Segregation

SEGREGATION IN the United States could rightly be considered a conservative sociopolitical practice. Since white racial supremacy had been the norm in both black-white relations and white interaction with Native Americans and Asian Americans as well, any racial ideology initiated by whites without the consent of the other race or races involved would be a manifestation of conservatism. Segregation certainly meets that definitional criterion.

There are two kinds of segregation, de jure and de facto. The former means segregation by law; this type of segregation was once sanctioned by either local or state law and upheld by the courts, even the U.S. Supreme Court. This kind of segregation is no longer allowed. The latter means racial separation that occurs by individual choice, not by law; it generally occurs in social situations, and it is practiced routinely in America today.

There had been a long history of various kinds of racial and ethnic segregation throughout the centuries around the world. Jews had been singled out in many European countries at least as far back as the 1500s, and Gypsies became targets of similar segregation ordinances in Europe in more modern times. Many examples of segregation throughout history came as a result of class warfare; slaves and masters could not live or work side by side in most cultures where slavery was practiced. The feudal system, although a step above a slave-labor system, likewise allowed little interaction and no equality between serfs and lords. Even in industrialized nations since the 1700s, poor workers and their bosses, despite occupying common ground physically, existed in separate spheres psychologically, resulting in a primitive, undefined form of segregation. The most notable case of pure racial segregation in modern times outside of the United States was South Africa's apartheid system, which ran concurrently with American segregation of the black race, although outlasting it by some two decades. Even now, there arises in the world from time to time attempts at “ethnic cleansing,” which turns mere segregation into mass murder and/or genocide.

Thus, the United States did not invent segregation, and it certainly never practiced the most extreme, notorious forms of it. American segregation is commonly considered a black-white racial phenomenon, but in fact segregation of Native Americans by whites was the first manifestation of de jure segregation in the United States, beginning with the creation of the Bureau of Indian [Page 859]Affairs and the development of the reservation system in the 1820s. In a sense, segregation of Native Americans is still practiced today, although it is now merely de facto segregation, since anyone wanting to escape the reservation on which he or she was born is free to do so.

Similarly, on the Pacific coast, the state of California enacted laws segregating Chinese immigrants in the 1850s, and by 1900 it did the same to Japanese immigrants, much to the displeasure of the government of Japan. A diplomatic crisis even erupted in 1906 between the United States and Japan over California's law segregating Japanese schoolchildren. Laws requiring separate schools for various Asian ethnic groups stayed on the books in California until the 1940s.

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