Racial Minorities

In Racial Minorities, historian Geroid Tanquary Robinson examines race relations in the United States through the experiences of Black Americans, Native Americans, Jewish Americans, and Asian Americans.

Writing in 1922, Robinson challenges the then-common claim that racial prejudice can be explained by biological superiority or inferiority. Instead, he looks to economic competition, political power, social exclusion, cultural assimilation, and the material interests of majority groups as forces that shape discrimination.

Moving across questions of education, labor, voting, migration, religion, segregation, and intermarriage, Robinson attempts to understand how minority groups are absorbed into—or kept apart from—the larger American society.

Originally published in Civilization in the United States: An Inquiry by Thirty Americans, the essay offers a revealing historical snapshot of American thinking about race, prejudice, assimilation, and national identity in the early twentieth century.

While notably skeptical of pseudoscientific racial hierarchy, the work also contains outdated racial terminology and assumptions characteristic of its era.

Narrated by Eleesha Lewis.