Antiblack prejudice grew out of slavery rather than causing it.

Evidence

In a controversial paper, the Handlins (1950) argued that black indentured servants were regarded and treated much the same as white servants when they first arrived in the American colonies in 1619. Over a period of roughly 40 years, they argued, the status of black servants deteriorated, whereas that of white servants improved. Thus, by around 1660, blacks had been reduced to a cheap, available, and easily exploited pool of servants whose bondage was viewed as lifelong. Importantly, this analysis suggested a gradual, not a rapid, degradation of blacks and transformation of the attitudes toward them. Such a pattern of events was more consistent with the view that antiblack prejudice resulted from the establishment of slavery, than with the claim that a deep psychological antipathy toward blacks preceded slavery. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3321

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the economy-vs-ideology debate in materialist theories of race and to post-hoc justification dynamics also seen in other status hierarchies. — connects to: Women’s emancipation increased male hostility rather than reducing it. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 298; Abolitionism was necessarily also an antiracist movement because slavery ran on racial technologies. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 89
• BMF: The gradual moral degradation of a group through institutional arrangement echoes the slow corruption of Okonkwo’s community in Things Fall Apart as colonial institutions reshape attitudes and behavior.