In the Unites States, many Americans think of racism as being overplayed after the election of America’s first black president. However, race is a hierarchical system and as such, it never dies, just evolves. In the book The New Jim Crow, the author, Michelle Alexander, claims that racial division is not a precondition of slavery, if not a consequence of it. Once slavery was instituted it became detached from its initial function and acquired a social potency all its own (Alexander 26). In the early period of European imperialism, the dominant class were able to rationalize social control in the United States by appropriating land and increasing the labor process needed to maintain the lands and crops through the process of slavery. The plantation owners (mostly European imperialists) of the time, the white supremacy who wrote the constitution of the nation and other bureaucratic officeholder had enough symbolic power and symbolic capital to construct the lives of many African Americans today. Even though slavery is not legal in the United States, many laws and regulation have been created and instituted in society to preserve the racial hierarchy that was in