I think you’re missing the point. The US had state, local and private laws, regulations, and institutions that discriminated against black people with varying degrees of formality. The discrimination in question existed and was widespread in the US.

I think you are missing my point. The USA itself is not one thing, and the laws are not one thing. Specifically, by design and in fact, people's rights to do a wide variety of things, were and are still, different. The language you are insisting on, is misinformation.

https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/discrimination-on-the-...

The post you replied to said:

> Up until about 1971 (possibly later, but that's the date of Loving vs Virginia), the US had formal, legal discrimination against black people.

And you seem to be arguing that this is “misinformation”. The best I can make of your objection is that, prior to 1967, the US did not outlaw miscegenation and that it was merely 16 states that did so and that these laws were legal in the US. This is IMO unhelpful nitpicking — the OP’s point had nothing to do with which books the laws were written in and also did not depend on all states being affected.

(The connection between miscegenation and college admissions is rather more distant than, say, the discrimination outlawed not too much earlier by Brown v Board of Education, but even that is a bit of a nitpick.)

States can do many bad things because the US constitution designed by the founders of the country lets them do it. So, no this scapegoat is not available. The discrimination is 100% an issue of the US as a country.

I agree that the founding politics of the United States did bargain with slavers, and wrote the documents and early government, such that the slave trade was legal in certain states. Readers here need to know that there were other states with different founders, who were completely and utterly opposed to slavery, and to Catholic forms of government also, while we are at it. And you might know that slavery, or indentured servitude, or peasants or whatever you want to call that, was a massive part of "civilization" across Europe, Central Asia and into the Far East. There was not industrial base without labor.

Last statement is, some religious people, of different groups, were absolutely and completely against slavery, preached against racism, wrote laws that were fair and impartial, from the very first days. The founding groups of the United States included deeply religious people who opposed slavery and did not practice it, and therefore got no monetary support from that system. And some of those deeply opposed to slavery, grew and built a great society. You or others cannot just ignore those founders and claim now that "everyone did it" , it is the fault of the USA, etc .. The USA was a place that broke away from the Old World systems, including a LOT of slaving, but the progress was uneven, and the slave system was profitable so their masters had a lot of money and things that go with that.

You're right, but we're not talking about groups inside the country. Iran, for example, also has lots of progressive groups, but its still basically a dictatorship in nature. We are talking about the legal framework for the USA itself. This institutional entity was friendly to slavery and perpetrator of human exploitation at several levels. Despite several well intentioned attempts of constitutional and democratic reform with some success, the same nature remains in the 21st century because it was never completely changed.