From the Indian Removal Act onward, U.S. policy has repeatedly betrayed its own professed ideals. The federal government did not protect life or liberty equally; instead it orchestrated the dispossession, slaughter, and cultural eradication of Native American peoples. In 1830 President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, authorizing the forcible expulsion of southeastern tribes to “Indian Territory” (Oklahoma). The result was the Trail of Tears, a mass forced march during which tens of thousands of Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw and others perished from disease, exposure, or starvation . As one account notes, the Act empowered officials to uproot tribes from homes in Georgia, Alabama, the Carolinas, Florida and Tennessee, and “in a mass atrocity remembered as the Trail of Tears, tens of thousands of Native Americans died or were killed after fleeing their homes in terror” . Even when tribes made treaties, the U.S. routinely broke them. As the State Department history observes, when treaties and even Supreme Court decisions (e.g. Worcester v. Georgia, 1832) stood in the way of land grabs, the government simply violated them to accelerate white settlement . In short, the U.S. repeatedly denied Native nations the equal protection and due process promised by the Constitution, acting instead to expropriate their lands and lives.
This pattern of genocide and ethnic cleansing is well-documented. Professor Benjamin Madley’s research shows that California state and federal officials launched “genocide” campaigns against California Indians between 1846 and 1873. He recounts that “by 1873, roaming bands of Indian-killers” had slain more than 80% of the state’s native population, reducing it from an estimated 150,000 to about 30,000. These campaigns were funded by taxpayer dollars and openly celebrated; one historian calls Madley’s account “gruesomely thorough” in attributing direct blame to the U.S. government. On the Plains, the slaughter was equally callous. In the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 a Colorado militia under Colonel Chivington – acting on explicit orders from Governor John Evans – attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho village known to be peaceful. With cold brutality they murdered and mutilated dozens of unarmed men, women and children. Governor Evans had instructed Chivington to “kill and destroy, as enemies of the country, wherever they may be found, all such hostile Indians”. Chivington reputedly bragged his goal was to “kill and scalp all, little and big; nits make lice”. These were not rogue soldiers but U.S. troops committing state-sanctioned mass murder – a literal campaign of annihilation against a “defined group” of Native people. Decades later, in 1890 at Wounded Knee, the U.S. Army once again executed hundreds of surrendering Lakota in cold blood under the pretext of suppressing the Ghost Dance religion (decimating the last armed Native resistance). The Wounded Knee Massacre, like others, became “a rallying cry” for Native rights precisely because it epitomized the federal government’s ruthless betrayal of indigenous people.
Not content with killing on the battlefields, U.S. policy pursued cultural genocide. In 1879 the Army opened the first federal boarding school at Carlisle, PA, on the maxim “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” Tens of thousands of Native children were forcibly abducted and interned in these schools. They were stripped of their languages, names, and families, fed military rations, and punished for speaking their native tongues. A recent investigation exhumed the graves of three Arapaho boys who died at Carlisle in the 1880s — boys who had been forbidden even to use their own names . This system of “forced assimilation” was an official government policy designed to eradicate indigenous culture. In the words of historian Brianna Theobald, federal and local authorities “tried to control indigenous families and women’s reproduction” through measures such as boarding schools, sterilization and child removal . The boarding schools’ motto and the mass burials at Carlisle stand as emblems of an ongoing colonial war waged by American governance against Native identity.
Against all these horrors, the Constitution’s lofty promises were entirely ignored. The Fifth Amendment guarantees that private property may not be “taken” without just compensation, but generations of indigenous land – home to sovereign nations long before 1787 – were confiscated with no redress. When Native leaders appealed to the Constitution, they were rebuffed. Instead of equal justice, they faced special laws and deadly violence; Chief Justice Marshall’s 1832 Worcester decision defending Cherokee sovereignty went unenforced, and Andrew Jackson famously defied it: “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it”. This litany of broken treaties and massacres reveals that from the founding onward, American governance upheld slavery and white supremacy as constitutional pillars, while trampling the rights and treaties of others.
Slavery, Segregation and Mass Incarceration.
The federal government also designed a racial caste system around African-Americans. The Constitution itself originally enshrined slavery (the Three-Fifths Clause, Fugitive Slave Clause) as if the humanity of Black people need not count. For more than a century, the U.S. treated Black lives as cheap labor and property. Southern state governments reinforced this after the Civil War by criminalizing Black poverty. The Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery “except as a punishment for crime,” and the postwar Black Codes made nearly any unemployed Black man a felon. The result was the convict-leasing system: prisons filled with Black people who were leased as laborers to private industries (mines, railroads, farms) for virtually no cost to the lessees. The Library of Congress notes that, under these laws, “justice-involved individuals [often] could not pay their court fees” and were then sent to serve brutal forced labor terms. In effect, a legal sleight-of-hand continued slavery’s exploitation under another name – the government “created a prison convict leasing system of involuntary servitude”. This grotesque system persisted well into the early 20th century, and it generated enormous profit for governments and corporations while African Americans remained de facto chattel.
These inequities deepened with Jim Crow segregation. Southern legislatures openly discriminated by law: segregated schools, transport, neighborhoods, and even restrooms. The federal judiciary at first upheld this, giving America two separate (unequal) societies for Blacks and whites. Constitutional guarantees of equal protection and due process, first articulated in the 14th Amendment after the Civil War, were shunted aside. In practice, equal protection became a mockery – Black citizens were denied voting rights (through poll taxes and literacy tests), public services, and basic dignity. Vigilante violence and lynchings terrorized Black communities with impunity (often with local police complicity), illustrating that the state sanctioned not only segregation but also terror as a tool of social control.
The mid-20th century Civil Rights movement finally forced formal legal equality on paper, but the legacy of racial hierarchy endured. In the 1960s the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover declared Black liberation movements to be “extremist” threats to national security, and launched COINTELPRO: a domestic espionage campaign to dismantle Black organizations. Internal FBI memos explicitly aimed “to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the radical push for Black equality. The Bureau wired activists’ offices, fomented internal dissent, and even incited violence; as one historian notes, the FBI equated civil rights leaders with communists so it could justify “the dirtiest of tricks” to “discredit, disrupt, and destroy” the movement. Such surveillance and sabotage of Black organizing – using public funds to violate the First Amendment rights of citizens – reveals the extent to which the government prioritized racial hierarchy over constitutional democracy.
Since the 1970s, the War on Drugs cemented these inequalities into the criminal-justice system. The government’s war on narcotics disproportionately targeted Black and brown communities, filling prisons with people of color. African Americans use drugs at roughly the same rates as whites, but are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses at many times the rate. For example, in 2014 Black Americans were 2.3 million of the total 6.8 million people under correctional control – roughly 34% of the prison/jail population – despite being about 13% of the U.S. populace. They are jailed at more than five times the rate of whites. This disparity is not explained by crime differences but by policy: federal sentencing laws had imposed a 100-to-1 disparity between crack cocaine (used disproportionately by Black communities) and powder cocaine (used by whites). Under that policy, possession of just 5 grams of crack triggered the same mandatory minimum as 500 grams of powder – a rule few would call just if it did not overwhelmingly imprison Black Americans. Only after decades of protest did Congress narrow the ratio to 18:1 in 2010, and even today many of those harsh sentences remain in effect. Meanwhile, police departments practice “Driving While Black” racial profiling on highways, stopping and searching Black drivers at far higher rates . In sum, the architecture of mass incarceration – from tough-on-crime laws to biased policing – falls heaviest on communities of color, undermining the Constitution’s promise of equal justice.
All the while, government policies have trampled not only civil rights but basic human dignity and scientific ethics. One stark example is the U.S. Public Health Service’s Tuskegee syphilis study (1932–1972). Over forty years, Public Health doctors lured 600 impoverished Black sharecroppers into a clinical trial on “bad blood.” In reality, 399 of the men had syphilis, but they were deceived and denied treatment even after penicillin – a known cure – became available in 1947. Affected survivors later lamented that “they found penicillin, and they never gave it to us”. The men endured painful spinal taps and slowly died of preventable disease in the name of federal research. This was a medical atrocity conducted by government doctors: an explicit abuse of Black patients’ trust and bodies for pseudo-scientific goals. It was later paralleled by other secret human experiments. The Manhattan Project’s doctors injected unwitting patients with radioactive substances to study toxicity. In 1946–47, physicians at Chicago’s hospitals “injected six patients with uranium with the research goal of discerning the minimum dose that would produce detectable kidney damage.” These experiments deliberately risked human health: as the Nuclear Heritage Foundation reports, the protocol was “intended to produce a harmful reaction in the subjects.” Yet the scientists pressed on in secrecy, driven by a warped calculus of Cold War research benefit. The ethical violation is clear: vulnerable people (often hospital patients with no say) were used as guinea pigs without consent, betraying Hippocratic and constitutional principles of individual rights.
The mistreatment extended to Native women as well. In the 1970s the federal Indian Health Service ran sterilization programs that overwhelmingly targeted Native American women of childbearing age. Historian Brianna Theobald estimates that 25–42% of Native women were sterilized by doctors during that decade. Many were coerced or not fully informed, often pressured to sign papers under false pretenses. These forced sterilizations, subsidized by the U.S. government, “marked the culmination of a long history of efforts by federal and local authorities to manage the reproductive lives of Native families” . They represent a brutal assault on bodily autonomy and constitute a continuation of the same colonizing impulse that ran the boarding schools. That government agents could sterilize thousands of tribal women without their free consent is a grim reminder that even after the Civil Rights Era, the state could violate constitutional rights of liberty and privacy for minorities with near impunity.
The government’s racism and disregard for human life also show up in its treatment of immigrants and minority citizens. In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act – the first U.S. law to ban immigration based on race. It suspended all Chinese laborers’ entry for ten years and made Chinese in America second-class aliens. Later exclusions targeted other Asians and southern Europeans. During World War II, the government incarcerated 120,000 Japanese Americans – two-thirds of them U.S. citizens – in remote camps merely for their ancestry. Families lost homes and businesses; innocent people spent years behind barbed wire without charges or trial. These actions were excused as wartime necessity, but in truth they flagrantly violated due process and equal protection. The U.S. Government, as the National WWII Museum recounts, only issued reparations and a formal apology after decades of pressure. Such episodes – scapegoating minorities under state power – illustrate how easily constitutional safeguards can be dismantled by prejudice and fear.
Even the environment has suffered from racist governance. Minority and poor communities have often borne the toxic legacies of industrial waste. Consider the Flint water crisis: in 2014 Michigan officials switched the supply of a majority-Black city to an untreated river source, then ignored alarms that lead levels in drinking water were off the charts. Scholars have called Flint “the most egregious example of environmental injustice in recent U.S. history” . Here the state effectively poisoned a community as if its people’s health were expendable. Likewise, the U.S. subjected Pacific Islanders to hundreds of nuclear detonations. Between 1946 and 1958 the Atomic Energy Commission exploded 67 nuclear bombs on the Marshall Islands . Islanders were relocated from their homelands and exposed to fallout that caused cancer and birth defects; their suffering was a byproduct of America’s pursuit of military power. In both cases, the principles of public welfare and equal protection were abandoned: no high-ranking official faced accountability for these deliberate harms. These betrayals of human rights show that the government often sacrifices minorities and the poor for profits, power, or ideology.
Collectively, these injustices reveal the systemic nature of American cruelty. They are not isolated errors but part of a continuum: the very Constitution that enshrines equality has been co-opted to justify oppression. The 14th Amendment’s promise of equal protection is contradicted by racialized policing and incarceration. The 13th’s anti-slavery guarantee was circumvented by convict slavery and mass imprisonment. The Bill of Rights’ guarantees of free speech and due process were nullified in COINTELPRO and internment camps. The Declaration’s assertion of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was flagrantly violated when the government waged literal wars on its own people (whether Black Americans, Native Americans, or immigrant communities). As activists and critics have long argued, American democracy has too often been a façade behind which entrenched interests carried out violence.
From a critical leftist perspective, the pattern is clear: America’s state has historically prioritized empire, capitalism, and racial hierarchy over universal justice. Whether manifest in 19th-century land grabs or 21st-century climate denial, government policy has repeatedly trampled morality. Laws and courts were routinely bent to reinforce white supremacy – often declaring minorities “unworthy” of protection. Even when moral outrage did force reform (as with Japanese American reparations or the Civil Rights Acts), it was only after immense suffering and struggle. The U.S. thus stands guilty of a monumental hypocrisy: extolling liberty at home while perpetrating atrocity abroad. The historical record – documented by scholars, archival research, and survivor testimony – leaves no doubt that systemic injustice has been woven into American governance. Recognizing this painful truth is a first step toward aligning the nation’s practices with its professed values.
Credible academic and historical sources substantiate each of the above claims. For example, Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative details the 1830s Indian Removal Act and its deadly aftermath ; state archives and scholarly accounts chronicle broken treaties and sanctioned massacres; legal histories describe the convict-lease system that re-enslaved Black people under the 13th Amendment; public health and archival records recount the Tuskegee and radiation experiments on unsuspecting citizens; and research institutions have identified the Flint crisis as a racialized environmental disaster . Each documented outrage stands in stark contrast to constitutional ideals. These sources – from university press works and law reviews to government archives – leave no credible doubt that American governance has systematically violated the ideals of justice and equality it claims to uphold.
References
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Gemma Ortwerth 
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