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This page, while it has some problems, highlights the history of scientific racism and how these ideas have been used by politicians and the public to justify genocide, ethnocide, slavery, segregation, etc.  It also should give some idea of how these deeply entrenched attitudes linger in our society and continue to have some effect on continuing inequalities.

What writers like these and others commenting in a similar vein agree upon is the absence of a readily identifiable foreign national tradition among black Americans. Thus there is no cherished alternative-there is no way to go but into the American mainstream, as it appears. But Frazier and Glazer and Moynihan carry the point too far, in our terms of what culture means. An ethnic culture does not have to be foreign, and all those who are one hundred percent American are not American in the same way. There is a black culture. largely evolved in America as a response to black American conditions, just as "black" has become a term for an ethnic group only in America. As Singer (1962) describes it, there has been an ethnogenesis on American ground. [Page 196] Myrdal, has a clearer view of this fact, but in his dramatic terms he rejects the possibility that maintaining or even strengthening the separate black culture would be to the advantage of black people. Obviously there is at least some kind of a disagreement between such views and those of protagonists of cultural nationalism. Maulana Ron Karenga (1968:164) states that black people must free themselves culturally before they can succeed politically. Stokely Carmichael (1968 a:158) sees the fight for the cultural integrity of black people as one of the struggles of the black power movement. And Julius Lester (1968:84-85) suggests that white Americans have consciously attempted to commit cultural genocide ever since the days of slavery-it was impractical to let black people have a culture of their own. The nationalists clearly feel that black culture at present has too little integrity.

Slave society was stratified into three castes: a small number of Whites, a smaller number of "free people of color" (generally mulattoes), and a huge Black slave population. White-minority rule led to the development of a "white bias": European phenotypic and cultural traits were more highly valued than their African or Creole counterparts. With Emancipation, the castes were transformed into classes, but the White bias persisted, resulting in a "color-class pyramid": a White upper class, a "Brown" middle class, and a Black lower-class majority. The addition of Chinese, East Indian, and Lebanese immigrants, who did not have a clear place in the color-class pyramid, made stratification more complex. Color and ethnicity still influence social interactions, but the White bias and the color-class pyramid have become less evident since the mid-twentieth century. Nevertheless, Jamaica is still highly stratified by wealth; it has a very small, prosperous upper class, a small middle class, and a huge, impoverished lower class. In the mid-1960s Jamaica had the highest rate of income inequality in the world.