Historical Timeline and Definitions

Understanding Structural Racism

Structural racism

• a deep-rooted system in which history, ideology, public policies, institutional practices, and culture interact to maintain a racial hierarchy that creates advantages (privileges) associated with whiteness, and disadvantages associated with color that endure and adapt over time.

Structural Racism

• the preferential treatment, privilege, and power that white people experience at the expense of racially oppressed people.

Structural Racism

• is diffused and infused throughout our entire social fabric, including our history, culture, politics, and economics.

• the most profound and pervasive form of racism; all other forms of racism (e.g. institutional, interpersonal, internalized, etc.) emerge from structural racism.

Historical timeline

• a visual representation of the history and events related to structural racism–from the past to the present.

• provides historical context for personal experiences.

• enables you to tell your own story – on an individual, community, state, national, or international level.

Everyone has an opportunity to contribute to the timeline

Invite each person to add his/her own experiences

Pictures contribute to the reality of the past and present

1500’s

• Encounters between Spanish, French, and English settlers and Native Americans led to conflict.

1600’s

• English colonists kept indentured servants (both Europeans and Africans). Some servants eventually earned their freedom.

1670’s

• Bacon’s Rebellion: an insurrection involving white and black servants against wealthy Virginia planters. Following the rebellion, Africans were condemned to a life of permanent slavery in the colonies.

• Thomas Jefferson, a Virginia slave owner and former President, was influential in promoting the idea that Whites are superior to Africans.

1772

• John Newton wrote the words to the hymn, “Amazing Grace,” in response to the horrors he witnessed working on an English slave ship.

19th Century

1852

• Harriet Beecher Stowe’s widely read novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, painted a more realistic portrait of slavery and tried to humanize slaves.

• African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Chinese Americans were used as slaves, for economic and political gain.

• African slavery provided free labor and increased the political clout of slaveholding states in the South.

• Belittling Native American cultures and defining Native people as “savages” made it easier to seize Native American land.

• Between 1889 and the early 1920s, there were roughly 50 to 100 lynchings a year in the U.S. While Blacks were mostly the victims, Italian Americans, Asian Americans, and Jews were also lynched.

20th Century

• In 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was formed to abolish segregation and discrimination in housing, education, employment, voting, and transportation and to secure constitutional rights for African Americans.

1963

• Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech.

1964

• Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life in prison in South Africa.

• The Civil Rights Act was passed in the U.S.