Race has been a constant source of identity politics; and in each century, politicians and average citizens have battled over which races counted and who belonged at the seat of decision making. The first wave of identity politics and race questioned the humanity of Blacks and the treatment of Native Americans as the eighteenth century merged into the nineteenth. The Civil War, the Trail of Tears, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and the Mexican-American War had race at the center of the nation’s determination of who held value. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the brief humanity of Reconstruction
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