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§3.1 INTRODUCTION
This book is concerned primarily with American racism initiated by whites against
blacks, and it reviews the extent to which racial discrimination is legitimated by the law,
as well as many of the efforts to utilize the law to remedy racial bias. African Americans,
of course, are not the only victims of racial discrimination. Other minorities who are
ways quite similar to those experienced by blacks and often for similar purposes.
America has exported racism to the foreign territories that have come under its control,
including the Philippines, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Hispaniola (Haiti and the
Dominican Republic).1 Color as the basis of racist policy is not limited to the United
States. White supremacy and greed drove the European invasion and three-centuries’-
long exploitation of Africa, the ill effects of which remain all too visible. But racism is
not a uniquely American outlook. By the mid-1990s South Africa ended apartheid aimed
at total physical and political separation of racial groups. Great Britain’s history of
imperialism included involvement in the slave trade and the creation of segregated
1
See Rubin F. Weston, Racism in U.S. Imperialism (1972); II To Serve the Devil: Colonials and
Sojourners (Paul Jacobs, Saul Landau, Eve Pell, eds. 1971). For a discussion of the U.S. policy toward
Haitian refugees that returned thousands to certain persecution, see Jean-Pierre Benoit and Lewis A.
Kornhauser, Unsafe Havens, 59 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1421 (1992).
colonial societies. British patterns of racism against nonwhites have been visible in
restrictive immigration laws and housing and employment discrimination not unlike those
Merely as exemplar, §3.3 includes a brief summary of the fate of peoples of color in
Australia and New Zealand. Adequate treatment of racial bias suffered by nonwhites in
the United States and around the world is deserving of book-length treatment, far beyond
the limits of this text. The summaries and excerpts that follow review the history of
discrimination against other nonwhites. They are brief and are not intended to convey
fully either the extent or the complexity of racial discrimination experienced by peoples
of color the world over or the current controversies in which they are involved. The
and elsewhere. Such a comparative reading may serve to illuminate both those aspects of
the construction of race and racism that uniquely reflect the American context and those