Vernellia Randall, “The Coercive Contract: Why All Communities Are Pushed Into America’s Anti-Black Hierarchy,” Racism.org (December 4, 2025).

 

 

vernelliarandall2015Anti-Black racism has shaped U.S. citizenship, belonging, and advancement from the nation’s founding to the present. It is not an accident of history or merely a matter of individual prejudice—it is a governing logic built into the nation’s institutions, laws, and cultural expectations. Even when unspoken, the message is the same: Black people occupy the lowest rung of the hierarchy, and advancement has long required distancing oneself from Blackness.

Most people do not consciously embrace this idea. Many reject it. But structural messages do not require belief to function. They operate through law, policy, housing, schooling, labor markets, policing, and media. They determine who is trusted, who is feared, who is entitled to protection, and who must justify their existence.

Understanding this lineage helps explain why anti-Black racism appears across all racial groups—including newcomers, long-established immigrant communities, and even descendants of Africans enslaved in the United States (DAEUS). The system pressures every community to uphold anti-Black norms because safety, acceptance, and advancement have been tied to this racial contract since the nation’s founding.

This essay uses the term “descendants of Africans enslaved in the United States (DAEUS)” to recognize the distinct historical, legal, and structural position created by chattel slavery and maintained across generations. Naming DAEUS explicitly honors that lineage and acknowledges how the racial hierarchy continues to shape their experience.

This essay traces that history, explains how the coercive racial contract operates, and ends with a call for the structural transformation the nation continues to avoid.

 


Structural Messages: A Historical Lineage

To understand how anti-Black hierarchy governs the present, we must trace its development across time. Each era produced new tools—legal, cultural, economic, and institutional—but all served the same purpose: to maintain Black subordination and require other groups to navigate or affirm this hierarchy. The details change, but the logic endures.

 

1. Enslavement as the Foundation (1619–1865)

Enslavement was the nation’s first racial institution and its most defining. It was not simply labor exploitation; it was a legal, cultural, and religious framework that assigned permanent inferiority to Black people and permanent authority to white people. This framework shaped courts, policing, land laws, property, inheritance, marriage, education, and citizenship.

Enslavement taught a foundational message: white identity depends on the subordination of Black people. Later systems—Black Codes, Jim Crow, convict leasing, lynching, and mass incarceration—did not invent new principles; they recycled the logic of slavery to meet new political needs.

 

2. The Naturalization Act of 1790: Citizenship as Whiteness

The first federal naturalization law restricted citizenship to “free white persons,” formally tying national belonging to whiteness. Black people—enslaved or free—were excluded by design. Indigenous, Asian, Middle Eastern, and many Southern and Eastern European peoples were also excluded or treated as racially suspect.

This law signaled that civic membership was not simply a legal status—it was a racial privilege. The message was clear: only those who could plausibly align with whiteness were entitled to the rights of citizenship.

 

3. Reconstruction Backlash (1865–1877)

The end of slavery initiated one of the most radical democratic experiments in U.S. history. Black Americans:

  • Built schools, businesses, churches, and political organizations

  • Won elections

  • Rewrote state constitutions

  • Created mutual-aid structures

  • Developed a multiracial democratic vision

But Black success destabilized the racial hierarchy, triggering violent and legal backlash:

  • KKK terrorism

  • Black Codes reimposing labor and mobility restrictions

  • Convict leasing as re-enslavement

  • Federal abandonment in 1877

The message was unmistakable: Black advancement is punished.

 

4. How Irish, Italian, and Jewish Immigrants Became “White” Through Anti-Blackness (Mid-1800s–Early 1900s)

Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants were not originally considered white. They were caricatured as biologically inferior, violent, uneducated, or unassimilable. Their path to whiteness required:

  1. Giving up cultural markers—languages, religious practices, ethnic identifiers

  2. Adopting white Protestant norms

  3. Demonstrating loyalty to white racial interests, often through participation in anti-Black policing, political coalitions, or labor exclusion

Whiteness was not a fixed identity; it expanded strategically when doing so reinforced Black subordination. Anti-Blackness was the gateway to belonging.

Immigration law reinforced these lessons, teaching newcomers that acceptance required proximity to whiteness and distance from Blackness.

 

5. Jim Crow: Legal and De Facto Apartheid Across the Nation (1877–1960s)

Jim Crow was not a Southern phenomenon; it was a national system of apartheid.

In the South, segregation was explicit: laws mandated separate schools, hospitals, transportation, housing, and public accommodations. Black voting was effectively eliminated. Violence enforced the order.

In the North, segregation operated through de facto mechanisms:

  • Restrictive covenants

  • Exclusionary zoning

  • Redlining

  • School boundary manipulation

  • Sundown towns

  • Discriminatory policing and mob violence

Black people who crossed racial boundaries risked violence or eviction even in states without segregation laws.

In the West, states such as Oregon embedded anti-Blackness directly into law—barring Black people from residing in the state, owning property, or entering contracts.

Across all regions, the aim was the same: protect the racial hierarchy that placed Black people at the bottom.

Mexican Americans in Texas experienced segregation, economic exclusion, and school discrimination. Yet when segregation cases threatened the Black–white binary, courts declared Mexican Americans “white” for legal purposes—demonstrating that racial categories were manipulated to preserve the anti-Black order.

 

6. Racial Eligibility for Immigration and the Battle to Be Declared “White” (1880s–1920s)

As immigration increased, courts were asked to determine which groups could join the category of “white.” Immigrants from Asia, the Middle East, and South Asia argued for whiteness using:

  • Claims of Caucasian ancestry

  • Assertions of civilizational history

  • Arguments about cultural similarity to Europeans

Courts issued contradictory rulings but maintained one purpose: preserve white dominance and the anti-Black hierarchy.

Those deemed non-white faced:

  • Deportation

  • Denial of citizenship

  • Loss of property rights

  • Exclusion from testifying against white people

  • Racial surveillance

Major cases:

  • Takao Ozawa (1922): whiteness required European ancestry

  • Bhagat Singh Thind (1923): whiteness defined by “common understanding,” not science

These cases exposed whiteness as a political category constructed to protect racial hierarchy.

 

7. Chinese Exclusion and Racial Measuring (1882)

The Chinese Exclusion Act banned Chinese laborers from immigrating and denied them citizenship. Racial theories of the era placed Chinese people above Black people but below whites, reinforcing the logic that Blackness belonged at the very bottom.

Exclusion was enforced through surveillance, interrogation, identification documents, and detention. It established the federal government’s template for race-based immigration control.

 

8. Japanese American Internment (1942)

During World War II, over 120,000 Japanese Americans—mostly U.S. citizens—were incarcerated. Their property was seized, their mobility restricted, and their rights suspended.

Yet federal officials repeatedly assured Southern politicians that internment would not disturb Jim Crow. Anti-Blackness remained the fixed anchor of the national racial hierarchy, even during wartime.

Internment demonstrated that state violence could expand dramatically, but the racial order—especially the position of Black people—remained constant.

 

9. Immigration Law and the Racial Ladder (1924–1965)

The 1924 Immigration Act established quotas to engineer the nation’s racial future. Northern and Western Europeans were favored; Southern and Eastern Europeans were restricted; Asians and Africans were excluded.

The 1965 Immigration Act ended formal racial quotas, but immigrants entered a society already structured around anti-Blackness. They quickly learned:

  • Proximity to whiteness eased integration

  • Distancing from Blackness signaled respectability

  • Assimilation required navigating the racial contract

Anti-Blackness remained the central organizing principle.

 

10. Modern Policing and Criminalization (1970s–Present)

Policing became the modern enforcement arm of racial hierarchy.

  • The War on Drugs targeted Black communities

  • Mandatory minimums fueled mass incarceration

  • “Broken windows” policing criminalized daily life

  • Stop-and-frisk normalized racial profiling

  • Militarized policing treated Black neighborhoods as occupied territories

Blackness became constructed as inherently criminal, dangerous, and disorderly. Other groups learned that distancing themselves from Black communities was often treated as the safer choice.

 


Why Anti-Black Racism Appears Across Racial Groups

Anti-Black racism persists because institutions make anti-Blackness appear rational, beneficial, or necessary for survival.

  1. Anti-Blackness is the baseline of the hierarchy

  2. Whiteness receives institutional rewards

  3. Anti-Blackness becomes a survival strategy

  4. Immigration law signals who belongs

  5. Media reinforces anti-Black stereotypes

  6. Anti-Blackness is transmitted across generations

  7. Solidarity is intentionally fractured

Anti-Blackness also harms non-Black communities by limiting their freedom to build genuine solidarity, forcing them into a racial bargain that ties their belonging to the ongoing marginalization of Black people. No group benefits from a system that requires participation in another group’s oppression.

 


Intersectionality: How Anti-Blackness Deepens Through Other Systems

Anti-Blackness does not operate in isolation. It is layered onto gender, class, disability, immigration status, sexuality, and other social identities, creating compounded forms of vulnerability.

Black women face misogynoir, a fusion of sexism and anti-Blackness that devalues their labor, undermines their authority, and erases their pain in health care. Black girls are adultified in schools, disciplined more harshly, and denied the innocence granted to white peers.

Black disabled people experience some of the harshest consequences of intersectional oppression. Disability becomes criminalized when layered onto Blackness: noncompliance is treated as threat, communication differences as defiance, and medical needs as neglect.

Class does not shield Black people from the hierarchy; it only changes how the hierarchy presents itself. Even wealthy Black people—executives, professionals, and homeowners in affluent neighborhoods—face discriminatory policing, unequal medical treatment, workplace exclusion, and bias directed at their children in schools. Wealth may ease some burdens, but it cannot override the structural position assigned to Blackness.

Black immigrants confront both xenophobia and anti-Blackness, navigating immigration enforcement alongside domestic racial profiling. Their experience reveals how U.S. racial hierarchy absorbs global Blackness into its structure.

Black LGBTQ+ people face anti-Blackness within queer spaces and queerphobia within Black spaces, producing higher rates of homelessness, violence, and state neglect.

Across these intersections, the pattern remains: the systems intensify anti-Blackness rather than dilute it. Intersectionality reveals that the racial contract is not one-dimensional—it is reproduced across criminal law, education, housing, health care, family regulation, and public assistance programs, all of which impose layered penalties on Black people with multiple marginalized identities.

The more intersections present, the more forcefully the racial contract is enforced.

 


What This History Reveals

The through-line across centuries is clear: U.S. racial order depends on keeping Blackness at the bottom and requiring every other group to orient themselves around that position.

Policies such as redlining, urban renewal, and highway construction destroyed Black wealth and displaced Black communities, continuing Jim Crow’s work under new language. The hierarchy adapts across eras even when the law no longer speaks openly about race.

 

Core Revelations

  1. Anti-Blackness is the organizing principle of American identity

  2. Whiteness retains power by protecting anti-Black hierarchy

  3. Immigrant and minority groups are positioned through anti-Blackness

  4. Members of DAEUS are also positioned through anti-Blackness

  5. Anti-Blackness is the glue of the hierarchy

  6. Institutions reproduce racial hierarchy automatically

  7. Individual beliefs cannot override structural incentives

  8. Solidarity is intentionally fractured

  9. The system is engineered—not accidental—and continually adapts

 

 


The Work Ahead: Dismantling the Hierarchy

A just society requires structural—not symbolic—change. Reform without transformation leaves the hierarchy intact.

The work ahead is made even harder by the actions of the Trump administration, which intentionally dismantled civil rights protections, weakened federal oversight, restricted diversity initiatives, and undermined the fragile legal tools that had helped move the country—slowly and unevenly—toward racial equity. These rollbacks did not simply pause progress; they strengthened the underlying architecture of anti-Blackness. They empowered states, agencies, and private actors to act with less accountability. And because the racial hierarchy operates across administrations, the damage done during this period will continue to shape policing, education, voting, health care, housing, and immigration long after a different president takes office. The result is a deeper, more entrenched form of anti-Blackness that future administrations will inherit, not erase.

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Call to Action: Transform Institutions

  • Transform school discipline systems

  • Reimagine public safety

  • End exclusionary zoning

  • Dismantle healthcare racism

  • Build equitable employment structures

  • Challenge economic systems tied to racial hierarchy

  • Support DAEUS-led organizing and leadership

We have inherited a racial order built on anti-Blackness, but we are not bound to preserve it. Building a humane future requires telling the truth about the past, confronting the institutions that maintain racial inequality, and creating a society where no group’s advancement depends on another’s oppression. These systems were built through human choices, and they can be dismantled the same way—through sustained organizing, honest public memory, and a collective refusal to uphold the racial contract that keeps inequality in place.


Further Reading

  • Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection

  • Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property”

  • Charles Mills, The Racial Contract

  • W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America

  • Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body

  • Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race

 

Vernellia R. Randall, Professor Emerita of Law, University of Dayton School of Law. This article was drafted with the assistance of ChatGPT, an AI language model. All content has been reviewed and edited by Vernellia Randall to ensure accuracy and coherence.