Background and History 5 that African Americans are treated less fairly than whites in dealing with police, in courts, when applying for a mortgage loan, and in the workplace. Meanwhile, racial gaps in income (DeNavas-Walt and Proctor 2015), health (Phelan and Link 2015), and educational achievement (Stanford Center for Education Policy Analysis 2016) persist. Th is chapter explains how race became the tremendously stratifying force that it is today, tracing its origins to and continuation through many of the major institutions in American life. The Origins of American Racism In the modern world we have become so accustomed to thinking within a framework of race and ethnicity that we are quite unable to conceive of a past that may not have had this framework. (Ivan Hannaford 1996:4) Clearing the Land Despite how commonly they are now discussed, systems of so- cial stratifi cation based on race are relatively new. Prior to and in the early years of European colonialism, characteristics like religion and social class typically determined who was advan- taged or disadvantaged in many societies (Anderson 2012 PBS 2003 Stam and Spence 1983). While evidence from classical antiquity reveals pictorial and written negative representations of darker-skinned people, Greek and Roman whites traded with and intermarried with Egyptian, Nubian, Ethiopian, and Carthaginian blacks, and most of their slaves were conquered whites (Snowden 1991 Th ompson 1993). Cox (2000) also suggests that explicitly racial confl ict was largely absent from ancient civilizations. However, as Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Great Britain sought to expand their empires into North America (among other places), the concept of racial categorization as a primary basis for hierar- chy began to make its way into the lexicon of each (Smedley and Smedley 2018). For example, during the late 1660s, the
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