History of Racial Discrimination
Racism has a long and unfortunate history. Modern racism, with its ideas of biological superiority, comes primarily from European colonialism and also from southern chattel slavery in the United States. Sadly, many of the concepts still rear their head today and the problem with its historic roots remains.
Racial discrimination has been around for a long time. It is quite possible that hominid tribes discriminated against the tribe in the next valley. However, the roots of modern racial discrimination are most commonly seen as lying in the twin concepts of colonialism and slavery.
As Europeans expanded into the New World, Africa and India, they came across people with different ways of life. However, they carried with them the belief that their own way of life, including their own religion, was superior. This led to colonialism, the attempt to convert people of inferior races to the white man's way of life. Southern chattel slavery came out of the need for manual labor and was ultimately an economic matter, but it reinforced the idea that white men are superior to those of other colors, not just culturally but biologically.
Faux science was used to justify keeping the Negro in a state of slavery. It was also used to justify violating treaties and taking land from the 'savage' Native Americans. Race was one, but only one, of the issues that caused the American Civil War. After the war, there was a brief period of near racial equality for blacks but Jim Crow laws, literacy tests and other measures rapidly pushed blacks, Native Americans and Hispanics back to second class citizen status.
The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s brought with it legal equality after a long series of peaceful protests, many of them attended by whites as well as blacks. However, in both America and Europe, racial discrimination remains. Additionally, there is discrimination in Japan against non-Japanese, proving that it is not limited to white people. Racial discrimination is a historic problem that has yet to be fully solved.