Chapter 3

Racism and Other “Nonwhites”

§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

identifiably nonwhite — Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, and other nonwhite

Spanish and French-speaking people — have suffered exploitation and discrimination in

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

found in urban America.

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

intention is to permit a clearer understanding of the factors of racism that serve to

rationalize exploitation, discrimination, forced removal, and genocide both in America

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

that seem to transcend national boundaries.