{"id":49096,"date":"2016-09-14T14:08:51","date_gmt":"2016-09-14T14:08:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=49096"},"modified":"2016-09-14T14:08:51","modified_gmt":"2016-09-14T14:08:51","slug":"american-segregation-started-long-before-the-civil-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=49096","title":{"rendered":"American Segregation Started Long Before the Civil War"},"content":{"rendered":"

American Segregation Started Long Before the Civil War<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

What It Means to Be American: A National Conversation Hosted by The Smithsonian\u2019s and Z\u00f3calo Public Square<\/a>
\n2016-09-12<\/p>\n

Nicholas Guyatt<\/strong><\/a>, University Lecturer in American History
\nCambridge University<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

How the Founders’ Revolutionary Ideology Laid the Groundwork<\/em><\/p>\n

Segregation remains an intractable force in American life, more than 60 years after the Supreme Court\u2019s Brown v. Board of Education<\/em><\/a> ruling outlawed racial separation in America\u2019s schools. The Government Accountability Office<\/a> recently estimated that more than 20 million students of color attend public schools that are racially or socioeconomically isolated. This figure has increased in recent decades, despite a raft of federal and state initiatives.<\/p>\n

Major cities like New York<\/a> and Chicago<\/a> struggle with high levels of residential segregation, especially at the neighborhood level. The entrenched correlation between race and poverty is partly to blame, but segregation catches even affluent people of color. A recent study found that, while only 9 percent of white Americans earning $100,000 or more lived in poor areas, 37 percent of African-Americans on the same income level lived in poorer neighborhoods.<\/p>\n

If we want to understand why racial segregation still exists in America, we should start by understanding its origins…<\/p>\n

…And then there was the prospect of racial amalgamation<\/a>, which scrambled the moral compasses of even the most progressive whites. Of all the European empires in the New World<\/a>, British North America<\/a> was the most squeamish on the question of amalgamation. But while the science and religion of the European Enlightenment<\/a> suggested no barrier to intermarriage, even white Americans who embraced \u201call men are created equal\u201d struggled with the practical application of that phrase. The preacher David Rice<\/a>, who tried valiantly to outlaw slavery in the Kentucky<\/a> constitutional convention of 1792, admitted that his own prejudices against intermarriage were hard to shake; but he was determined, he told his fellow delegates, not to allow irrational feelings to \u201cinfluence my judgment, nor affect my conscience.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alas, many others who spoke in the abstract against slavery failed to follow Rice\u2019s example; or, like Thomas Jefferson<\/a>, they compartmentalized their private and public lives. It\u2019s now widely accepted that in the 1790s and 1800s, Jefferson secretly fathered six children with Sally Hemings<\/a>, a multi-racial slave in his household, while insisting in public on his \u201cgreat aversion\u201d to \u201cthe mixture of color.\u201d<\/p>\n

It soon became apparent that the realization of \u201call men are created equal<\/a>\u201d required more than an abstract recognition of black or Native humanity; it required the surrender of what we now call white privilege. When even the most liberal whites struggled to meet this challenge, they developed an alternative plan that might deliver the United States from the guilt of slavery and oppression without obliging white people to live alongside people of color: perhaps blacks and Indians could be persuaded to move elsewhere…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Nicholas Guyatt teaches American history at the University of Cambridge in England. He is the author of <\/em>Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation<\/a> (Basic Books).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

American Segregation Started Long Before the Civil War What It Means to Be American: A National Conversation Hosted by The Smithsonian\u2019s and Z\u00f3calo Public Square 2016-09-12 Nicholas Guyatt, University Lecturer in American History Cambridge University How the Founders’ Revolutionary Ideology Laid the Groundwork Segregation remains an intractable force in American life, more than 60 years […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,8,6940,20],"tags":[24831,20874,24980],"class_list":["post-49096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-media-archive","category-slavery","category-usa","tag-nicholas-guyatt","tag-what-it-means-to-be-american","tag-what-it-means-to-be-american-a-national-conversation-hosted-by-the-smithsonians-and-zocalo-public-square"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49096"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49096\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49097,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49096\/revisions\/49097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}