ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 opens with a brief discussion of race, slavery, and the slave trade in the Western tradition to provide context for the discussion of these topics in our history. We then explore the academic literature on the social structure of race in American history and in contemporary American life. Chapter 1 concludes by describing the dominant racial orders in American history from colonization, through slavery and Jim Crow, to the mid-twentieth century Civil Rights Revolution and its challenge by the ideology of a colorblind society.
