Racism in the United States.

Racism is the belief that some human beings are superior to others based on the color of their skin, language, or place of birth. The history of racism in the United States can be traced back even before the nation was founded, when the first European settlers encountered the native people of the Americas. As was the case in most developed nations of the time, racist attitudes were based on a mistaken belief that darker-skinned people were biologically inferior. Though this belief—and, indeed, the very idea of race as a biological rather than social construct—was eventually disproven, it contributed to centuries of racism and oppression in the United States, most notably in the practice of slavery and the legal segregation of Black Americans in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While great strides toward equality were made in the mid-twentieth century, racism did not vanish. It remains a serious issue into the twenty-first century where it continues to define and divide many Americans.