How has public policy defined race in America?
Race in itself means nothing – the markers of race, skin color, hair texture, the things that we identify as racial markers – mean nothing unless they are given social meaning and unless there’s public policy and private actions that act upon those kinds of characteristics. When you look at racial differences and racial inequality through the lens of wealth, it pushes us to look at the whole history of America from slavery through today and examine the public policies and private actions that generated these differences. And when you see slavery that was based on the color of skin, when you see public policies like the differences in the homestead and land reform, based mainly on the color of the skin, that creates race. That creates the social manifestations of what we consider to be the social construction of race in America. And it’s interesting that a lot of these racialized outcomes came out of the most progressive legislation in American history – the whole set of legislation dur
