As human history goes that's relatively recent, but compared to the other people who moved to what is now the United States, they are clearly the “native” old-timers of the area. The first non-Native American immigrants (responsible for calling the inhabitants Indians) were the Spanish explorers. The Spanish were followed in short order by the English, Dutch, French and Portuguese. The English soon gained control over the eastern coast of what is now United States and were joined over the next several centuries by one of the wildest mixes of ethnic groups the world has ever seen. But as diverse as that ethnic mix became, descendants of those original English colonists maintained control over the basic coordination of social life that characterizes the United States today. Everyday life in the United States today is largely an experience, of an Americanized English culture.
The Growth of Racism
When the English Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts in 1620, they had been beaten by one year by the first African arrivals in the colonies: twenty Africans who were sold from a Dutch freighter in Jamestown, Virginia, as indentured servants. The Africans weren't yet permanent slaves, and ideas of racism were still very much in their infancy in the new land, but both slavery and racism were already on the horizon.
Racism can describe either a belief or a way of life. As a belief, it represents the social separation of people into two or more races coupled with the idea that different races are biologically inferior or superior to each other. As a way of life, racism describes the individual experience of living within a system of ethnic stratification in which the groups at the bottom of the hierarchy are defined as racially inferior. Racism is an idea peculiar to the minds of Europeans over the last several centuries; previously humans had been guilty of all kinds of atrocities against each other, but they never defined their victims as biologically inferior while having them drawn and quartered. Europeans became increasingly attracted to the ideas of racism that were popularized throughout the 1700s and 1800s. No wonder that peoples of the rest of the world soon found themselves the possessors of increasingly derogatory labels. Asians were in one race, Native Americans in another, and Africans in still another. No finer idea than racism could ever be found to justify exploitation.
