RACISM

How Laissez-Faire Racism Replaced Blatant Cruelty of The Jim Crow Era

An essay about the different ways racism presents itself

Woman reading a newspaper | Photo by Masha Raymers via Pexels

The Jim Crow Era was this country's first white backlash era, the first time where the racial hierarchy was challenged in a meaningful way, with the abolition of slavery. White Americans, particularly in the South, responded by passing laws to control nearly every facet of Black people's lives. For example, in Louisiana, The Separate Car Act of 1890 required that "all railway companies" would "provide equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races" and that "No person or persons shall be permitted to occupy seats in coaches other than the ones assigned to them on account of the race they belong to." A Creole man, Homère Plessy, challenged the law in 1896, but the Supreme Court sided with John Howard Ferguson, a White lawyer and Louisiana judge. "Ferguson considered Plessy guilty because he thought the state had the right to make decisions on passing segregation policies." During this era, anti-Black racism was codified into the law, and as a result, White people could freely express racist beliefs. Or, in modern terminology, no one was getting canceled for being racist.

This dark period in American history was marred with instances of legalized racial…