ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 deals with the slowly changing American sense of citizenship, full social and civil rights, over the course of our history. These constitutional provisions, laws, and norms operationalized the demographic fact of White dominance from the colonial period, disrupted only briefly by the Civil War and Reconstruction, well into the twentieth century. Later in U.S. history, when appropriate data becomes available, we present and discuss voter registration, turnout, and partisanship by race and ethnicity. This chapter traces the fight for civil recognition for American racial and ethnic minorities, including Black, Hispanic, and Asian citizens and demonstrates how politics has by turns both hastened and slowed full social and political inclusion.
