The Legal History of Systemic Racism
Dr. Manisha Sinha explains the origin of White people and Slave codes which evolved into Black Codes, Jim Crow Laws, Nazi Nuremberg Laws, and South African Apartheid
In this interview excerpt, Dr. Manisha Sinha, the Draper Chair of American History at the University of Connecticut, talks about what Southern enslavers invented: a system of racial apartheid that infected the world.
Video transcript:
And the reason why you had to have these colonial slave codes was because, in British law, there was no law of slavery. There was a Roman law of slavery that the Spanish and the Portuguese used, but not in British common law, right? They did not have any law of slavery, so they had to be sort of invented in the colonies.
And what you can see in these slave codes is not just slavery being legalized but also the invention of race as a legal category. So you can really see how both slavery and race are made in colonial America and how that continues pretty much up to the Civil War.
Black codes make it illegal to be Black
The Black Codes are somewhat different. These were codes that were put into place immediately after the Civil War by Southerners. These Black Codes discriminated against people of African descent in various ways, large and trivial. You couldn't own property in cities, you couldn't follow certain professions. There were even Black Codes at the city level that were more egregious, such as requiring you to step off a sidewalk if you saw a white person approaching.
They literally tried to make sure that, even though slavery was dead because of the 13th Amendment, they would push Black people into as close a state to slavery as possible. And so the Black Codes ended up being overthrown, and you had Radical Republicans in Congress putting the South back under military occupation and having new state governments elected, with Black voting, Black office holding, and the rise of new interracial governments.
Jim Crow laws infected lawbooks after Reconstruction was killed
Once Southern elites again managed to overthrow Reconstruction, they had new state constitutions that disenfranchised Black men despite a constitutional amendment—the 15th Amendment—which gave Black men the right to vote. Despite that, they actually created state constitutions that disenfranchised Black men through literacy tests, poll taxes, and sometimes the grandfather clause—you could vote only if your grandfather had voted. Then they put into place Jim Crow laws and racial segregation.
All this is a result of the defeat of Reconstruction. Jim Crow laws are instituted, of course, because, again, the Supreme Court gave a green light to Southern states to actually institute racial segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Southern states developed their own race laws, their own one-drop rule to identify Black people. Many of these Jim Crow laws were then applied to Hispanics, Latino Americans, and Indigenous people. It was just a whole system of racial laws that they put into place in the heyday of scientific racism, European imperialism, and social Darwinism.
Nazis were Jim Crow fanboys
And it does become a template for European fascists to look at. In fact, the German Nazis, who studied the race laws of the South, thought it was too strict—which is hilarious if you think about that. They were also inspired by the genocidal warfare against Native nations. We know that Hitler thought that was a good thing. We know that he thought the defeat of the Confederacy was a bad thing for the United States.
So this idea of thinking undemocratically, in an authoritarian, reactionary way, and in a highly racist way is something that the South pioneers. We know that South Africans, for instance, were very much interested in Southern race laws for their apartheid system because what the South had invented was really a system of racial apartheid.