Institutionalized Racism and the Eugenics Movement in the USA during the Early 20th Century

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2010 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,7, Ruhr-University of Bochum (Fakultat fur Philologie), language: English, abstract: Racist ideology touched ground in America with the arrival of the early Puritans, who established a restrictive apparatus that has been governed and controlled by white Anglo-Saxon power-relations ever since. They believed to be superior over the American Natives due to divine prophecy. The mistreatment of ethnic minorities is deeply rooted in the ideology of a white superior race, regarding non white ethnicities as weak and inferior and in terms of their different cultural behaviour as barbaric and heathenish and therefore not worthy of equal treatment. Yet it was not before the nineteeth century that an overly culturally justified became subject to "e;scientific determinism"e;. ... With the beginning of the twentieth century, U.S intelligentsia started waging a war on everyone who they saw 'unfit', weak or defective and therefore incapable of self-sustenance.