America’s proto-whites were also deemed racially inferior before racial consensus formed

Evidence

Taney, in summarizing “the public history of every European nation,” argued that the Constitution of the United States could not have encompassed rights for Blacks: “They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.” … Given his predilection for “public history,” had the subject of their social equality come before him, Taney could have come to similar conclusions about the majority of those who were becoming members of the “white race.” Prior to the forging of racial consensus, in both Europe and the New World, the “racial” inferiorities of most of these proto-whites was well established by the literati and intelligentsia classes. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1729

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the larger argument in Robinson that race was constructed to unite previously inferior European classes behind whiteness — parallels Theodore Allen’s ‘The Invention of the White Race’.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that those becoming ‘white’ were themselves deemed racially inferior before the forging of racial consensus is a dense, paradigm-shifting observation about race as manufactured solidarity rather than natural category.