The problem of racism is not specifically an American problem, though Americans have made it into an important political and social issue as they have tried to find a way to eliminate racism from their society. Racism occurs whenever there is a dominant racial group that uses its position to discriminate against a minority racial group on the basis of racial characteristics. Traditionally, discrimination has been seen as a creature of prejudice, and until the late 1960s the dominant perspective among social science analysts of discrimination was that prejudice and intolerance were the causes of discriminatory actions. Other observers have focused on individual racists and have seen the problem as the individual motivated by hatred of a given "outgroup." Still others consider the issue in terms of patterns of segregation and community practices.
Racism in the United States has been related to the issue of slavery, since the blacks in American society are nearly all descended from slaves brought to this country beginning at the end of the seventeenth century and only freed from slavery at the end of the nineteenth century. Racism involves more than relations between Blacks and Whites, but that is probably the form that is most common in this society. Many Americans probably believe that the problem of racism has been virtually eliminated from American life, though there is ample evidence to the contrary. These people think back to the overt racism of the past, and they see society today as being quite different. This is true, but the change is not complete. The Civil Rights Movement has made great changes in American society, but it has not eliminated racism. It has pushed it underground for the most part, but many of the attitudes remain powerful. In addition, there are institutional forms of racism that continue unabated.
There were several forces at work in the early 1950s and into the 1960s that caused the Civi...