Ongoing research in genomics and human population variation continues to confirm that attempts to analyze human persons by assigning to discrete racial groups are based on fallacies in earlier models in the history of biology. “At present no single trait or set of traits has been identified that is necessarily manifested by all members of a population group, nor have traits been found that are restricted to a single population group. For [numerous] reasons, most geneticists and biological anthropologists now concur with the view that biologically determinate ‘races’ corresponding to traditional racial taxonomies do not exist.”16 The classification of human persons in “races” as rooted in innate biological group differences has been refuted. What, then, accounts for the prevalence and power of racial beliefs and their real-world manifestations in contemporary society? “Racism” is the most commonly invoked explanation, and in typical usage, it is construed in psychological and attitudinal terms, as does the Oxford Dictionary definition of racism: “Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior.” 17 This essay, however, suggests that the sociological concept of “racialization” is the most illuminating framework with which to understand the arrangement and conditions of society: the construction of the social world as a set of institutions based on shared assumptions and practices. Within this frame, Michael Emerson and Christian Smith define racialization as denoting a situation in which “race matters profoundly for differences in life experiences, life opportunities and social relationships” because the system is organized by racial ideas and values and reinforces it. “Due to the origins of the idea of race, the placement of people in racial groups always means some form of hierarchy. … A racialized society ‘allocates differential economic, political, social and even psychological rewards to groups along racial lines: lines that are socially constructed.’”18 The following sketch of historical actions and events demonstrates how the relatively recent, contingent idea of “race” and racial logic came to acquire not only social meaning but concrete existential force through its use to create a hierarchical society. The institutionalization of “race” is best seen and understood by examining the historical policies undertaken—especially through the enactment and enforcement of laws—with respect to the status, opportunities and constraints of the various people groups in society relative to one another. The construction and application of race, i.e., racializing logic, is clearly evinced in the historical development of the United States as a nation-state, beginning in the colonial era. This history extends into and clearly explains a major cause of the contemporary conditions of life in this society. The Origins and Institutionalization of “Race” in the United States: An Historical Overview The following historical account is selective, both in substance and in scope. It highlights a series of significant actions and events pertaining to the experiences to a number of the principal groups representative of the many that now comprise the people of the United States, in relation to the process by which the social world they entered, inhabited, and developed became an increasingly racialized order. To bring the principles and dynamics of racialization into sharp relief, this narrative treats the laws and social policies that were enacted and implemented in roughly chronological order. Thereby the development of the objective societal system as a racialized system is traced from the colonial era to more recent events.
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