Racial Classification System Based on Skin Color Determined Who Could Escape From Poverty
Between the Civil War and the Great Depression broad policies were put in place that classified citizens based on their skin color. “Those broad policies called forth more specific policies from the census bureau, state legislatures, courts, and other institutions that sought to label, classify, order and otherwise manage people of mixed or ambiguous or merely foreign descent,” according to a report by Harvard University’s Jennifer L. Hochschild and University of Virginia’s Vesla Mae Weaver. These policies ultimately kept people of darker complexions trapped in poverty.
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