Colonial administrators deliberately engineered racial hierarchy to secure white loyalty.

Evidence

But as the eighteenth century progressed, racist sentiments were increasingly buttressed by colonial administrators who, driven by a desire to secure the loyalties of white residents of the colony, encouraged racial division and hierarchy through the complex of discriminatory laws that Raimond railed against. There was, such officials argued, inevitable solidarity between free people of color and the enslaved, and only by highlighting the difference between whites and people of African descent, whatever their legal status, could the hierarchies necessary for the survival of slavery be maintained. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 229

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘complaints about immodesty’ moral-panic frame and to other settler-colonial analyses where elites deliberately manufacture division. Echoes Frankopan-adjacent theme of divide-and-rule administration. — connects to: Colonial law deliberately manufactured racism to divide poor whites from enslaved blacks. — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1166