The U.S. Supreme Court entered the debate in the 1850s and further codified the unequal treatment of black people. The court heard arguments concerning the enslavement of black people. Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote, “the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”3 That opinion in part set a precedent for the 1857 ruling in the Dred Scott decision. Pro-slavery attorneys introduced studies by anthropologists, such as Morton, who said whites and Negroes belonged to different species. Anthropologist Josiah Nott testified that slavery saved Negroes from reverting to their original barbaric state. The Dred Scott opinion re-enforced the point of view that people of African ancestry could not claim American citizenship and reduced them to enslavement. The ruling returned Scott to slavery and concluded that he lacked the right to file a lawsuit.
The Oxford English Dictionary in 1902 was the first to define racism. The dictionary said racism was “the theory that distinctive human characteristics and abilities are determined by race.” The dictionary termed racism as a synonym of racialism, which is the belief in the superiority of a particular race. Americans rarely used the term racism in the early 1900s. Pioneering civil rights activist and journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett did not mention the concepts racism or racist in her memoir, Crusade for Justice, which she began writing in 1928, but died in 1931 before finishing the book. Instead she used words such as race hatred and race prejudice. The word racism did not appear in the Merriam-Webster dictionary prior to 1949. Webster defined racism as “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.” Later Merriam-Webster revised the definition stating that it represented a systemic problem and not simply personal prejudice. It is “a doctrine or political program based on the assumption of racism is designed to execute its principles.”
Systemic racism is a series of actions of interacting mechanisms that make opportunities available to racial groups on an unequal and unjustified basis. Institutional racism refers to leaders of organizations or operations that distributed opportunities and services inequitably based on race. Institutional racism is the mechanism by which systemic racism functions. Education, healthcare, financing, and justice are among the institutions providing societal resources that Caucasians believed reserved for white people.