We the People? Race, Gender, and the Struggle for Equality

Welcome to America at 250, a podcast series that explores the United States not simply as a country with a 250-year history, but as a set of ideas, narratives, institutions, conflicts, and cultural practices. Rather than moving chronologically through American history, this series asks questions that are central to American Studies: What is America? Who belongs? How was the nation created? Which myths shape American identity? And why has the United States so often presented itself as both a promise and a site of conflict?

This is Episode 3: We the People? Race, Gender, and the Struggle for Equality

The opening words of the U.S. Constitution are among the most recognizable in American political culture: “We the People.” But who, historically, has been included in “the people”?

This question takes us to the center of American history: the relationship between universal ideals and unequal social realities.

The United States was founded with powerful language about liberty and equality, but slavery was embedded in the economic and political order of the early republic. Millions of African Americans were enslaved over the course of U.S. history. Enslavement was not simply an unfortunate contradiction outside the political system; it was deeply connected to law, property, economic production, and political power.

The Civil War transformed this system. The abolition of slavery through the Thirteenth Amendment was followed by the Fourteenth Amendment, which established birthright citizenship and equal protection, and the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited denying the vote on racial grounds to male citizens. The Reconstruction era therefore represented a major attempt to redefine citizenship and the meaning of equality.

But Reconstruction did not produce lasting racial equality. After federal Reconstruction ended, white supremacist political structures became entrenched across much of the South. The system that developed became known as Jim Crow. Segregation, disenfranchisement, racial violence, and discriminatory law restricted African Americans’ citizenship and social mobility.

The twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement challenged these structures. Figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. became internationally known for advocating nonviolent protest and racial equality. But the movement was never represented by one person or one strategy.

Malcolm X, for example, articulated a different critique. He emphasized Black self-determination, racial pride, and the international dimensions of racial injustice. Comparing King and Malcolm X is useful not because one should be reduced to a symbol of moderation and the other to a symbol of radicalism, but because their different approaches reveal the diversity of Black political thought.

The struggle over citizenship was also never only about race.

Women were excluded from formal political citizenship in important ways during the early republic. The nineteenth-century women’s rights movement challenged these exclusions. The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 is commonly remembered as a landmark event. Its Declaration of Sentiments explicitly drew on the language of the Declaration of Independence while criticizing women’s political and social inequality.

Women’s suffrage was achieved nationally with the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But again, the formal expansion of rights did not automatically eliminate inequality. Race, class, region, and other social differences shaped women’s access to political participation differently.

The twentieth century brought new phases of feminist activism. Second-wave feminism, particularly from the 1960s onward, expanded the political agenda beyond voting rights to employment, education, reproductive rights, sexuality, family roles, and violence against women.

At the same time, feminist movements themselves were internally contested. Black feminists and other women of color criticized approaches that treated “women” as a homogeneous category and insufficiently addressed the intersections of race, class, and gender.

This brings us to intersectionality, a concept that became especially influential through the work of legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw. Intersectionality draws attention to how different structures of power can interact. A person's experience cannot always be understood by looking at race, gender, or class separately.

The history of LGBTQ+ rights adds another dimension. LGBTQ+ people have challenged legal and cultural systems that criminalized same-sex relationships, restricted gender expression, and excluded sexual and gender minorities from full social recognition.

The Stonewall uprising of 1969 is often treated as a symbolic turning point in the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. Over subsequent decades, activism contributed to major changes in law, public discourse, and cultural representation. Yet these changes have remained contested, and experiences have differed across communities.

Across all these movements, one pattern becomes visible. Equality in the United States has often expanded through political struggle rather than simply unfolding from the ideals of the founding.

This is why the phrase “We the People?” is useful. The question mark turns a statement of inclusion into an analytical problem.

Who counts as a citizen? Who has political power? Who has access to property, education, employment, or public institutions? Whose experiences are treated as representative of the nation? And who has to organize and protest in order to have existing promises applied to them?

American history can therefore be understood partly as a history of expanding the meaning of citizenship and equality. But “expanding” does not mean a simple linear progression. Gains can be uneven, contested, and sometimes reversed.

The history of race, gender, and sexuality also demonstrates that legal equality and lived equality are not identical. A constitutional right may exist while social practices continue to produce unequal outcomes. Conversely, cultural change can precede legal change.

For American Studies, the important point is methodological as much as historical. Rather than asking only whether America has fulfilled its ideals, we can ask how those ideals have been interpreted, contested, and transformed.

“We the People” is both a constitutional phrase and a cultural argument.

The struggle over who belongs within that phrase is one of the central stories of the United States.