Irregardless of what one thinks of racism in the US, I feel unlike South Africa and Malaysia it’s not explicitly enforced by law

31 comments

  1. There is racism enshrined into US law, but it would be quite a stretch to say that it’s constitutionally mandated.

  4. It is safe to say that constitutionally mandated racism is long gone.

    It is not safe to say that systemic racism or laws written to be racist do not still exist.

    One of the greatest examples of this is how schools receive money.

    Unlike every other form of infrastructure schools are paid for by the neighborhoods that they service instead of the county or the city as a whole.

    This means that low income neighborhoods have low funded schools and receipt for education which will guarantee that the people who live in those neighborhoods will not be able to get well paying jobs and will continue to be a low income neighborhood.

    No child Left behind doubles down on this effect by lowering a school’s automatic governmental funding when their students don’t perform well creating a feedback loop where there’s not enough time or money to properly educate the children to pass the test making sure that there’s not going to be any more time or money.

    Placing DMVs and ID issuance offices a long way away from low-income neighborhoods. Since a lot of people in low income neighborhoods won’t have easy or ready access to a vehicle this can severely delay or in some cases prevent them from getting a state issued ID meaning they can’t get a job.

    They need a job to have a car, they need to have an ID to have a job, but they also need to have a car to get the ID.

  6. Honestly contrary to what many media outlets like to say about ‘how racist America is’ I actually think America leads the world in so many metrics when it comes to handling racial and immigration issues.

    Skilled foreign talent? Both Republicans and Democrats appreciate foreign talent, whilst even in multicultural countries such as Hong Kong and Singapore, foreign talent is often seen as competition and with suspicion.

    Housing discrimination? It’s explicitly written in American law that it is ILLEGAL to deny housing to other races, whilst in South Africa and Singapore it’s still legal to do so and many do.

    Hiring people based on race? There has been one study that showed that American companies are far more likely to accept a Black, Arab, and Asian application into their workplace. Whilst in Europe it still lags behind in this area.

    Integration of immigrants and their children? America has successfully integrated most of their immigrants and children, even the most impoverished immigrant groups still feel at home in the US and still feel American in the end of the day. In Europe and Asia they are still struggling to integrate other ethnic groups.

    Now what America needs work on is systemic issues (which isn’t always intertwined with constitutionally mandated racism)

  7. At the constitutional law level – yes – long gone.

    It took longer to get to the state law level and get federal acts enacted like the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

  10. Constitutional yes. However, there is still a lot of racists laws from gun control to red lining that many Americans are fighting to repeal and reform. It’s a very sad history of our country, but by recognizing our failures and bad past, we can all work towards a better future and a better america

  13. The last bit of Jim Crow in the US is being removed (the laws forbidding carrying guns).

  14. I live in the American south (multiple states) for about 6-7 years, and my wife is a Malaysian. And I can tell you my in-laws are the racist people I’ve met. And I grew up around white supremacists.

  15. Racism is banned in America, but only on the surface. Racial discrimination in people’s hearts is actually hard to stop

  16. Conditionally? Yes. But there’s plenty of legislation that is pretty clearly designed to keep minorities down. Gerrymandering, redlining, the war on drugs, the justice system.

    Did you know slavery is still legal here? Only as a form of punishment, but it still is. And we disproportionately send black people to prison sooooo yeah we’re still enslaving black people.

    I fucking hate it here

  17. Racism was written out of the constitution with the 14th amendment in 1868. This promises “equal protection” for all citizens of the United States.

    However you should remember that the US constitution limits what the government can do. It does not (except obliquely) limit the actions of individuals.

    And it is not (especially with respect to the 14th amendment) implemented perfectly.

    But there is no constitutional mandate for racism.

  19. It is easy to lose just how far ahead we are in the world when it comes to lessening racism in our society. Racism is still a huge issue, but just because we have it bad doesn’t mean that other countries don’t have it worse

  20. I don’t believe constitutionally mandated racism ever existed in the US; besides the 3/5th compromise of course

  21. So long as corporations (which are classified as people) can own for profit prisons, then yeah. Proportionally speaking African Americans are incarcerated at a much higher level than any other “group”, so just do the math.

  22. You’re not going to get fair answers in here. People answering the questions aren’t affected by racism at an institutional level.

  23. Almost everything in this country, from property rights to the constitution, was written to enshrine slavery into law. We still live with that legacy.

  24. Love this question. And if u read in between the lines of the replies you’ll get a pretty good idea about the states.

  25. The constitution was never racist. The only reason it didn’t initially include the abolition of slavery was that the Carolinas were slave based economies (the largest of the colonies) and there were fears that they wouldn’t join an abolitionist confederation, and that if they didn’t join we wouldn’t be able to win a war with Britain.

  26. Racism in law is a lot more coded now. The Mann Act was supposedly a law again prostitution over state lines, but was used to prosecute immigrants and black men who were in consensual relationships with white women. This act is still active. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann_Act?wprov=sfti1

    Boxer Jack Johnson was prosecuted under this.

  27. At a Constitutional level, racism was abolished a century and a half ago with the 13th and 14th Amendments in the late 1860’s.

    In our legal code, it was abolished over half a century ago. The remaining remnants of legalized racism were abolished in the 1960’s

    Our courts are still working to interpret our laws and pass rulings to help ensure our laws and regulations keep racism out of our government.

    Racism in the US is through deep biases in our economy and social structure that were established generations ago and subtly make life more difficult for some races, or acts and statements by individuals (albeit sometimes individuals acting on behalf of the government, such as police officers, although this is illegal but poorly enforced).

  28. Racism is right in the Bill of Rights, where Native American people are called merciless savages.

  29. So in a very technical sense there is racism under the Constitution but it effectively is nullified due to the current circumstances

    There are articles in the Constitution that refer to “Indians not taxed” and how Congress has exclusive jurisdiction to conduct relations with them however since the Indian citizenship Act all Native Americans are American citizens *technically one could make the argument that the territory of American Samoa is kind of like a big Native American reservation legally speaking in fact they’re delegate to Congress when explaining the legal situation to Outsiders used this exact comparison and since it’s a territory they would be considered not or subject to limited taxation but that gets into the further complicated issue of how Americans Samoan residency doesn’t confer US citizenship

    Basically all aspects of racism under the Constitution have been made more or less irrelevant by Statute the best example of this is how the Constitution prohibits Banning the slave trade until 20 years after it’s adoption I think it’s absolutely racist of the Constitution considers the slave trade definitionally legal before that point in time but in terms of actual constitutionally mandated racism that affect Americans today there’s very little if any

  30. It’s not *gone* gone-there’s currently plenty of arguments being had over whether affirmative action based on race instead of economic need is racism being legally mandated, but if it is here in a legal sense it’s the barest, tiniest fraction of what it used to be compared to 100 years ago, to say nothing of 200.

  31. Since the passage of the 13th,14th,and 15th ammendments, in the 1870s, racially based laws have been unconstitutional.

Leave a Reply
You May Also Like