A young man drinks from a segregated water fountain—an everyday example of racial segregation in the American South prior to civil rights legislation of the 1960s.
In 1846 former slave, social reformer, and abolitionist Frederick Douglass left the United States for the first time. During a speaking tour in Great Britain, he was amazed to discover how little prejudice he encountered. “There is no distinction on account of color,” he wrote to a friend back in the United States. “The white man gains nothing by being white, and the black man loses nothing by being black.” When he went to public gardens, museums, and theaters, he noticed that white people “looked as though they thought I had as much right [to be] there as themselves.”
Frederick Douglass (ca. 1818–1895) was born into slavery in Maryland, escaped to the North as a young man, and became an outspoken opponent of slavery and advocate of equality. As an author and public speaker, he called attention to the entrenched discrimination he and other people of color faced in the United States.
This was a new experience for Douglass. In the United States, he was accustomed to being “carefully excluded” because of his race. Born into slavery—from which he eventually escaped—he had spent his entire life struggling against discrimination. His time in Great Britain reinforced what he already knew: race relations in the United States are tied to the country’s distinct, complex history of slavery and racially discriminatory laws. More than 120 years after Douglass’s death, twenty-first-century Americans still grapple with racial tensions, misunderstandings, and injustices. Racial profiling in the modern United States stems from these issues, which stretch back centuries.
Diversity and Conflict
The United States is an ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse nation, and that diversity dates back to the country’s origins. North America’s first inhabitants were numerous distinct indigenous peoples with their own cultures, faiths, and governing systems. By the early seventeenth century, large numbers of European adventurers and settlers—most of whom were white Christians—had begun arriving on the continent. European colonizers sought to push the original inhabitants off the land and to impose their own customs on indigenous populations, often through violence. In the centuries that followed, American Indians suffered genocidal losses through colonial and US military conquest and through government policies of eradication, including forced relocation to reservations.
After European settlers arrived in North America, slave traders began bringing West African captives to the continent. Along with enslaved indigenous Americans, these enslaved Africans were legally the property of their white masters. Slavery became entrenched in the American South, where the economy depended on plantations that produced cotton, tobacco, and rice for sale domestically and overseas. To maintain the large-scale production of these crops, plantation owners relied on the free labor of enslaved workers. Besides tending crops, slaves ran white colonists’ households, where they cooked, cleaned, sewed, raised children, and cared for all the needs of their masters’ families. Slave owners often forced captives to work under brutal conditions, with no personal privacy or protection from violence. White masters routinely raped enslaved women and girls. Owners had the legal right to abuse and even kill slaves.
Enslaved people had no legal rights. Colonial laws generally barred slaves from owning property, legally marrying, testifying in court, voting, and learning to read. At slave auctions, family members could be sold, separating parents from children and husbands from wives. For the vast majority of enslaved people, escape was impossible. Colonial police patrols (also known as slave patrols) were formed specifically to monitor slaves’ movements, pursuing and capturing those who attempted to run away. White people who aided in the capture of runaway slaves received monetary rewards—a further economic incentive to support the institution of slavery. Recaptured fugitives were usually returned to their owners and subjected to brutal punishments.
Before states in the South had organized police forces, slave patrols tracked the movements and activities of people of color. Patrollers and professional slave catchers captured runaway slaves and returned them to their owners. Slave catchers often pursued fugitives into the North, where they also kidnapped free black people and sold them into slavery. This 1839 illustration from The Anti-Slavery Almanac shows white northerners kidnapping a free black man, likely with the intention of handing him over to slave catchers from the South.
During this time, stereotypes about people of African descent became institutionalized among white colonists. Through propaganda that ranged from newspaper articles to religious sermons, supporters of slavery spread false ideas that black people were less intelligent, less hardworking, and more prone to violence than white people. In particular, many colonists portrayed black men as physically threatening to white men and sexually threatening to white women. These stereotypes—used to justify slavery—would persist for centuries, despite having no basis in fact.
After the United States won independence from Great Britain in the Revolutionary War (1775–1783), a growing number of northern states abolished slavery—largely because their economies were based on manufacturing, not agriculture, and depended on paid (largely immigrant) labor instead of unpaid slave labor. The framers of the US Constitution—ratified in 1788—were keenly aware of racial tensions and oppression within the new United States. Yet they chose not to outlaw slavery or extend the rights of citizenship to nonwhite Americans, believing leaders could address these issues later.
Throughout the young nation, enslaved peoples and their allies fought for the end of slavery. Many slaves sought safety and freedom in the northern United States and in Canada, where slavery had been abolished. By the mid-nineteenth century, private citizens had established a network of safe houses and secret routes to the North, known as the Underground Railroad. Aided by black, white, and American Indian opponents of slavery, hundreds of runaway slaves used these routes to reach freedom. But law enforcement officials and professional slave catchers had the legal right to capture runaways and return them to slavery—or kill them. The few fugitives who did reach the North struggled against pervasive prejudice there and faced limited opportunities for employment, housing, and education.
Disagreements about whether slavery should remain legal fueled deepening tensions among the nation’s states. These tensions eventually sparked the American Civil War (1861–1865). Eleven slaveholding states in the South chose to break away from the United States (the Union) to form a new nation, the Confederate States of America, where slavery would remain legal. At the war’s outset, the primary goal of US president Abraham Lincoln was to preserve a unified nation. He eventually became convinced that the issues dividing the states would never be resolved while slavery continued. Shortly after the war ended, with a Union victory, slavery was formally outlawed throughout the United States with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution in December 1865.
Legacies of Violence
After the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the US government pursued a policy known as Reconstruction, which aimed to bring the southern states back into the Union and to promote the legal rights of black people in the South. Former Confederate states were required to accept the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which the US Congress ratified in 1868. This amendment officially granted citizenship to black Americans, giving black men the right to vote and entitling all black people to “equal protection of the laws.” Many white southerners resisted these changes.
The right of black men to vote became a primary target of opposition. The Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified in 1870, declared that states could not legally ban African American men from voting. However, lawmakers in the South found ways to work around this regulation. One strategy was to establish literacy tests as a requirement for voter registration. Because learning to read had been illegal for enslaved Americans, many black southerners were illiterate. To target black men who could read, state legislatures passed laws that allowed voting registration officials to tailor literacy tests. This flexibility meant that an official could ask a white voter to read and answer a single, simple question, virtually guaranteeing that he would pass, while presenting a long series of complex questions to a black voter and allowing him to register only if he got every answer right. Another tactic was instituting poll taxes—voter registration fees. Many African Americans (as well as some white citizens) in the South could not afford these fees.
Exclusion of African Americans extended beyond the ballot box into daily life. Millions of newly freed African Americans struggled to find work and to buy property. In the rural South, black families rented small plots of land and farming equipment from white landowners in return for a large portion of their yearly crop. This system, called sharecropping, was designed to keep laborers in constant debt to their landlords, locking many black Americans into a system of unpaid work and often insurmountable poverty.
Sharecropping, a system in which poor black and white families rented small plots of farmland from wealthy white owners, locked many southern black families in a cycle of debt and poverty for generations. This family was photographed working in a Georgia cotton field in 1941.
Beginning in the 1870s, many southern states passed laws mandating segregation—the separation of black and white Americans in public spaces. Known as Jim Crow laws, these policies were especially common in former slaveholding states. Depending on the individual state, white people and black people were legally required to use separate movie theaters, restaurants, hospitals, restrooms, water fountains, prisons, train cars, buses, hotels, schools, libraries, and cemeteries. Supporters of segregation often described segregated facilities as “separate but equal.” Opponents argued that in practice, black institutions and facilities received less funding and had less access to resources than white institutions—disadvantages that fueled social and economic inequalities. Moreover, segregation sent the message that people of color were unworthy of sharing spaces with white people. Charles Hamilton Houston, a Washington, DC, lawyer who worked to end segregation during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, insisted, “There is no such thing as separate but equal. Segregation itself imports [signifies] inequality.”
Law enforcement institutions also actively participated in the marginalization of black Americans. Legislators throughout the South passed laws designed to heavily penalize black citizens for minor crimes. In fact, many of these laws invented punishable crimes, such as changing jobs without a previous employer’s permission or being unable to produce proof of employment when stopped by a law enforcement officer. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Douglas Blackmon, such laws were “designed to criminalize black life—to make it essentially impossible for any African American man . . . to not be in violation of some law at almost all times.” Although the laws did not explicitly apply only to African Americans, “overwhelmingly, they were only ever enforced against African Americans.”
Between the 1860s and the 1940s, thousands of black people were arrested under these laws and sentenced to months or years of hard labor in a practice called convict leasing. Local businesses, as well as large companies based in both the South and the North, paid law enforcement agencies for the labor of black convicts, creating a widespread, profitable system of labor that echoed the institution of slavery. For black prisoners caught in the physically grueling, psychologically devastating, and often deadly work of convict leasing, civic engagement was impossible. For the rest of the black population, the risk of arrest due to the color of their skin hung over them as they walked to work, as they made long treks to the nearest schools, and as they approached polling places on election days.
The justice system was not the only institution that posed deadly threats to black Americans. In the South and elsewhere, private citizens also targeted black Americans. For example, white Americans opposed to racial equality formed unofficial groups, sometimes called vigilance committees, to promote the protection of white citizens. In reality, these groups aimed to intimidate black Americans so they would not exercise their legal rights. The most infamous and formalized of these groups was the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), which was originally formed in 1865 by former Confederate soldiers who opposed Reconstruction. KKK members sabotaged, harassed, and killed African Americans, as well as some white citizens who supported the rights of black Americans. The KKK and other civilian groups used multiple tactics against their targets, including burning African American churches and schools.
Members of the Ku Klux Klan regularly burned crosses on the property of people they targeted for intimidation. Well beyond the nineteenth century, black citizens, as well as some white citizens who opposed the KKK, endured open threats of violence from the KKK and other white-supremacist vigilantes.
The most extreme form of civilian violence against black Americans was lynching. This form of mob punishment occurred outside the legal process. Perpetrators typically murdered victims by hanging or shooting, often after inflicting physical abuse and torture. Private citizens spearheaded lynchings in response to alleged crimes, especially alleged sexual transgressions by black men and boys against white women and girls. Mob participants, many of whom were leading members of society, rarely faced social or legal repercussions for these killings. Lynching peaked in the 1880s and early 1890s, especially—but not exclusively—in southern US states. “Our country’s national crime is lynching,” Ida B. Wells, a black journalist and antilynching activist, wrote in 1900. “It represents the cool, calculating deliberation of intelligent people who openly avow that there is an ‘unwritten law’ that justifies them in putting human beings to death without complaint under oath, without trial by jury, without opportunity to make defense, and without right of appeal.”
The exact number of lynching victims may never be known. A 2015 study by the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal advocacy organization, reported that nearly four thousand African Americans were lynched in just twelve southern states between 1877 and 1950. The report’s authors wrote, “Lynchings were violent and public acts of torture that traumatized black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials. These lynchings were terrorism.”
With a long history of terrorizing black Americans, especially in the South, law enforcement agencies and the legal system largely gave their unspoken approval to the brutality of lynching. Some law enforcement officers and private citizens did intervene to prevent individual lynchings, but law enforcement agencies took no action to address the practice at large. This type of institutional inaction is another form of racial profiling. In fact, the ACLU includes “discriminatory omissions on the part of law enforcement” in its definition of racial profiling.
Black Americans were not the only targets of racial bias and profiling after the Civil War. Throughout the nineteenth century, large numbers of immigrants came to the United States from all over the world, fleeing poverty, war, religious persecution, and other hardships. They moved to the United States seeking better lives and greater opportunities for themselves and their families. When they arrived, they faced deep-seated prejudice against foreigners. New immigrants spoke many different languages and followed religions, dress styles, and customs that were unfamiliar to mainstream Americans. And many simply looked different from their white European American neighbors. These differences often led to tension with fellow Americans, especially with poor white Americans who feared losing their low-paying jobs to new immigrants willing to work for even lower wages. At various times, immigrants from European countries—such as Ireland, Poland, and Sweden—faced suspicion and discrimination.
The most extreme and sustained prejudice generally fell on non-European immigrants. For example, in the early to mid nineteenth century, many Chinese immigrants arrived in the United States. Some of them helped build the first transcontinental railroad, which linked the eastern United States with the West and was completed in 1869. Many white Americans regarded the newcomers with hostility, and Chinese immigrants experienced widespread discrimination that sometimes erupted in violence. In October 1871, for example, hundreds of white Americans entered Chinatown in Los Angeles and attacked residents, killing at least eighteen immigrants. Eventually, anti-Chinese sentiment led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a federal law that ended immigration from China for the next several decades.
Still seeking a steady supply of cheap labor, US industries turned to Japanese immigrants, whose arrival provoked the same prejudices and suspicions as their Chinese predecessors. In San Francisco, California, for instance, a 1906 school board decision segregated the city’s public schools, requiring white children and children of Asian descent to attend separate schools. By 1908 the US government had severely limited the number of Japanese workers who could enter the country, and US employers began relying on Mexican workers to fill their need for cheap labor.
Mexican immigrants fled political and economic instability in their native country and took low-paying jobs in the US agricultural, mining, construction, and transportation industries, sparking resentment from white workers who held the same jobs. That resentment grew during the Great Depression (1929–1942), a serious, global economic downturn. In the United States, millions of people lost their jobs and homes. In response, US leaders decided to deport some Mexican workers so that their jobs would be available for white citizens. During the 1930s, the US government forced hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants and Mexican American citizens to leave the country. Yet when the United States entered World War II (1939–1945) and thousands of white American men enlisted in the armed forces, US employers sought Mexican workers to fill the new labor shortage.
A 1942 agreement between the US and Mexican governments allowed Mexican citizens to enter the United States and contract with US companies as guest workers. After the war, this labor program continued, and US industries became increasingly dependent on Mexican manual labor. Employers hired both authorized workers who came through the labor program and Mexicans who entered the United States unofficially. As a result, illegal immigration to the United States from Mexico spiked during the 1950s and 1960s. Although the US government officially ended the labor program in 1964, American industries’ reliance on cheap Mexican labor continued. So did widespread stereotyping of Mexicans and others of Latin American descent.
Well into the twentieth century, white Americans—from legislators to journalists to scholars—continued to portray African Americans as more violent, less hardworking, and less intelligent than white people. To mask the devastating effects of racist policies, white supremacists claimed African Americans were naturally incapable of earning a living or being financially responsible. These myths, in turn, helped launch a new wave of racially biased economic policies and a particular kind of racial profiling known as redlining.
To help the American economy recover from the economic blows of the Great Depression, the US government made it easier for Americans to afford to buy homes. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), established by the federal government in 1933, granted home loans, or mortgages, that were insured by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), a government agency created in 1934. Between the mid-1930s and the early 1960s, the US government backed $120 billion of home loans, 98 percent of which went to white borrowers. In fact, the official policy of HOLC and the FHA identified people of color, regardless of their social class, as financial risks who should not receive government loans.
The two agencies created color-coded city maps that categorized neighborhoods by their perceived financial risk level. Areas occupied by people of color, specifically black and Latino Americans, were marked in red. Known as redlining, this practice of denying loans to people of color spread beyond the federal government to private mortgage companies throughout the country. As journalist Jamelle Bouie writes, “These institutions, private and public, didn’t cause racism in housing markets, but they gave it official sanction [approval], which—over time—influenced how individuals understood the value of their homes and neighborhoods. A white neighborhood was a good one; a black neighborhood, a bad one.”
This map shows how government workers coded the city of Oakland, California, in 1937. The federal government and private mortgage companies avoided granting loans to residents of “red” neighborhoods populated by people of color. “Orange” neighborhoods were considered less undesirable but still at risk of “infiltration” by people of color. “Blue” and especially “green” areas were seen as good investments for lenders.
The racial bias in the mortgage market led to a type of unofficial yet institutionalized segregation across the United States. Many white families moved into relatively affluent, safe suburbs, especially as the US economy rebounded following World War II. Most families of color, meanwhile, lived in inner cities, where predatory landlords rented out poorly maintained homes at inflated prices.
A home is a valuable asset that increases the owner’s net worth (financial holdings), since the owner can theoretically sell it one day for a profit. White home buyers were dramatically increasing their net worth with purchases of brand-new suburban homes. Yet the vast majority of people of color were forced to rent low-grade inner-city housing. Renting does not increase the net worth of the family who is paying the rent, only that of the property’s owner. The FHA’s portrayal of “red” neighborhoods as undesirable places to live became a self-fulfilling prophecy. With neither government agencies nor private companies willing to invest in “red” neighborhoods, these areas suffered from a lack of infrastructure (facilities and resources). This contributed to widespread poverty—and to the high crime rates that stem from poverty. Police forces tended to target these areas far more heavily than largely white suburban communities, reinforcing white Americans’ association of people of color with crime and violence.
Building a Movement
In the 1950s, black activists in the United States began drawing national attention with coordinated efforts to promote equal rights for African Americans. The civil rights movement, as this wave of activism came to be called, waged its struggle on two fronts: first, advocating for laws against institutionalized racial bias and, second, working to put those laws into practice in communities where discrimination remained rampant.
In May 1954, a major US Supreme Court case marked an early victory for the civil rights movement and an important step toward ending segregation. In Brown v. Board of Education, the court ruled unanimously that state laws enforcing the segregation of black students and white students in separate public schools were unconstitutional. In practice, desegregation of public schools in the South did not begin until 1960. Black citizens who spearheaded the integration of schools throughout the nation faced continuing opposition. Many white citizens withdrew their children from integrated schools and harassed black students. Opponents of integration routinely invoked ugly stereotypes about black people’s inferior intelligence and even inferior hygiene as justification for racial segregation.
During the 1950s and 1960s, civil rights activists also worked to desegregate public transportation, lunch counters and restaurants, housing, and numerous other public places and private businesses. The response from white citizens—as well as local, state, and national institutions—was often hostile. Police arrested civil rights activists for carrying out peaceful demonstrations. On several occasions, police officers attacked demonstrators with tear gas, clubs, and vicious police dogs. Segregationists bombed black churches, businesses, and homes—acts of terrorism that law enforcement rarely investigated. In Birmingham, Alabama, for instance, more than fifty unsolved bombings ravaged black neighborhoods between 1947 and 1965. After one such attack, a 1963 church bombing that killed four African American girls, white Birmingham lawyer Charles Morgan Jr. accused the police force of failing black citizens: “There are no Negro policemen; there are no Negro sheriff’s deputies. . . . Do not misunderstand me. It is not that I think that white policemen had anything whatsoever to do with the killing of these children or previous bombings. It’s just that Negroes who see an all-white police force must think in terms of its failure to prevent or solve the bombing and think perhaps Negroes would have worked a little harder.”
At the federal level too, the movement had enemies in the highest ranks of law enforcement. J. Edgar Hoover, who served as the director of the FBI from 1924 to 1972, viewed the civil rights movement as a threat to national security. Hoover placed leading civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. under surveillance and instructed agents not to intervene when they witnessed violence against civil rights activists.
In August 1963, hundreds of thousands of civil rights advocates gathered for the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, DC. Martin Luther King Jr. (front, far left) was among the prominent civil rights leaders who organized and spoke at the march.
Some of the civil rights movement’s most vocal opponents were political leaders, especially in southern states. On January 14, 1963, George Wallace—the newly elected governor of Alabama—inspired thunderous applause from his audience when he addressed the issue in his inaugural speech: “I say, segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.”
The pressure for change and racial justice was enormous. Despite widespread opposition to civil rights legislation, the US Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which President Lyndon Johnson signed into law in July 1964. This landmark law prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, also signed into law by President Johnson, prohibited racially discriminatory barriers to voting such as literacy tests and poll taxes. The US Supreme Court legalized interracial marriage across the nation in 1967, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 outlawed redlining. (Nonetheless, the mortgage industry has unofficially continued to implement similar practices.)
Dissent and Disruption
Despite its significant victories, the civil rights movement encountered powerful resistance and suffered numerous setbacks. Prominent black activists and white allies of the movement were assassinated. These included President John F. Kennedy in 1963, activist Malcolm X in 1965, activist Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, and New York senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Efforts to desegregate suburban neighborhoods in the North sparked riots, fire bombings, and other acts of violence by white residents. In general, communities and individuals of color received little support from government or law enforcement bodies when they tried to exercise their expanded legal rights.
Long-simmering discontent and animosity over racial inequality sometimes boiled over into violent unrest. For example, in 1965, riots took place in Watts, a mostly black neighborhood of south central Los Angeles, after a white California Highway Patrol officer pulled over a black motorist on suspicion of drunk driving. A crowd soon gathered, and an altercation broke out. In the ensuing six days of riots, thirty-four people died, about one thousand were injured, and nearly four thousand were arrested. Two years later, in July 1967, Detroit, Michigan, was the scene of race riots that left forty-three people dead. In both cases, black residents of these racially divided cities were frustrated and angry about unemployment, discrimination, poverty, and police brutality and prejudice—including racial profiling of black individuals. Similar displays of outrage broke out in cities across the nation including Baltimore, Maryland; Minneapolis, Minnesota; New York City; and Portland, Oregon. Some Americans regarded these incidents as justified uprisings that were part of the ongoing fight for equality, while others viewed them as inexcusable criminal actions.
By the late 1960s, a more radical form of activism emerged in response to the nation’s slow progress toward racial equality. In 1966 in Oakland, California, college students Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party. This activist group called for an end to racially motivated police brutality, incarceration of black Americans, and racial disparities in employment, housing, and education. By 1969 the Black Panthers had risen to national prominence. Besides calling for black civilians to engage in armed self-defense, the group ran community service ventures that provided free meals for children, health-care services, and educational programs in poor black neighborhoods around the country. The group’s militant philosophy and successful organizing of black youth attracted the attention of the FBI, which worked to disrupt the Black Panthers’ operations. Over the 1960s and 1970s, the FBI carried out surveillance, intimidation, and murder of activists and their families, planted FBI informants in the movement’s ranks, and arrested numerous members on charges that courts frequently found to be unsubstantiated. Police departments also targeted Black Panther activists. The heavy law enforcement scrutiny and violence drove many black Americans away from the group. Escalating violence between Panthers and law enforcement, along with negative media coverage, turned white public opinion against the organization. Plagued by internal strife and concerted law enforcement efforts to squelch the movement, the Black Panther Party floundered in the 1970s and ultimately dissolved in 1982.
In the 1970s, a new federal drug policy further targeted communities of color. In response to a nationwide spike in the abuse of recreational drugs such as marijuana, heroin, and cocaine, President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs aimed at discouraging drug use and disrupting drug trafficking. With support from the Nixon administration, the US Congress passed a series of laws that tightened drug regulations. The Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 allowed law enforcement officers to enter private homes unannounced and search for drugs. “No-knock” searches had far-reaching effects on US communities, particularly communities of color, where the practice quickly became especially common.
John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic policy adviser, reportedly admitted in an unpublished 1994 interview that the Nixon administration used the war on drugs to undermine Americans who were critical of the Republican president. Black Americans, who generally support Democratic politicians, were among the main targets. “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be . . . black, but by getting the public to associate . . . the blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing [heroin] heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman explained. “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.”
Under Republican president Ronald Reagan, who took office in 1981, the federal government intensified its focus on criminalizing drug use. This was partly in response to a nationwide cocaine crisis that hit urban communities of color especially hard. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 created mandatory minimum penalties for drug offenses, meaning that possession of even a tiny amount of a controlled substance carried a prison sentence of several years. Critics of the harsh drug policies alleged that these measures were calculated to target people of color and to appeal to white voters who feared African Americans. Attorney Eric Sterling, who served as the legal counsel to the US House of Representatives committee that drafted the law, later became a critic of the policy. According to Sterling, “The Department of Justice was supposed to be focusing on high-level [drug] traffickers. . . . [Instead] the federal government is looking at insignificant local cases and handing out long sentences to defendants that are predominantly black or Hispanic.”
At this time, white Americans were about 45 percent more likely than black Americans to sell cocaine and other drugs. Yet in the following decades, arrests of Americans of color for drug-related crimes skyrocketed, and the swelling populations of American prisons held a disproportionate number of black, Latino, and American Indian inmates. Under the umbrella of the war on drugs, police presence in communities of color continued to intensify. Media outlets routinely linked people of color with criminal behavior, and public servants and private citizens became increasingly likely to make the same association.
Interactions with police were often traumatizing for families of color. Lori Penner, of the Cheyenne and Sac and Fox American Indian nations, remembers the first time local law enforcement searched her home for drugs. “My door was broken down [by police officers]. They pointed guns at us and told us to get on the floor. . . . My 15-year-old daughter was jerked out of the shower and forced to stand naked in front of three male officers. She . . . had to get dressed in front of three officers. . . . The police laughed and smirked at us when no drugs were found. One police officer had the audacity to tell my daughter she cleaned up nice and looks good for a 15-year-old girl.”
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, political and economic instability in Mexico and many Central and South American countries prompted hundreds of thousands of people from those regions to seek safety and better opportunities for their families in the United States. Some came legally after successfully applying for green cards (permanent resident status with the legal right to seek and accept employment). However, partly due to the limited number of available green cards, the strict qualifications that applicants must meet, and the long waiting period, many Latino immigrants entered the country without legal documentation. Nevertheless, numerous US industries, from agriculture to hospitality (restaurants and hotels) to meatpacking, hired large numbers of Latino workers—typically at very low wages and with few benefits—without concern for legal status.
Many US industries rely heavily on the labor of migrant workers from Latin America, who often face poor working conditions and prejudice in the United States. In this photo, agricultural workers harvest iceberg lettuce in California.
As a result of this cheap labor, industries earned huge profits and American consumers became accustomed to paying low prices for the products and services the workers supported. Meanwhile, many white American workers feared that employers’ preference for the cheap labor of immigrants would hurt their own job prospects. The perception that all people of Latin American descent are in the country illegally—and are guilty of drug-related crimes—gained traction with the American public. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, the nation’s Latino population was fifty million in 2010, while the population of unauthorized immigrants that year was only one-fifth of that, at a little over eleven million people. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, crackdowns on illegal immigration at local, state, and federal levels have put Latinos at high risk for racial profiling, including heightened scrutiny by local police departments and US Border Patrol officials.
Across the nation, Latinos are more likely than white people to be stopped by law enforcement while walking or driving—and they are often detained for hours even when it is clear they have not committed any crime. Latino Americans such as landscape architect Richard Gallego express frustration at the unequal treatment. “I’m a US citizen. If the law tells you to ask me for my immigration status, that should go for everyone—not just Latinos. But these laws are only for Latinos. Nobody’s talking about Turkish, Japanese, Indian, or Canadian illegal immigrants.” Gallego’s assessment is backed up by data. In 2010 Mexicans made up about 58 percent of the estimated total of unauthorized immigrants, while the remaining 42 percent came from numerous other nations.
The activities of Mexican drug cartels, which often hire or coerce undocumented immigrants to smuggle drugs into the United States, intensified law enforcement interaction with—and negative public perceptions of—Latino Americans. Many Americans, including political leaders, associate Latino people with drug use and trafficking. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump referenced these impressions during the 2016 presidential race. In the June 2015 speech in which he announced his candidacy, he remarked, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best. . . . They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems [with them]. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists and some, I assume, are good people, but I speak to border guards and they’re telling us what we’re getting.”
Profiling in the Age of Global Terrorism
Latino immigrants are not the only foreign-born Americans to face racial profiling in the twenty-first century. Widespread fear and suspicion of Muslims—also known as Islamophobia—took root in the United States in the aftermath of terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. On that day, the militant Islamist group al-Qaeda carried out a series of carefully coordinated strikes in New York and near Washington, DC, killing more than three thousand people.
Because the 9/11 terrorists came from countries in the Middle East, the region where Islam originated, many Americans came to associate Muslims with people of Middle Eastern descent, particularly Arabs (one of many Middle Eastern Arabic-speaking groups). In fact, Islam is practiced all over the world by people of various ethnic, racial, and cultural backgrounds, and people of Middle Eastern heritage practice a variety of religions, including Christianity. Yet in the United States, Islamophobia often targets anyone who “looks” Muslim. Because many (although not all) people of Middle Eastern descent have brown skin, skin color has become a primary focus in the profiling of Muslims.
Profiling of Muslim Americans as potential terrorists has spiked in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Muslim women who wear hijab, traditional clothing including headscarves, often arouse suspicion and hostility. Hidayah Martinez Jaka wore a headscarf with an American flag design to highlight her patriotism when she attended a 2015 speech by Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley in Virginia.
Beginning around 2010, Islamophobia intensified again as a brutal terrorist organization known as the Islamic State (also called ISIS, ISIL, Daesh, and al-Sham) arose in Iraq and began to spread throughout the Middle East, gaining recruits from all over the world. ISIS carries out vicious and lethal attacks, often on small groups of Westerners or against other individuals they view as enemies of their deeply conservative understanding of Islam. After high-profile ISIS attacks gained global attention, many young Muslim and Arab Americans reported facing heightened tension and bullying at school and elsewhere. Ferida Osman, a twenty-one-year-old student in New York, was on her way home one day in November 2015 when a passerby spit on her and she heard someone shout, “Go back home, you terrorist.” Fearing such encounters—or worse—many girls felt reluctant to wear hijab, traditional modest Muslim clothing, including headscarves. Some young Arab Americans began going by Americanized versions of their names (such as Mo instead of Mohammed), stopped praying in public, and no longer spoke Arabic around non-Arab friends. Nineteen-year-old Shafiq Majdalawieh, a student at Brooklyn College in New York, described the feeling “that everybody’s out to get you and you have something to prove. . . . It feels like they’re trying to shoot down our dreams and aspirations simply because we practice a different religion.”
Adults also began to detect mistrust from non-Muslims. Takhia Hussein, a high school teacher in New York, says, “When my students get up to say the Pledge of Allegiance, I’m up there with them, pledging every single day. It’s devastating to think people are questioning our loyalty to a country that we love.”
Vandals defaced this Dearborn, Michigan, mosque (Islamic house of worship) and other mosques in the area with racist graffiti in 2007. The Islamic Center of America, which houses this mosque, also received hate mail after hosting a press conference to complain about Northwest Airlines’s discriminatory treatment of a group of Muslim passengers.
“Why Go Back to the Past?”
In the United States of the twenty-first century, racial profiling is only the tip of the iceberg of racial inequality, deeply interwoven within a larger historical framework of exploitation and discrimination. Racial profiling as a modern phenomenon has historical origins in both individual minds and in institutional traditions. Stereotypes invented and perpetuated by white Americans for profit and power came to pervade US society, shaping attitudes and systems that still influence how people of color are treated. The importance of this legacy is clear to lawyer G. Douglas Jones, who in 2001 prosecuted two former KKK members for the 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Church. For Jones, understanding the history that shapes modern biases is a crucial step toward alleviating injustice. “People will say, ‘Why go back to the past?’ . . . But you never close those chapters, which still sear in the black community.”