color line
Discrimination's invisible barrier
The color line is a barrier—social, legal, or customary—separating white people from people of other races, especially Black Americans.
The term emerged in the era of segregation to describe both formal laws and informal practices that enforced racial separation: crossing the color line, breaking the color line.
Jackie Robinson famously broke baseball's color line in 1947.
- double consciousnessAwareness of conflicting identities
- Jim CrowRacial separation laws
- segregationForced separation by group
- racial divideSeparation between ethnic groups
- racismPrejudice based on ethnicity
apartheid · Plessy v. Ferguson · drinking fountain · prejudice · passing · one-drop rule · miscegenation · separation · W.E.B. Du Bois · white supremacy · redlining · other side of the tracks · blockbusting · white · systemic racism · institutional racism · black · inequality
- Jim CrowJim Crow laws, separate but equal, segregation laws, Plessy v. Ferguson, whites only
- race literatureHarlem Renaissance, slave narratives, racial themes, minority voices, protest literature
- Black HistoryMartin Luther King Jr., MLK, Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass
- racial identityracial identity, mixed heritage, racial passing, ethnic identity, race mixing
color lineintegration
Combining into a whole
racial integration · desegregation · racial equality · racial unity · social integration
color lineequal access
Uniform right to participate
open society · equal opportunity · freedom of association · social mobility · meritocracy
color lineracial equality
Equal treatment regardless of ancestry
equal rights · civil rights · racial justice · equal opportunity · nondiscrimination
color, line, colorful, colored, coloring, colorless, multicolor, coloration, discoloration