Judicial aspects of race in the United States
Legislation seeking to direct relations between racial or ethnic groups in the United States has had several historical phases, developing from the European colonization of the Americas, the triangular slave trade, and the American Indian Wars.
The 1776 Declaration of Independence included the statement that "all men are created equal", which has ultimately inspired actions and legislation against slavery and racial discrimination.
Racial legislation has been intertwined with immigration laws, which sometimes included specific provisions against particular nationalities or ethnicities, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1923 United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind case in the US Supreme Court.
Race remains an active area of contention with police killings disproportionate to the racial distribution of the US population; whites are under-represented and blacks are over-represented.
[3] The idea that a single drop of African or Indian blood qualified someone as officially black or Native American was a generally obeyed legal principle although the so-called one-drop rule was never codified federally.
After the end of the Reconstruction era, southern whites reasserted political and social supremacy with the violence and the discrimination that caused the nadir of American race relations.
After regaining power in the state legislatures in the 1870s, white Democrats passed legislation to impose electoral requirements that effectively disfranchised black voters.
With political control in what was effectively a one-party system, the South passed Jim Crow laws and instituted racial segregation in public facilities.
In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the defendants in the Plessy v. Ferguson case, which established the "separate but equal" interpretation for the provision of services.
Without the vote, however, black residents in the South found their segregated facilities consistently underfunded and were without recourse in the legal system, as only voters could sit on juries or hold office.
Urban planning historians theorize that the maps were later used for years by public and private entities to deny loans to people in black communities.
During the first major waves of immigration to the United States, ethnicities now generally considered white were not thought of as such, including Southern and Eastern Europeans.
Although the law that banned wood laundries did not specify a certain race, it resulted in specifically radicalized impacts, and Yick Wo's lawyers discovered that the Chinese were singled out within the recorded minutes of the meeting.
He and others contend that Italians were in fact considered white and were able to reap the immediate benefits that status conferred, such as a right to citizenship, although they were somewhat discriminated against for their nationality.
The National Origins Formula was established in 1929 explicitly to keep the status quo's distribution of ethnicity by allocating quotas in proportion to the actual population.
[18] Discriminatory laws were mostly enacted according to national origins, but also involved racial typologies developed by scientific racism theorists.
[13] These racial naturalization requirements necessitated the more concrete ideation of the category of “Asian” as distinct from white so immigrants could be rejected on the basis of race instead of national origin.
This need was quickly supplied by a plethora of judicial rulings and pieces of legislation focused primarily on classifications based contradictorily on phenotypic features, scientific objectivism, and "common knowledge", depending on the case.
[13] Japanese-born Takao Ozawa applied for citizenship after living in the United States for 20 years, but his application was denied because he was not considered white.
[13] Justice George Sutherland delivered the opinion on the unanimous ruling, stating that the "white" race must be interpreted "in accordance with the understanding of the common man from whose vocabulary they were taken".
President Franklin D. Roosevelt enacted discriminatory practices with Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, which paved the way for Japanese American internment.
In 1983, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) concluded that the incarceration of Japanese Americans had not been justified by military necessity.
Rather, the report determined that the decision to detain Japanese Americans had been based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership."
The United Nations Participation Act of 1945, passed after the victory of the Allies, included provisions that immigration policy should be conducted in a fair manner and nondiscriminatory fashion.
In 1954 Hernandez v. Texas, a federal court ruled that Mexican Americans and all other ethnic or "racial groups" in the United States had equal protection under the 14th Amendment.
"[24] Legislation enacting racial segregation was finally overturned in the 1950s and the 1960s, after the nation had been morally challenged and educated by activists of the civil rights movement.
In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education had the US Supreme Court rule that "separate but equal" was inherently discriminatory, and the integration of public schools was ordered.
An executive order of 1961, by President John F. Kennedy, created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to oversee workplace affirmative action.
In an effort to prevent African American populations from being divided to dilute their voting strength and representation, federal courts oversaw certain redistricting decisions in the South for decades to overturn the injustice of the previous century's disfranchisement.
Determining that it was created to place African Americans in one district, which would have enabled them to elect a representative, the Court ruled that it constituted illegal racial gerrymander.
