White-Passing Minorities and White Privileges (Essay Sample)

White-passing Minorities and White Privileges
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White-passing Minorities and White Privileges
The United States is highly multicultural and comprises of people from all walks of life. While blacks were brought into the country as slaves, they have since been emancipated and leave freely in the society. Over the years, persons of different ethnicities particularly those from underdeveloped and developing nations have migrated and settled into the region in search of the American dream. They purpose to take advantage of the abundance of employment opportunities and quality resources. The US is also quite stable and peaceful compared to their countries of origin and has a constitution that accords them equal rights and freedoms. The different ethnicities in the US have learned to coexist although not entirely and intermarriages are continuously and increasingly being witnessed. Some of the offspring of these intermarriages easily pass for whites. It is worth noting that despite opening its doors for people of all ethnicities and racial backgrounds, the US remains largely divided on the basis of race. Whites make up the majority and have since time immemorial identified themselves as the dominant and superior group. Despite the rights and freedoms enshrined in the US constitution, whites continuously discriminate and victimize persons of minority groups including African Americans and Hispanics. They are shortchanged in terms of equitable distribution of resources and forced to live in abject poverty. They are also treated as criminals by law enforcement agencies and subjected to brutal force. However, white-passing minorities are lucky as they get to benefit from white skin privilege.
History of White-Passing Minorities
Racial intermarriages were outlawed in the US as early as the 17th century through anti-miscegenation laws. According to Bhusal (2017), “Anti-miscegenation laws or miscegenation laws are laws that enforce racial segregation at the level of marriage and intimate relationships by criminalizing interracial marriage and sometimes also sex between members of different races”. Despite the presence of miscegenation laws, enslaved women were continuously raped by the masters and consequently bore mixed-race children. These children were identified by different names including quadroons in the sense that they were one quarter African and the rest of European ancestry. While the reality was that these mixed-race children were half-white, hypodescent institutions that existed during that period considered and labelled them black and consequently inferior based on their racial caste of slavery (Bhusal, 2017). It is also worth noting that there are mixed-race children who were born between whites and free slaves and since then became ancestors of free families of color.
During the period that the US was marred by the injustice that is slavery, mixed-race people particularly