Race
This socially constructed category classifies people based on physical characteristics but has no biological basis and creates hierarchies of power.
Race
This racial classification system categorizes people into two distinct and opposing groups, typically white/non-white or white/Black, erasing complexity and mixed ancestry.
Binary Racial System
This 19th-century belief held that American expansion across the continent was justified, inevitable, and divinely ordained.
Manifest Destiny
This system of slavery, unique to the U.S. and inherited from the British colonial model, treated people as personal property that could be bought, sold, and inherited.
Chattel Slavery
This 1830 law authorized the forced removal of indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands in the southeastern United States.
Indian Removal Act
This term describes the process of assigning racial meaning to previously unclassified relationships, practices, or groups, making race relevant where it wasn't before.
Racialization
This measurement system determines indigenous identity based on the degree or percentage of indigenous ancestry a person has.
Blood Quantum
This forced march of the Cherokee Nation from their ancestral lands to Oklahoma in the 1830s resulted in thousands of deaths.
Trail of Tears
These organized groups with legal authority represented the origins of American law enforcement, designed to protect white slave owners' property rather than public safety.
Slave Patrols
This federal law required citizens in all states to assist in capturing and returning freedom seekers, even in states where slavery was illegal.
Fugitive Slave Act
This socio-political process explains how racial categories are created, transformed, and destroyed over time through competing projects and social structures.
Racial Formation
This hierarchical social classification system used in Spanish colonies categorized people based on racial ancestry and mixture, with detailed terms for different combinations.
Caste (Casta) System
This 1887 law divided communal tribal lands into individual plots, with "surplus" lands sold to white settlers.
Dawes Act
This man of African and Indigenous descent became the first casualty of the Boston Massacre in 1770, later celebrated as a martyr for American liberty.
Crispus Attucks
This 1857 Supreme Court decision ruled that African Americans, whether enslaved or free, could not be American citizens and had no standing to sue in federal court.
Dred Scott v. Sandford
These organized systems of reasoning and assumptions are used to justify racial hierarchies and explain racial differences as natural or inevitable.
Racial Logics
This concept describes how rights to use, enjoy, and profit from property were extended to whiteness itself, making racial identity a valuable asset with legal protections.
Whiteness as Property
This federal policy forcibly removed indigenous children from their families and sent them to institutions where they were punished for speaking their languages or practicing spiritual traditions, embodying the motto "Kill the Indian, Save the Man."
Boarding Schools (or What is the Policy of Assimilation)
These 1662 and 1705 colonial laws defined the legal status of enslaved people, established racial boundaries, and codified slavery based on maternal ancestry.
Virginia Slave Codes
This economic and political system produces and exploits racial categories to extract value and maintain inequality, linking capitalism's development to racial oppression.
Racial Capitalism
This ideology asserts that white people are superior to people of other racial backgrounds and should dominate society politically, economically, and culturally.
White Supremacy
This is the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, ethnic, national, or religious group through killing, harm, or prevention of births.
Genocide
This 1978 law formally protected indigenous peoples' right to practice their religions after over a century of suppression.
Indian Religious Freedom Act
This refers to the forced transportation of millions of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas from the 16th to 19th centuries.
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
This principle affirms indigenous peoples' right to freely determine their political status and pursue their economic, social, and cultural development.
Self-Determination