• Dixie: A term used to reference and romanticize the Confederate and pre-Civil War South.
• Ghetto: Originally used to describe the neighborhood districts that many Jewish people were confined to in Italy and Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. In the early 20th century, segregation, housing discrimination, and redlining also confined African American migrants from the South to impoverished, underinvested urban neighborhoods. In the 1960s, people started calling these areas “Black ghettos” or simply “the ghetto.” People who lived in these communities often had to be resourceful and creative with budgets, food, and amenities. “Ghetto” then became a term facetiously used to describe the subpar conditions, cost-saving DIY fixes, or brassy behavior thought to be associated with living in redlined Black neighborhoods.
• Grandfathered-in: Derived from Jim Crow-era “Grandfather Clauses,” which some Southern states used to exempt white people from voting restrictions that targeted Black people.
• Moron: A eugenicist named Henry Goddard coined the term to describe people with low IQ. Eugenicists often used IQ tests to validate their theories on white superiority and racial hierarchy. Morons were considered the least of three “feeble-minded classes: idiots, imbeciles and morons. 
• Plantation-style: Plantations were large farmlands where enslaved people worked and produced crops. In the South, plantations often featured magnificent mansions for the enslavers. Some of these mansions and plantations still stand, and some people admire their aesthetic, using “plantation-style” as a design descriptor.
• Race: Today most scientists agree that there is no biological basis for “race.” European colonists invented and promoted the concept of racial groups to justify slavery and colonization. They distinguished certain kinds of Europeans as “white” and came up with other classifications for Africans, Natives and Asian people. Until then, “race” was rarely used to describe ethnic groups.
• “Sold down the river”: An idiom people use to say they’ve been betrayed. But it comes from the fact that enslaved people were sold along the Mississippi River.
• “Takes the cake”: References a competitive dance by enslaved African Americans that was called the “Cakewalk” because the winner received a cake. 
• “The tipping point”: Used during the mid-20th century to describe the point at which too many Black people moving into an area made white families leave.
• Uppity: Similar to “bougie,” but used by white people in the Jim Crow era to describe Black people who were considered presumptuous or acting “out of place.”
• White [people]: European and early American colonists popularized the concept of “white people” and “race” to promote colonization and slavery. They distinguished certain kinds of Europeans as “white” and came up with other classifications for Africans, Natives, and Asian people. Before then, “white people” and “race” were rarely used to describe ethnic groups.

RAILROADS: Enslaved African Americans built much of the South’s vast railroad systems. They also maintained and helped operate the lines once they were built. Today, some of the rights of way that enslaved people built for railroads are still in use by railroad companies like the Norfolk Southern Railway and CSX Transportation. 

PLANTATIONS: Plantations were large swaths of farmland that people in the South used as enslavement camps. Enslaved Black people worked on the plantations to grow crops like sugar, cotton, and tobacco. After slavery was abolished in 1865, many plantation owners rented out their farmland to formerly enslaved people in a very exploitative system known as sharecropping. Plantation owners often lived on the property in large, lavish homes, while enslaved farmers and sharecroppers sometimes lived in “slave quarters” or shoddy shacks on the property. Some of these plantations and their buildings have been preserved and currently function as tourist attractions, wedding venues, historical sites, museums, and bed and breakfasts

BUILDINGS AND LANDMARKS: Several iconic structures in America were built with slave labor. Slave labor was leasable in the United States. That meant that when contractors, architects, or engineers needed workers to build out their designs, they could rent slave labor. Many did. Enslaved people built buildings, roads, monuments, and canals. Some became famous structures. Pierre L’Enfant, the engineer who designed Washington D.C., used slave labor to build the White House and the Capitol building. Former first lady Michelle Obama once said, “I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves” (2016). Sometimes enslavers sold enslaved people and built things with the profits. That’s how parts of Harvard Law School were built. Other well-known structures built with slave labor include the Smithsonian Institution Building in D.C., The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Virginia, and Thomas Jefferson’s estate Monticello in Charlottesville Virginia.

NEIGHBORHOOD SEGREGATION: Many American cities, like Chicago and Detroit, remain racially segregated today because of racism and housing discrimination in the past. Redlining was a unofficial practice in which real estate professionals and mortgage lenders in the first half of the 20th century discriminated against “undesirable neighborhoods,” later marked in red on maps . Banks would often refuse to lend in these areas. These neighborhoods included communities with many Black, Hispanic, and Jewish residents. As millions of Black people migrated from the South to the North in the early to mid-20th century, redlining and other housing discrimination tactics, like steering, racial covenants and sundown towns, limited where they could live. White people often moved out of neighborhoods that Black people started moving into, or near. Some moved to the suburbs (white flight), where Black people were usually not allowed. Despite the Fair Housing Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1968 that outlawed housing discrimination, many predominantly Black and minority neighborhoods in major U.S. cities still exist within the confines of old redlining boundaries.

INTERSTATES AND HIGHWAYS: Many highways were built to run right through Black and minority neighborhoods in order to avoid interrupting white ones. In some cases, thriving Black communities were razed to accommodate freeways. This happened in several American cities in the North and the South, including Los Angeles, Detroit, St. Paul, MN., Nashville, Houston, and Baltimore. This is because President Dwight Eisenhower’s Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1956 planned an interstate highway system throughout America. The highways particularly affected urban communities of color because they tended to be more densely populated than suburban white ones. In some cases white residents successfully lobbied for the highways to not be built in their neighborhoods. Other times, Black areas that were targeted were deemed “blighted” and prime locations for highway construction. In one case, an interstate expressway was built to run through the Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is where the infamous Black Wall Street massacre occurred. This destroyed a lot of the businesses and development that were rebuilt from the 1921 massacre. Some residents now refer to the highway’s construction as the “second destruction.” The highways, not only further segregated or destroyed communities of color, they, of course, affected property values and wealth. They’ve also contributed to disproportionate rates of pollution-related health issues in communities of color.

THE SUBURBS: Systemic racism played a significant role in the development of American suburbs, most of which were built exclusively for white Americans. During the suburban development boom in the 1940s and 1950s a number of discriminatory practices intentionally kept most people of color out of the suburbs. First, the Federal Housing Administration allowed loan lenders to discriminate against Black applicants while allowing white families to finance suburban homes at lowered risks. Second, the GI Bill made it easier for veterans to buy homes in the suburbs, but since it was implemented at the state level it often excluded Black veterans. Third, leading suburb developers, like William Levitt of Levittown fame, outright banned Black people from their new towns. On top of housing discrimination, the increase in BIPOC residents in large cities encouraged many white people to seek housing in the more homogenous suburbs. This phenomenon became known as “white flight.” Suburban areas thrived, attracting more development, investment, ownership opportunities, higher property values, and better schools, while the urban areas suffered in ways that created longstanding racial disparities in education, investment, homeownership, health, and wealth.

“GHETTOIZATION”: “The American ghetto” is a product of systemic racism. During the Great Migration era, racism, especially housing discrimination, segregated cities in the North. This gave rise to “the American ghetto,” or what some called the “ghettoization of America.” As millions of Black people migrated from the South to Northern cities in search of opportunities, millions of urban white families fled cities and settled in the suburbs (white flight). White communities that remained in the city often segregated their communities from Black ones. Housing discrimination practices, like redlining, blockbusting, predatory lending, and racial covenants, further limited where Black migrants could live and work. These practices ultimately isolated Black people into districts that lacked investment, quality education, and job opportunities. This concentrated crime and poverty in many of these areas. By the 1960s, Americans began calling these neighborhoods “Black ghettos” or simply “the ghetto,” because of how much they resembled Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe. Even after the Civil Rights Act outlawed housing discrimination, some families living in these communities remained caught in generational cycles of poverty. Cities like Detroit and Chicago remain highly segregated because of these practices.

Source: National Community Reinvestment Coalition analysis of 142 Core-based statistical areas • Data from 2014-2018 American Community Survey. The National Community Reinvestment Coalition converted these grades into numerical scores tied to current census tracts. These scores were divided into four quartiles and show that communities that had redlining scores in the third and fourth quartiles have more residents of color and higher rates of poverty today.

PUBLIC HOUSING PROJECTS: Initially designed to help poor white families enter the working class, public housing grew to include cheaply made high-rise complexes primarily serving poor Black communities. Under the New Deal in the 1930s, the Public Works Administration built public housing developments for low-income families. Most of the housing projects were segregated, due to the “neighborhood composition rule,” which mandated that public housing residents reflect the racial makeup of the surrounding neighborhood, not disrupt it. After World War II, federal housing policies and subsidies effectively created different housing programs for low-income white people and low-income Black people. Working class white families were given opportunities to obtain affordable single family homes in the suburbs, while Black people were ushered to housing projects in the city and shut out of decent neighborhoods or the suburbs. Racist practices, like redlining and blockbusting, propelled this.

Tough public housing restrictions faded by the 1960s and public housing residents became poorer. Rent revenue decreased and upkeep for the already cheaply made buildings suffered. In large cities public housing became multi-unit high-rises that served predominantly minority tenants. Public housing therefore became associated with poor people of color. When cities presented plans to build public housing in or near white communities, white residents often resisted and protested. Therefore many of the projects were built in segregated Black neighborhoods. A racialized stigma and stereotypes surrounding public housing developed, and were perpetuated by the media.

Today Black people are disproportionately represented among public housing assistance recipients.

SUNDOWN TOWNS AND COVENANTS: Sundown towns were communities that officially or unofficially banned people of color and Jewish people from living in or entering the town. Many remain predominantly white today. Prior to the mid-20th century there were thousands of sundown towns in America. 

Another tactic that systematically kept suburbs and small towns white was using racial covenants. These were racist clauses written into deeds or homeowners association rules that outright barred Black people from living in or buying the property in question. Some families continue to discover outdated racial covenants in their deeds today. 

INTERNET ACCESS: Many Black and Hispanic communities disproportionately lack access to the internet. This is because housing discrimination tactics, like redlining, segregated American neighborhoods in the early to mid-20th century. Many formerly redlined areas remain racially and economically segregated. Since internet access is based on neighborhood income and also tied to the education gap and credit discrepancies (providers want to offer service in profitable areas), many Black and Hispanic communities that were once redlined don’t have the same internet access as other neighborhoods. This is known as “digital redlining” and the “digital divide.”

HOMEOWNERSHIP AND THE EQUITY GAP: The gap between the number of Black homeowners and the number of white homeowners in America is currently at a record-high, as Black homeownership declines. Housing discrimination in the form of redlining, blockbusting, racial covenants, and predatory lending during the Great Migration era prevented generations of African Americans from owning homes, especially homes in desirable neighborhoods. Meanwhile, all sorts of programs, like the New Deal, the GI Bill, and the suburbanization boom, made it easier for white families to own homes and pass the equity down for generations. Economic hardships like the Great Recession of 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic have exacerbated the disparities.

Black people who own homes also face issues that negatively affect property equity. Studies show disparities in property assessment, home appreciation disparities, as well as residential segregation, have negative effects on home equity for Black homeowners. Homeownership has been a major way to earn wealth in America, especially generational wealth. So homeownership and equity gaps are also linked to racial wealth gaps.

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Economics and Statistics Administration

GENTRIFICATION: Discriminatory housing and lending policies in the early 20th century created a racially segregated housing market. This has led to racial disparities during periods of neighborhood shifts, like gentrification. Many of the segregated, lower-income urban districts that systemic racism and housing discrimination created have recently become targets for middle class or upwardly mobile people moving back into cities and seeking affordable areas to live. The cheaper real estate and lack of development also attract developers trailing the newcomers into the area. Gentrifying neighborhoods can therefore end up pricing out and displacing its original inhabitants. Data shows these displaced groups tend to be people of color with low income.

HOMELESSNESS: The portion of unhoused people who are Black is more than three times the overall portion of Americans who are Black. This discrepancy is a culmination of structural racism and systemic issues like redlining, the wealth gap, and the education gap. Racial disparities in drug addiction, mental health, gentrification and displacement, lending, foreclosures, school quality, and other areas also contribute.

AMERICAN CUISINE: Slavery has significantly shaped the American diet. Several everyday crops and produce in America stem from Africa and arrived to the States through slavery and the slave trade. Sometimes African captives sneaked seeds from their homelands onto slave ships. Enslavers also brought seeds from Africa to grow as crops or to give to enslaved people to plant so that they could eat food they recognized. Enslaved African Americans often had to grow and prepare their own meals, and ultimately developed recipes and cooking styles that are now ubiquitous.

Below are some food and dishes associated with slavery and systemic racism:

Crops:

• Rice: Rice was one the many African cereals that enslavers and colonizers imported to America via slave ships and the Middle Passage. Enslaved Africans became the farmers responsible for early rice production in the United States, using African techniques to cultivate the crop.
• Sorghum: Sorghum is another cereal grain enslavers brought to America from Africa during the slave trade. In the U.S. sorghum has been most commonly used for livestock feed and to make ethanol fuel, but is also found in syrups and some breakfast cereals.
• Okra: In Southern cuisine okra pods are often fried or sautéed, and are used to thicken soups and stews. It’s the key ingredient in Creole-style gumbo. Okra came to the Americas via the slave trade. Enslavers brought crops from Africa to the Americas to cultivate and also to cheaply feed enslaved people with food already common in West African diets. Black people therefore planted the crop in gardens for themselves and for enslavers.
• Watermelon: Watermelons are native to Africa. They arrived in the U.S. via colonists and enslaved Africans as part of the Columbian Exchange (the period between the 14th and 19th centuries in which the West traded crops, culture, ideas, and diseases with Afro-Eurasia). Enslaved people were allowed to grow the fruit in gardens and it became a part of their diet. After the Civil War, the watermelon, like many other popular African crops that Black people lived on when they were enslaved, became a symbol of freedom and Black culture. Many emancipated Black people continued growing watermelons and sold them to make an independent living as free people. Eventually, the watermelon became a demeaning trope used in minstrel shows and racist caricatures of Black people, mocking Black people’s reverence for the fruit.
• Black eyed peas: The cowpea, also known as the black eyed pea, is an African bean that Africans brought to the Americas while on slave ships. It still plays a major role in Southern and soul food cuisines.
• Sesame: Enslaved West Africans brought sesame seeds with them to America. Today sesame seeds can be found as a topping for baked goods like burger buns, bagels, and crackers. Sesame seed oil is also a popular cooking fat.

Commodities:

• Rum: Rum was a tradable commodity that helped power the slave trade. Its development and production relied on processing sugarcane, a task given to enslaved Black people.
• Molasses: Molasses played a crucial role in the slave trade. Enslaved people produced molasses, which was used to make products, like rum, for trading on the international market.
• Whiskey: Many of America’s first whiskey distilleries used slave labor. The most famous example is the story behind one of the most well-known whiskey brands, Jack Daniel’s. An enslaved man named Nathan “Nearest” Green was leased out to work at a distillery owned by a pastor and distiller named Dan Call. While working for Call, Green apprenticed a young Jack Daniels, teaching him whisky distilling techniques, likely passed down to Green through generations of enslaved distillers. When Daniels took over the distillery after the Civil War, he hired the recently emancipated Green to be the head distiller.

Recipes:

• Macaroni and cheese: James Hemings, a chef enslaved by Thomas Jefferson, introduced macaroni and cheese to America. Jefferson had Hemings train in France, so that Jefferson—who had become known as somewhat of a food influencer of the time—could continue to impress dinner guests. Hemings’s French cooking skills led to the development of baked macaroni and cheese. He also introduced some traditional French dishes, like creme brûlée and snow eggs, to America.
• Fried chicken: Enslaved Black people built on European meat frying techniques to produce what is now a Southern staple. Enslaved African Americans added seasonings to fried meat to create what Americans recognize today as fried chicken. Because of Black people’s historical association with preparing fried chicken, the dish has been used in pop culture to stereotype and demean Black people.
• Barbecue: Often responsible for preparing meals, enslaved people in America built on Native American slow-cooking and pit-cooking techniques and heavily influenced the development of modern American barbecue, particularly Southern styles.
• Southern cookbook recipes: In the 1800s, long before Tik Tok and social media, many wealthy Southern white women published influential cookbooks to assert women’s expertise in domestic skills. These cookbooks were responsible for fusing African and European cooking and spreading the recipes around the South. But sometimes the books’ recipes were lifted from or inspired by the enslaved Black cooks and chefs who worked for the white authors. Several recipes published in “The Virginia House-Wife,” the first published Southern cookbook–written by Thomas Jefferson’s cousin Mary Randolph–are thought to have been taken from Black people whom Randolph and Jefferson enslaved. As a socialite and hostess, Randolph, like many wealthy Southern white women, oversaw domestic slave labor, including cooking and housekeeping, and likely appropriated some of the culinary techniques for the book. After Randolph’s book was published, one of its dishes, macaroni and cheese, began appearing in restaurants. As Randolph had never been to France, many historians believe that the recipe likely came from Jefferson’s enslaved chef James Hemings, who had trained in France and had originally introduced the dish to Americans.

CATERING: America’s first celebrity chefs, caterers, and restaurateurs included enslaved or formerly enslaved Black people who used their skills in the kitchen to build innovative food empires. This led to the birth of the catering industry.

African Americans in the 19th century became highly skilled in domestic labor, hospitality, and cooking because they were often limited to service jobs. So, many Black people, free and enslaved, held prominent positions in the hospitality and domestic fields. White society associated Black cooks with talented food preparation and service. Some enslavers even invested in Black cooking and food businesses. Thomas Jefferson notably traveled to France with James Hemings, an enslaved chef from Jefferson’s household. When Hemings returned he introduced French cooking to America and invented his own French-style dishes. Nat Fuller was also an enslaved chef, but like many “self-hired slaves” he lived separately from his enslaver William Gatewood, and earned wages cooking for other people (which he had to share with his enslaver). Still enslaved, Fuller opened his own restaurant, the Bachelor’s Retreat, with Gatewood as his primary investor.

In the North, many free Black people, some formerly enslaved, also made a living selling food. Thomas Downing, a former slave, was a notable Black abolitionist and restaurateur known as the Oyster King of New York. He used profits from his Manhattan oyster bar to help the abolitionist movement. Black women in Philadelphia sold pepper pot soup as street vendors. Meanwhile many Black men worked as freelance public waiters, serving food to white clients.

By the 1820s and 1830s, public waiters in Philadelphia started offering extra services, including consulting, full waitstaff, and food preparation, creating what became the professional catering industry. Robert Bogle, who was born enslaved and later bought his freedom, ran the most prominent catering business in Philadelphia and is credited as the first to professionalize the field. Eventually other Black people in Philadelphia started catering services or restaurants that offered catering services.

TIPPING: Tipping and forcing tipped workers to live off tips has roots in systemic racism. Wealthy American travelers brought tipping to the United States from Europe shortly after the Civil War. They started tipping unskilled laborers and service workers, who, due to Jim Crow-era racial barriers, were often Black. Tipping became so popular that some employers stopped paying their tipped employees wages and expected them to rely on tips instead. The Pullman Company sleeping car service, whose tipped train porters were almost exclusively Black men, was an early proponent of restricting wages and expecting employees to rely on tips.

The custom had racialized undertones from the start and attracted vocal critics on all sides of the issue. Some saw the practice as demeaning to Black workers. William Rufus Scott, author of “The Itching Palm” (1916), called it a new form of slavery. Others, like journalist John Speed, saw the act as degrading only to white workers. Speed said in 1902 that “negroes take tips, of course, one expects that of them – it is a token of their inferiority. But to give money to a white man was embarrassing to me.” Benjamin Tillman, a senator from South Carolina, was one of the people who saw the act of giving Black people extra money as unthinkable, prominently claiming he’d never tip Black person.

Many spoke out against tipping, calling it exploitative. Despite temporary tipping bans in several states in the early 1900s, tipping service workers eventually became standard practice in the U.S.–a big win for companies like the Pullman Company that used the system in place of paying Black workers fair wages. Congress didn’t even include tipped workers in the first minimum wage laws passed in the 1930s and 1940s. It wasn’t until the mid-1960s that Congress established a special, lower minimum wage for tipped workers. Today that wage is $2.13 per hour.

American tipped workers remain disproportionately people of color. Studies show Black and Hispanic workers are often tipped less than white people in service work. The tipped system is particularly volatile for Black service workers. During the erratic early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, Black tipped workers saw a significant decline in the way customers treated and tipped them.

FARMING: A well-documented contentious relationship between Black farmers and the USDA, dating back to the Jim Crow era, has contributed to a significant decline in Black farms. Many American farmers depend on government loans and subsidies to operate. But under USDA programs that are executed by locally run boards, many Black farmers in the South have been routinely left out of the loans, subsidies, and benefits.

Black farmers faced blatant discrimination for decades. Several federal agencies and commissions between the 1960s and the 1990s reported rampant discrimination in lending USDA loans. During the Civil Rights Movement it was not uncommon for USDA officials to outright withhold money from Black farmers. Even during the Farming Crisis of the 1980s white Southern farmers were given subsidies while Black people did not get the same amount of relief. This led to more foreclosures and loss of farmland.

In 1999 a class action lawsuit against the USDA (Pigford v. Glickman) was settled with the USDA admitting discrimination. Even then, the tight payout restrictions and allegations of fraud prevented some farmers from ever getting a settlement. This led to more Black families losing land and wealth.
Recent attempts to restore the relationship between Black farmers and the USDA have stalled. In 2021 the Joe Biden Administration initially promised debt assistance for “socially disadvantaged” farmers (read: farmers of color), but after white farmers threatened legal action, Congress replaced the program with fewer funds and new requirements that avoided the appearance of targeting racial groups. This prompted a group of Black farmers to file a class action lawsuit against the U.S. government over the reversals.

FOOD SECURITY: Discriminatory housing policies from the early to mid-20th century have concentrated Black people with limited income in urban regions where retailers are less willing to invest. This has made access to fresh food restrictive for some Black and Hispanic communities. Research shows that many historically redlined communities have limited access to affordable food, other than fast food, bodegas, and small convenience stores. This has led to a number of health disparities in historically redlined areas.

Source: USDA Economic Research Service

WALL STREET: The United States’s most important financial center was built with the help of systemic racism. The name “Wall Street” comes from the physical wall that enslaved Black people helped build for Dutch colonists in 17th-Century New York. Then, in 1711, New York City’s first official slave market launched at Wall Street, helping the district become a commercial hub. By 1730, New York City became the second-largest slave-owning city in the American colonies, with many of its enslaved people purchased or sold at the slave market near Wall Street. The Bank of New York (now the Bank of New York Mellon) was the first company traded on the New York Stock Exchange. It was also one of several financial institutions to use enslaved people as collateral for loans. If borrowers defaulted on loans, banks would take ownership of the enslaved.

BANKING ACCESS AND REVERSE-REDLINING: Black people are more likely to use payday loan services and pawn shops in the event of unexpected expenses, because they are disproportionately “unbanked.” Banks have historically avoided redlined areas, making it easier for alternative banking options, like payday loans and pawn shops with predatory lending practices, to target Black and underserved communities. This is known as “reverse-redlining.” Being disproportionately unbanked or underbanked means Black communities also have less savings and wealth compared to white communities.

WELFARE STIGMA: Welfare programs were once meant to help white mothers. Once Black people started using them, they suddenly became stigmatized. The earliest forms of public assistance, like Mother’s Pension programs in the early 1900s and New Deal era programs, actively shut out Black participants. As public aid programs opened up to more non-white families by the 1970s, the rhetoric surrounding welfare started to become racialized, along with calls for “personal responsibility.” During his 1976 presidential campaign Ronald Regan infamously referenced the “welfare queen,” a racialized trope based on an actual woman from Chicago who committed welfare fraud. It quickly became a stereotype for Black women using public assistance. This eventually led to a push in the 1980s and 1990s for “welfare reforms” that would make it harder for people, particularly people of color and single women, to receive public assistance. Today, even though a nearly equal number of Black and white people use the government’s current family assistance program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Black people using it are overrepresented. Meanwhile, the stigma surrounding using public assistance remains.

SCHOOL CURRICULA AND TEXTBOOKS: Many Americans still believe lies about the Civil War and the Confederacy. One Southern Poverty Law Center study found that only 8 percent of high school seniors surveyed in 2017 knew that slavery was the reason the South seceded from the Union. More than 50 percent of Americans believe the Confederate flag is a symbol of “Southern Pride” and not racism.

Ideas that slavery wasn’t horrific, that Confederates fought in the Civil War primarily over state rights, and that Confederate imagery is simply a matter of Southern pride, are all misleading narratives cooked up during “Lost Cause of the Confederacy” campaigns from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The United Daughters of the Confederacy led much of this movement throughout the early 1900s. Lost Cause campaigns aggressively attempted to downplay slavery’s role in the Civil War and re-brand the Confederacy as a symbol of Southern culture and not racism, essentially preserving its memory. One of the movement’s key tactics was re-writing textbooks and changing school curricula so that children could learn Lost Cause versions of the antebellum South, slavery, and the Civil War. Textbook commissions used Daughters of the Confederacy-approved guidelines for choosing books, while some school boards rejected books that didn’t teach Lost Cause narratives. During the Civil Rights Movement, several Southern politicians pushed harder for Lost Cause ideals to be taught in Southern public schools. Some Lost Cause textbooks remained in use until the 1980s, teaching generations of living Americans, some of whom still believe the myths today.  

Whitewashing American history to downplay racism’s role in it is still an issue. In 2015 McGraw-Hill, one of the largest textbook publishers in America, apologized and issued re-written digital copies of geography books after a parent discovered the books referred to enslaved people as “immigrants” and “workers.”  And a state-approved social studies curriculum in Texas had to be edited in 2018 to teach that slavery indeed played a “central role” in causing the Civil War. The previous version downplayed it as one of several contributing factors.

The political battle over how to teach America’s racially charged history has no end in sight. Measures to restrict lessons about racism and its cultural byproducts (often branded as “critical race theory”) have been introduced or adopted in most U.S. states.

STANDARDIZED TESTING/SATs: Eugenicists popularized standardized testing in America. The SAT, one of the most well-known standardized tests in the country, is the product of one of those eugenicists. In the early 1900s, some eugenicists, who believed in racial and genetic superiority, became fixated with IQ testing, widely promoting their use in measuring intelligence. During this time, the College Board, which used exams to place students in American colleges, commissioned a test that could rate high school students’ intelligence and predict their success in higher education. So the head of the commission, Carl Brigham, a eugenicist, designed the Scholastic Aptitude Test, also known as the SAT. Like many eugenicists, Brigham believed standardized testing could prove the intellectual superiority of certain classes of white people. This affected the way the tests were designed. People have since used IQ tests to advocate for segregation, sterilization, and white supremacy. Even so, many psychologists, since the 1960s, have warned of inherent biases baked into standardized tests.

Some people still try to use IQ and SAT test scores to make pseudoscientific claims about race and inherent intelligence, but these claims are largely debunked by the wider scientific community, because racial categories, as we know them, are unscientific social constructs. There has been a persistent racial gap between Black and white SAT scores, but most experts agree that racial gaps in SAT and IQ reflect racial disparities in the American education system and society at large, rather than genetic differences. 

SCHOOL SEGREGATION/ACHIEVEMENT GAP: Because almost half of school funding comes from local property taxes, racial disparities exist between Black and white school districts. Redlining and other forms of housing discrimination in the early to mid-1900s segregated cities and suburbs. When civil rights legislation in the 1960s outlawed segregated schools, many white families migrated to suburban school districts with better property values, leaving Black families stranded in lower-funded districts. There are still income and wealth disparities between redlined Black communities and white communities. Today, white school districts earn more local and state revenue per student, compared to Black districts. This is linked to achievement gaps between Black and white students. 

RACE: The concept of “race” was invented to promote slavery and colonization. Prior to the late 16th century, people rarely used the word “race” to describe perceived biological differences between human beings. American colonists started using “white” in the 1600s to establish themselves as a “race” different from the Indigenous and African people they enslaved. This distinction united white colonists in justifying the way they treated the “savage” or “slave” “races.” Whereas the early colonies had once been divided by class, like in England, by the latter half of the 1600s, race in America became the primary factor in determining social status. And whereas African and Indigenous slaves once openly commingled with European indentured servants, and were sometimes able to earn their freedom, by the 1660s the American colonies had committed to thinking of racial groups in terms of natural hierarchy. In 1662, Virginia declared that Black people could be born into slavery and kept in slavery indefinitely, simply due to their ancestry, marking one of the first times racial caste was codified in American government. By the late 1600s and into the Enlightenment era, Enlightenment thinkers came up with “official” classification systems for people, based on physical appearance and geography. Generations of people around the world would then embrace race as a biological reality, using it to justify eugenics, segregation, and even genocide.

In reality, race doesn’t exist, biologically. Most scientists agree that racial categories, as people know them today, are biologically inaccurate—the genetic diversity among humans defies racial categorization. Human beings are genetically more than 99 percent the same, proven by a landmark Stanford University study and the famous Human Genome Project. The physical differences people use to describe race actually come from social and environmental factors related to shared ancestry and geography, not genetic differences inherent to any kind of “race.”

GYNECOLOGY: The “father of gynecology,” James Marion Sims, experimented on enslaved Black women. The condition known as vesicovaginal fistula (VVF) threatened the reproductive health of many women in slavery. Sims therefore spent much of his medical career experimenting on them, trying to develop standardized treatments for VVF. This led to the formal practice of gynecology. During his experimentations he also used and improved on new gynecological tools. One of those tools was the first vaginal speculum, which led to the modern day speculum.

FIELD OF PSYCHOLOGY: Notions of racial hierarchy, heredity, social Darwinism, and eugenics greatly shaped early American psychology. Many early psychologists were eugenicists who used their positions in the field to help form public policy and opinion on racial differences, nationalism, segregation, institutionalization, and forced sterilization. Eugenicist G. Stanley Hall established the first psych lab in America, and helped establish the American Psychological Association, now the leading professional organization for psychologists. The first psychology professor, James McKeen Cattell, was also a eugenicist. In the 1910s, eugenicists, like William McDougall, Henry Goddard, Robert Yerkes and J. Harold Willliams, served in government agencies and academic leadership, pushing eugenical works that guided public policy on forced sterilization, incarceration, interracial marriage, education, and cognitive testing. Throughout the 1920s, many eugenicists and segregationists cited psychological studies claiming to show cognitive differences between races. One eugenicist and psychologist named Carl Brigham created the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) in the mid-1920s—eugenicists at that time had become fixated with using IQ and cognitive tests to prove cognitive differences between groups of people, including racial groups.

Finally, during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, the field began to diversify and psychologists used their research to promote desegregation. Still, some psychologists, such as Henry E. Garrett, Raymond Cattell, and Audrey Shuey, spoke out in opposition to desegregation. Even recently, a small number of psychologists and organizations have attempted to revive theories of racial differences in IQ, promoting what many call scientific racism.

BLACK MEDICAL MISTRUST: Shocking racist events throughout American healthcare history have changed the way Black communities view healthcare. These events included medical experiments on enslaved people, secret research studies on Black patients, the eugenics movement, and sterilization laws that targeted Black and Hispanic women. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study is perhaps the most infamous. From the 1930s into the 1970s, the U.S. government told hundreds of Black men in Tuskegee, Alabama that they were being treated for “bad blood” when they were actually being studied for the untreated effects of syphilis. The scandal led to the creation of the National Research Act and the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research to protect subjects in medical research.

Still, the experiment, and other forms of medical racism have contributed to generations of medical distrust in Black communities that continue today. Most recently, these fears were found to have played a partial role in COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in Black communities. A 2019 Pew Research Center study found that 54 percent of Black Americans in May 2020 said they would definitely or probably get a coronavirus vaccine if one were available, compared to 74 percent of white Americans. The same study found that 53 percent of Black Americans have a mostly positive view of medical research scientists, compared to 74 percent of white Americans. Black Americans also feel that doctors today don’t treat them fairly or respectfully. Seventy percent of Black Americans said they think professional misconduct by doctors is “at least a moderately big problem,” compared to only 43 percent of white Americans who felt the same.

GREEN SPACE AND TREES: In many ways, the mere presence of parks and trees is sometimes a testament to the power of systemic racism. The first national parks were conceived by eugenicists and white nationalists. Early conservationists and green space pioneers like John Muir, Madison Grant, and Gifford Pinchot, were eugenicists partially motivated by racism. They saw public parks as opportunities to promote nationalism, compete with European park space, and showcase white America. Muir even encouraged the removal of Indigenous people from land because he believed they blighted America’s landscape.

The planning for green spaces has displaced many Black and indigenous communities, due to eminent domain. The wealthy white New Yorkers who pushed for the construction of Central Park, for instance, had to see to it that Seneca Village, a Black settlement that had been at the site since the 1820s, be razed to make room for the now world-famous park. Similarly, in the Harris Neck area of Townsend, Georgia, the descendants of enslaved Black people who owned more than 1,000 acres of the land had to leave in 1942 to make way for a World War II air base. Instead of giving the land back to the descendants after the war, the U.S. government gave the land to the county. When the county mismanaged it, the federal government took it back and built the Harris Neck Wildlife Refuge, despite outcry from the descendants of the families who once lived there. There are many other examples.

During the early 20th century, racially motivated redlining practices in the real estate industry helped segregate American cities and isolated minority communities in under-developed areas. Green space became a selling point for buyers and investors. Real estate developers often used trees, parks, and shrubbery to make areas more appealing to white buyers. In some cases early developers for America’s burgeoning suburbs, such as Baltimore’s Roland Park, used trees to block the sight of nearby Black neighborhoods, or the nearby city itself. Areas that didn’t have many parks or trees were redlined, and overlooked for more green space. Instead, redlined areas attracted more industry, concrete-based construction, and apartments.

To this day, Black and Hispanic neighborhoods that were once redlined have fewer trees than white areas that weren’t redlined, and are hotter because of it. And parks in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods are on average half the size of the parks in white neighborhoods.

ENVIRONMENTAL DISPARITIES AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: Black Americans are more likely to live near hazardous sites and suffer environment-related health issues. That’s because racist mid-century housing policies, like redlining, helped segregate urban Black and Hispanic communities from white ones, and throughout the 20th century many of these communities became targets for industrial projects and toxic dumping grounds. 

Redlined communities are more likely to have dangerous pollution from the roads and highways that were intentionally built near poor Black and Hispanic neighborhoods during the construction of America’s Interstate system. These areas also have fewer trees and green spaces. They are hotter in the summer, and less energy efficient in the winter, due to neglect and underinvestment in the buildings, public spaces, and infrastructure. Ultimately, people in these areas now have a shorter life expectancy on average. All this has become known as the effects of “environmental racism.”
The “environmental justice movement” is a response to these issues. Many point to Warren, North Carolina in 1982 as the start of the movement. Black activists in Warren protested a project that would have brought toxic waste to a landfill in their community. After that, several studies found that landfills with toxic waste were more likely to be located in minority and poor communities. This prompted the U.S. government to incorporate environmental justice initiatives into the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal programs. Though, under the second Donald Trump Administration, these organizations have been targeted and written off as unfair programs that currently face defunding or eradication.

HEALTH DISPARITIES: Structural racism, including segregation, and housing discrimination, is associated with health disparities between Black and white communities, studies show. Housing professionals and banks discriminated against minority neighborhoods in the early 20th century in what is now referred to as redlining. Years later, many formerly redlined communities still experience health problems at disproportionate rates. The National Community Reinvestment Coalition found that redlined neighborhoods face higher rates of hypertension, obesity, asthma, and diabetes than non-redlined areas.

PARAMEDICS AND EMTs: America’s first paramedics were African Americans who felt their communities could no longer rely on police for medical emergencies. In the 1960s, Pittsburgh’s Hill District, like many predominantly Black neighborhoods in America, struggled with racial tensions between residents and police. Prior to the 1960s, police officers were usually the first responders in medical emergencies. They would transport people to hospitals in the same wagons they used to transport people to jail or bodies to the morgue. Police had limited first aid skills and Black residents often complained of neglect and mistreatment. Many people died for not receiving proper care from police before arriving at hospitals. This led to a nationwide call to improve emergency medical services.

In 1967, Phil Hallen, a white activist who was also the president of a Pittsburgh medical fund, teamed up with CPR and resuscitation pioneer Dr. Peter Safar to create the Freedom House Ambulance Service. They recruited Black residents from the Hill District community and trained them in quick-response emergency care. In its first year Freedom House gained a reputation for successfully saving lives, and eventually the city contracted it to serve some of Pittsburgh’s Black communities. Freedom House emergency medical technicians (EMTs) would aid and coach police at emergency sites in Hill District. Police started calling for Freedom House EMTs from outside the service’s designated boundaries because they were so skilled at providing on-the-street medical treatment. But after white residents in Pittsburgh questioned why they weren’t getting the same emergency services as the predominantly Black areas that Freedom House served, the city stopped contracting Freedom House and created its own predominantly white EMS program. The new city-run program systematically shut out many of the original Black Freedom House paramedics. 

Freedom House’s influence lived on, however. Even though other organizations around the country had started developing their own EMS programs in the late 1960s, many looked to Freedom House, the first, as a model, especially for its use of on-the-street intubation and resuscitation (thanks to Dr. Safar’s involvement). One of Freedom House’s medical directors, Nancy Caroline, used the EMS service as the model for the first nationally recognized paramedics training program. The program is still used to train paramedics today. 

THE HUMAN BRAIN: Systemic racism can alter the way people think and behave. It can also harm the brain itself. Studies show that white people who score high for racial prejudice sometimes react physiologically to Black people, seeing them as a threat. This triggers the fight-or-flight response and increases the stress hormone cortisol, which can wear down muscles and damage the immune system over time. People who experience racism can also have permanent effects on their mental and neurological health. The Weathering Hypothesis states that racial inequalities, like residential segregation and interpersonal discrimination, are stressors that can lead to faster aging brains and poorer health for people who experience them. One 2022 study found that experiences with racial discrimination might affect the brain’s microstructure. Another study found that Black women who reported experiencing racism had three times the risk of reporting poor cognitive function than those who didn’t.
At the same time, racist myths can inject bias into people’s thought patterns, altering the way people see and react to certain types of people. A 2019 study found that white people currently living in counties and states that had higher proportions of enslaved people before the Civil War showed more pro-white bias. Black people living in these areas showed less pro-white bias. The study concluded that the results “support an interpretation of implicit bias as the cognitive residue of past and present structural inequalities.”