Colonial law deliberately constructed race as a caste system of power

Evidence

This anti-miscegenation law was accompanied by a set of measures designed to codify the superior status of white people and the subordination of Black people. The law gave white indentured laborers “freedom dues”—a payment in cash, land, or supplies received when they completed their contract term—while enslaved Black people were entitled to no freedom at all. The legislature enacted a set of “slave codes,” which declared that an enslaver who killed a person he enslaved while “correcting” the victim would not be prosecuted for a felony. The same statute, by contrast, prohibited masters from inflicting “immoderate correction” on white indentured laborers and allowed those laborers to file complaints against masters who violated this restriction. The codes also prohibited Black or mulatto individuals from holding public office, testifying in court, or otherwise swearing under oath. This legal distinction in status based on race alone turned racial classification into a caste system. Through these laws, colonial landowners constructed race as a system of power in which anyone categorized as Black could be dominated by anyone categorized as white. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 213

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s core task: this is the empirical claim under the reframing thesis — race as engineered legal caste, not natural category. — connects to: Colonial policing hardened fluid status groups into fixed racial identities. — Erin K. Jenne and Promise Frank Ejiofor, Ethnopopulism and genocidal…, 50; Native tribal membership rules co-construct race with gender and settler logics — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 84; 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
• DEFINE: Defines ‘caste system’ and ‘freedom dues’ concretely, grounding the foundational-vs-peripheral reframing in specific mechanisms.