E/CN.4/1995/78/Add.1 page 8 American legislation to be more advanced in certain respects than international norms. The process of ratification of the international human rights instruments initiated by the United States Government in the early 1990s marked the start of a search for a balance between the implementation of internal norms and of universally recognized human rights norms, 6/ the emphasis necessarily being placed on the unity of the rights of the human person, namely, the interdependence and indivisibility of civil and political rights and economic, social and cultural rights. II. HISTORICAL, SOCIO-POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS OF RACISM AND RACIAL DISCRIMINATION 21. The history of the United States of America is closely bound up with the Black slave trade and slavery and with the colonization and genocide of the Indians that were openly practised from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century. Those practices were based on racism; slave traders and cotton planters, followed by the pioneers in their westward trek, fostered the doctrine of the superiority of the White race and the inferiority of Blacks and Indians. 22. Once they had been developed, racist theories institutionalized systematic discrimination, oppression and exploitation of the Blacks, the Indians and then the Asians, for the benefit of the Whites. "Historically, racism has constituted/constitutes a system of special privileges, benefits and psychological and material benefits for people of European descent/white people in United States society - a long-standing intergenerational, developmental, affirmative action program for white people." 7/ In American colonial slave-owning society, the Blacks and the Indians had no rights. 23. Africans were first brought to the western hemisphere enslaved in 1518, and to British colonial America in 1619, 12 years after the establishment of the first English settlement at Jamestown. By the middle of the seventeenth century, a slave system among colonial plantation owners was fully established and by the end of that century, enslaved Africans had become the chief source of labour and profit and, therefore, the key component of the colonial agricultural and commercial interests. A racist social structure was established, which placed Africans at the bottom and was supported by northern trading and shipping firms. 24. When the American colonialists challenged British rule in the late eighteenth century and achieved independence through the revolutionary war, a system of racism was incorporated into the basic documents of the newly formed United States of America. The Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution condoned racial subordination and discrimination. At that time, the framers of those documents saw no contradiction in composing a liberal view of liberty for white males with property, while denying it to all African peoples, indigenous peoples, white women and even poor white males.