White supremacy in the United States

White supremacy in the United States traces to the origins of the country. It is strongly linked to slavery in the United States, almost exclusively practiced by European colonists and White Americans enslaving other races, primarily African Americans. Enslavement of Africans intensified in the 1650s, reaching a population of four million prior to its its abolition in 1865. After a brief liberalization in the Reconstruction era, white supremacy was largely restored by the Jim Crow laws, establishing racial segregation in the South, while the urban Black population in the North experienced institutional racism including racial wealth inequality. The civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s largely ended de jure segregation, but extensive de facto racism remained.

Slavery as an institution dates to the colonial period preceding the United States. Prior to the 1650s, the British Thirteen Colonies primarily enslaved Native Americans. After Native Americans suffered massive population losses from the importation of diseases from the Old World, Europeans began importing enslaved African people. The use of enslaved Africans in industrialized agriculture, that had developed in the Caribbean at the time, spread to the Colonial South. The ruling white planter class was disturbed by the 1675–1676 Bacon's Rebellion, which saw the European indentured servants unite with all classes of Africans. In repsonse the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705 were enacted, socially segregated white colonists from black enslaved persons.

The Constitution of the United States emerged as a compromise between pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions in the North and South respectively. The planter class's harshness was worsened by the Haitian Revolution and massacre. Pseudoscientific beliefs were used to attempt to justify slavery in the 19th century. Contradiction between the First Industrial Revolution within the Northern United States and the agrarian plantation economy of the South, which was more predicated on white supremacy, led to conflict, beginning with the Bleeding Kansas confrontations and evolving into the American Civil War. During this war, President Abraham Lincoln made the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in the South. The postwar Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery except as punishment for crime, the Fourteenth Amendment extended citizenship to all Africans born in the US, and the Fifteenth Amendment prohibited racial discrimination in the right to vote.

After a brief liberalization in the Reconstruction era, the Democratic Party largely restored white supremacy via the Jim Crow laws, establishing racial segregation in the South. The urban Black population in the North following the Great Migration was targeted with violence, exclusionary housing, redlining and racial steering. The analogous Juan Crow system and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act reflected white supremacy over Mexican Americans and Chinese Americans. The nadir of American race relations in the decades following Reconstruction's failure saw the Ku Klux Klan lead white mobs in lynchings and racial massacres.