Color Line

History of the Color Line

The color line in the United States reflects a history of colonization, slavery, property rights, immigration codes, and myriad other legal and extralegal social arrangements. Race thinking developed in the United States around and through questions of citizenship and resource distribution. The history of U.S. immigration and citizenship reflects a system deeply embedded in the protection of White privilege and the denial of rights to people of color. Numerous legal and extralegal sanctions have been used to define and defend the color line by creating clear distinctions between people defined as White and all others. When the distinction seemed threatened, new sanctions were enforced, including penalizing those who challenged the color line with physical punishment, banishment, prison, enslavement, or death.

Moreover, ideologies and theories used to maintain the color line relied on religion, science, and the law. Slaveowners and those sympathetic to the slave system needed and sought out justifications for the brutal system they created, perpetuated, and benefited from. The justifications were made and then naturalized through the color line. Once in place, various theories could be drawn upon to justify injustice. The most prominent historical explanation has been the assumption that the color line is merely the reflection of genetic differences among humans, whether divinely granted or scientifically “proven”; the explanation supported the action, and the action supported the explanation.

At the same time, those defined as “other” were also struggling to make sense of the racialized system. Under the brutality of slavery, Africans began to claim the color line as a way to demarcate friend from foe, and thus the color line was used on both sides, albeit for different reasons and with differing outcomes. Whites protected the color line to maintain power; Blacks protected the line for solidarity in the struggle for liberation from White domination.

Skin color and physical features have historically been used to identify and locate people on one side or the other of the color line. Little room was left for ambiguity. Under slavery, many slave women faced rape and coerced sex. The outcome meant generations of slaves who appeared less African and more European. Contrary to existing patriarchal rules, children remained with the mother, as slaves. Eventually, some slave children began to appear to be White. Because the slave system was upheld ideologically on the basis that physical differences reflect other inherent human qualities and values, slaves who appeared to be White could undermine the structure of the system.

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