mise of the American Dream is still denied to much of the black population. The Hispanic population in the Southwest and the Puerto Rican population in areas of the Northeast are also minority groups that do not share fully in the economic promise of American society and that have been discriminated against and made into a near-permanent underclass. Throughout American history, there have been minorities that have immigrated to the United States and that have encountered prejudice and discrimination once they arrived, including the Jews, the Irish, and various Asian groups. One element distinguishes between these groups on the one hand and African-Americans on the other, and that element is slavery. Only the ancestors of the black population were brought to this country against their will and labored under slavery for generations before being freed at the end of the Civil War. Much of what they have had to face since--racism, institutional resistance, Jim Crow laws, discrimination, unemployment, the Welfare State--can be traced to slavery as the root cause of black disadvantage today. Hacker notes that America is inherently a "white" country in character, in structure, and in culture, and African-Americans as a result face boundaries and constrictions on all sides (Hacker, 1992, 4).
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 ...