Encyclopedia of Sociology

AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDIES

property—a position held by no other group in the
four centuries of American history. This bloody
article-of-property system created great wealth for
whites and was soon rationalized in the aforemen-
tioned racist ideology. Ever since, whites have
remained in firm control of all major U.S. institu-
tions; they have perpetuated a racist system that is
still imbedded in all these institutions.

White-on-black oppression is a comprehen-
sive system originally designed for the exploitation
of African Americans, one that for centuries has
shaped the lives of every American, regardless of
background, national origin, or time of entry. This
long-standing white-racist framework has been ex-
tended and tailored for each new non-European
group brought into the nation. Immigrants from
places other than Europe, such as Chinese and
Japanese immigrants from the mid-1800s to the
1950s and Mexican immigrants after 1900, were
often oppressed for white gain and constructed as
racialized inferiors without citizenship rights (Takaki
1990). Other types of white racism have been
important in U.S. history, but white-on-black ra-
cism is the most central case. While it has changed
in some ways as time has passed, this systemic
racism has stayed roughly constant in its funda-
mentals. U.S. society is not a multiplicity of discon-
nected racisms, but has a central white-racist core
that was initially developed by whites as they drove
Native Americans off their lands and intensely
exploited enslaved African Americans. Scholar-
ship (Takaki 1990; Feagin 2000) has shown how
this framework was gradually extended and adapt-
ed for the oppression of all other non-Europe-
an groups.

POSSIBILITIES FOR CHANGE

Some African-American scholars have expressed
great pessimism about the possibility of significant
racial change in the United States. The constitu-
tional scholar Derrick Bell (1992) argues that ra-
cism is so fundamental that white Americans will
never entertain giving up privileges and thus that
black Americans will never gain equality.

There is a long history of African Americans
and other people of color resisting racism. The
development of resistance movements in the 1950s
and 1960s was rooted in activism in local organiza-
tions, including churches, going back for centuries

(Morris 1984). Given these deep and persisting

roots, many other analysts, black and nonblack,

remain optimistic about the possibility of civil

rights action for social change. Thus, legal scholar

Lani Guinier (1994) has spelled out new ideas for

significantly increasing the electoral and political

power of black Americans. While the Voting Rights

Act (1965) increased the number of black voters

and elected officials, it did not give most of these

officials an adequate or substantial influence on

political decisions in their communities. Guinier

suggests new strategies to increase black influ-

ence, including requiring supermajorities (a re-

quired number of votes from black officials who

are in the minority) on key political bodies when

there are attempts to pass major legislation.

Some scholars and activists are now pressing

for a two-pronged strategy that accents both a

continuing civil rights struggle outside black com-

munities and an internal effort to build up self-

help projects within those communities. A leading

scholar of civil rights, Roy Brooks (1996), has

documented the failures and successes of the tra-

ditional desegregation strategy. Though still sup-

portive of integration efforts, Brooks has argued

that blacks must consider separatist, internally

generated, community development strategies for

their long-term economic, physical, and psycho-

logical success. Working in the tradition of W. E.

B. Du Bois and Malcolm X, numerous African-

American scholars and community leaders have

reiterated the import of traditional African and

African-American values for the liberation of their

communities from continuing discrimination and

oppression by white Americans.

REFERENCES

Allen, Theodore W. 1994 The Invention of the White Race:

Racial Oppression and Social Control. London: Verso.

America, Richard F. (ed.) 1990 The Wealth of Races: The

Present Value of Benefits from Past Injustices. New York:

Greenwood Press.

Ani, Marimba 1994 Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique

of European Cultural Thought and Behavior. Trenton,

N.J.: Africa World Press.

Asante, Molefi Kete 1988 Afrocentricity. Trenton, N.J.:

Africa World Press.

Bell, Derrick 1992 Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The

Permanence of Racism. New York: Basic Books.