Racial segregation

• 1. Introduction

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  Racial segregation is the systematic separation of people according to race or ethnicity in the ordinary spaces of daily life. It touches eating, drinking, schooling, worship, travel, shopping, and where a person can legally make a home. The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance defines it as the act by which a person separates others on the basis of enumerated grounds without objective and reasonable justification. Under the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, racial segregation can rise to the level of an international crime and a crime against humanity. What makes this subject both sprawling and urgent is that it is not a relic of a distant era. From Tang dynasty China to post-apartheid South Africa, from the cotton fields of the American South to the inner suburbs of Canadian cities, the impulse to divide people by origin has taken legal, informal, and structural forms across every inhabited continent. The questions worth sitting with are these: how did these systems justify themselves? How were they resisted? And what remains when the laws are finally gone?

• 2. Ancient Roots, Imperial Codes

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  In 779, the Tang dynasty issued an edict forcing Uyghurs to wear their ethnic dress, blocking them from marrying Han Chinese women, and banning them from passing as Han Chinese. The logic was explicit: it was about preserving boundaries between groups the state had decided were distinct. In 836, Governor Lu Chun arrived in Canton, found Chinese people living alongside foreigners, and immediately moved to ban interracial marriages and make it illegal for foreigners to own property. The 836 law named its targets in specific terms, describing "dark peoples" or "people of colour" as Iranians, Sogdians, Arabs, Indians, Malays, and Sumatrans, among others.

  The Qing dynasty, founded not by Han Chinese but by Manchus, presents a more layered picture. Early Qing policy actually promoted intermarriage as a tool of imperial consolidation. Nurhaci married one of his granddaughters to Ming General Li Yongfang after Li surrendered Fushun in Liaoning in 1618. In 1632, Prince Yoto and Hongtaiji arranged a mass marriage of Han Chinese officers and officials to Manchu women, involving roughly a thousand couples, explicitly to promote harmony. Han defectors swelled the Eight Banners so substantially that ethnic Manchus made up only 16% of the Banners by 1648, with Han Bannermen at 75%.

  Yet the dynasty later reversed course. It imposed a policy of physical segregation between Bannermen and Han civilians, barring Han civilians and Mongols from settling in Manchuria and banning Mongol civilians from crossing even into neighboring Mongol Banner administrative zones. The Outer Willow Palisade physically divided Manchuria from Inner Mongolia. Banner garrisons occupied separate walled zones within the cities where they were stationed. The Qing case is a reminder that segregation is not always about supremacy in a simple sense; it can be about minority groups protecting cultural survival through the machinery of state power.

• 3. Colonial Templates

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  France conquered Ottoman-controlled Algeria in 1830 and maintained colonial rule there for well over a century. Scholars have described this arrangement as "quasi-apartheid." The colonial law of 1865 allowed Arab and Berber Algerians to apply for French citizenship only if they abandoned their Muslim identity. Azzedine Haddour has argued this established "the formal structures of a political apartheid," while Camille Bonora-Waisman identified it as distinct even from France's other colonial arrangements in Morocco and Tunisia. This internal system of apartheid is cited among the causes of the 1954 insurrection and the independence war that followed.

  In Southern Rhodesia, the Land Apportionment Act of 1930 governed land allocation along racial lines in rural areas. One measure of how thoroughly segregation penetrated everyday life came in 1959, when a newly built theatre's plan to share restrooms across racial lines triggered a public dispute. The proposed unsegregated toilets at the Reps Theatre provoked a controversy that became known as "The Battle of the Toilets."

  In the Belgian Congo, Governor-General Leon Petillon worked from 1952 onward to construct a "Belgian-Congolese community" in which Black and White people would be treated as equals. King Baudouin's visit to the colony in 1955 was celebrated as a milestone. Yet anti-miscegenation laws remained in place throughout this period. Between 1959 and 1962, thousands of mixed-race Congolese children were forcibly deported from the Congo by the Belgian government and the Catholic Church and relocated to Belgium. In Uganda, after British rule ended in 1962, the country's Indian minority, who constituted 1% of the population but earned a fifth of the national income and controlled 90% of businesses, lived in ethnically segregated communities with their own schools and healthcare. In 1972, President Idi Amin ordered their expulsion, and the government confiscated some 5,655 firms, ranches, farms, and agricultural estates.

• 4. Jewish Segregation Across Centuries

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  In 1204, the papacy required Jews to segregate themselves from Christians and to wear distinctive clothing. That decree formalized what had existed informally in much of Europe and gave it the authority of Rome. Forced segregation spread through Europe during the 14th and 15th centuries. In the Russian Empire, Jews were confined to the Pale of Settlement, the western frontier territory that roughly corresponds to modern-day Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine. By the early 20th century, the majority of Europe's Jews lived within its boundaries.

  In Morocco, from the beginning of the 15th century, Jewish populations were confined to mellahs. In cities, a mellah was surrounded by a wall with a fortified gateway. In rural areas, mellahs were separate villages whose only inhabitants were Jews.

  A mid-19th century account by J. J. Benjamin described the lives of Persian Jews in terms that require no editorial gloss. He wrote that they were obliged to live in a separate part of town, considered unclean, prohibited from going out when it rained, because rain washing dirt from them might soil the feet of Muslims, and subjected to beatings in the street. Shop owners would not let them touch goods for sale. Anyone identified as Jewish faced spitting, beatings, and the danger of murder during religious observances. On the 16th of May 1940, Norway's Administrasjonsradet asked German occupiers why radio receivers had been confiscated from Jews. The historian Tor Bomann-Larsen has claimed the council then quietly accepted this racial segregation, and that two years later, Norwegian police arrested citizens at the same addresses from which radios had been taken. Albert Einstein, in direct response to Italy's 1938 racial laws, cancelled his honorary membership in the Accademia dei Lincei.

• 5. Fascism's Legal Architecture

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  In 1938, under pressure from the Nazis, Benito Mussolini's regime passed a series of racial laws instituting official segregationist policy across the Italian Empire. The laws banned Jews from teaching or studying in ordinary schools and universities, from owning industries deemed nationally important, from practicing journalism, from serving in the military, and from marrying non-Jews. The immediate practical consequence was severe. Among the scientists who left their posts were the physicists Emilio Segre, Enrico Fermi (whose wife was Jewish), Bruno Pontecorvo, Bruno Rossi, and Tullio Levi-Civita; the mathematicians Federigo Enriques and Guido Fubini; and the fascist propaganda director Margherita Sarfatti, who had been one of Mussolini's mistresses. Rita Levi-Montalcini, who would later win the Nobel Prize for Medicine, was forbidden from working at the university.

  Germany's race laws drew explicitly on American precedents. Adolf Hitler praised America's system of institutional racism in Mein Kampf. The National Socialist Handbook for Law and Legislation of 1934-35, edited by Hitler's lawyer Hans Frank, contained a pivotal essay by Herbert Kier on race legislation that devoted a quarter of its pages to U.S. law, covering segregation, race-based citizenship, immigration, and anti-miscegenation rules. This directly inspired the two principal Nuremberg Laws, the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Under these laws, relationships between those classified as "Aryan" and "non-Aryan" were called Rassenschande, race defilement. Aryans convicted could be incarcerated in a concentration camp; non-Aryans faced the death penalty. Under the General Government of occupied Poland in 1940, the Nazis divided the population into distinct groups with different rights, different food rations, different allowed housing zones, and different access to public transportation. Polish forced laborers, between 1939 and 1945 numbering at least 1.5 million transported to the Reich, were required to wear a yellow cloth tag with a purple border and the letter "P," were subject to curfews, and were banned from public transportation. Sexual relations between Poles and Germans were punishable by death.

• 6. South Africa and the Apartheid System

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  The National Party's victory in South Africa's 1948 general election brought to power a government committed to formal, nationwide racial separation under the name "separate development." What followed built on discriminatory legislation that dated to the founding of the Union of South Africa and the earlier Boer republics, but went far further. The Population Registration Act of 1950 classified every resident into one of four racial groups: "black," "white," "Coloured," and "Indian," and noted this classification on identification documents. The Group Areas Act of 1950 assigned different regions to different races, making it illegal to cross boundaries without a permit. The Reservation of Separate Amenities Act of 1953 labeled public facilities, including hospitals, universities, and parks, by race. The Bantu Education Act of 1953 segregated national education. Pass laws deprived Black South Africans of freedom of movement within their own country.

  Resistance began almost immediately. As early as 1949, the Youth League of the African National Congress advocated ending apartheid and proposed multiple methods of opposition. Over the following decades, hundreds of actions followed, including the Black Consciousness Movement, student protests, labor strikes, and church activism. In 1991, the Abolition of Racially Based Land Measures Act repealed the Group Areas Act and other segregation laws. In 1994, Nelson Mandela won in South Africa's first multiracial democratic election. Despite these formal changes, the legacy of apartheid persists in high levels of racial inequality that sociologists continue to document in the post-apartheid era.

• 7. The American Record

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  Maryland passed the first anti-miscegenation law in 1691. Two centuries later, during the Lincoln-Douglas Debates in 1858, Abraham Lincoln stated plainly: "I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races." After the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, Jim Crow laws codified racial discrimination. Though many were passed shortly after the Civil War, they became fully formalized after the end of Reconstruction in 1877. The Supreme Court's 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling explicitly permitted "separate but equal" facilities. Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented, warning the decision would "stimulate aggressions upon the admitted rights of colored citizens," "arouse race hate," and "perpetuate a feeling of distrust between the races."

  The Cotton Club in Harlem, central to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, was a whites-only establishment. Duke Ellington and other Black performers were permitted to play there, but only before white audiences. At the reception honoring Jesse Owens following his performance at the 1936 Summer Olympics, he was not permitted to enter through the main doors of the Waldorf Astoria and was instead directed to a freight elevator. Hattie McDaniel, the first Black Academy Award recipient, was barred from attending the premiere of Gone with the Wind at Loew's Grand Theatre in Atlanta under Georgia's segregation laws. At the 12th Academy Awards ceremony at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, she was required to sit at a segregated table at the far wall. Her final wish to be buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery was denied because the cemetery was restricted to white people.

  In the U.S. military during World War II, the Army Air Force and the Marines had no Black enlisted personnel. The army had only five African-American officers. No African-American received the Medal of Honor during that war. Black soldiers sometimes gave up their train seats to Nazi prisoners of war. On the 11th of September 1964, John Lennon announced the Beatles would not play to a segregated audience in Jacksonville, Florida. City officials relented. A 1965 contract for a Beatles concert at the Cow Palace in California explicitly specified that the band "not be required to perform in front of a segregated audience."

  In 1958, Mildred Loving and Richard Loving were prosecuted in Virginia under the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 for their interracial marriage. Their one-year prison sentence was suspended, but in 1963 they sought help from the American Civil Liberties Union. The resulting appeal reached the Supreme Court, which in 1967 issued its ruling in Loving v. Virginia, invalidating all laws prohibiting interracial marriage. By 1968, all forms of segregation had been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited discrimination in the sale and rental of housing on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, and disability. Yet the Supreme Court's 1974 ruling in Milliken v. Bradley found de facto racial segregation acceptable so long as schools were not actively making policies of racial exclusion, and school segregation continued through indirect mechanisms. Thirty years after the civil rights era, the United States remained a residentially segregated society. By 1990, some sociologists were describing the persistence of residential separation as "hypersegregation" or "American apartheid."

• 8. Segregation's Continuing Forms

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  In Hungary, the racial segregation of Roma children in the education system has been an ongoing issue since the 1990s. A landmark case involving twenty-eight schools found that educational authorities had failed to intervene against discriminatory practices, violating national equal treatment laws. Similar rulings have come from multiple courts across Hungary.

  In Canada, the last Black-specific segregated school closed in Ontario in 1965, and in Nova Scotia in 1983. The last racially segregated Indigenous school closed in Saskatchewan in 1996. Section 38 of the 1910 Immigration Act had permitted the government to prohibit immigrants "belonging to any race deemed unsuited to the climate or requirements of Canada." This closed immigration system barred virtually all non-white immigrants until 1962. Black workers were systematically denied membership in trade unions when the labor movement organized in the late 19th century. Since the 1970s, some academics have raised concern that major Canadian cities are becoming more segregated along income and ethnic lines.

  In Malaysia, a constitutional distinction between bumiputra Malays and non-Bumiputra groups, including ethnic Chinese and Indians, creates a legally enshrined hierarchy of rights and privileges. A Stanford University study identified discriminatory policies among the main drivers of emigration of non-bumiputera Malaysians. Malaysia is not a signatory of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination; a possible ratification in 2018 prompted an anti-ICERD mass rally by Malay supremacists in the country's capital. In Mauritania, slavery was criminalized in August 2007. The number of people held in slavery was estimated at up to 600,000, or roughly 20% of the population, drawn primarily from the Haratin lower class of poor Black Africans who had been treated as natural slaves by Arab and Berber Moors for centuries. In the United Kingdom, the Race Relations Act 1965 made the "colour bar" in pubs illegal, but members' clubs could still bar people by race for some years after that.