Colonial law deliberately manufactured racism to divide poor whites from enslaved blacks.

Evidence

The vast majority of people of African descent in North America today are descendants of those who were wrenched from their homelands during the 300+ years of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But the discourse also had to be taught and enforced. In the colonial U.S., rebellions by the poor were feared by the elites, and most frightening was the potential for enslaved blacks, white servants, and other poor whites to unite against the rich. So a series of laws were passed that aimed to divide black from white. For example, one law increased the benefits to freed white indentured servants, thus encouraging them to see their interests as allied with the large landowners. Many states passed laws banning intermarriage between black and white, and insisting that any children born of a mixed relationship would be illegitimate (Zinn, 1980, p. 55). Other laws required the hiring of whites to supervise slaves and to work on slave patrols to catch runaway slaves. As Edmund Morgan notes, encouraging racism was a response to the danger of black-white rebellion: “The answer to the problem, obvious if unspoken and only gradually recognized, was racism, to separate dangerous free whites from dangerous black slaves by a screen of racial contempt” (quoted in Zinn, 1980, p. 57). Thus again we see that racism was not a natural product of difference, but a created product of domination. — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education, 1166

Categorization

• XREF: Buttresses ch12 and ch24 claims that racism is a created, dominating discourse — and mirrors how eco-justice pedagogy treats value hierarchies as politically invented products. — connects to: Traditional African slavery was often time-limited and permitted full social integration — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1133; The racist creates the inferiority of the colonized.; Colonial law deliberately constructed race as a caste system of power — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project: A New American Origin…, 213 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Colonial law deliberately constructed race as a caste system of power #corroborates (0.93) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 213
• Colonial administrators deliberately engineered racial hierarchy to secure white loyalty. #corroborates (0.90) — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 229
• The racist creates the inferiority of the colonized. #expands (0.82)
• Caribbean plantation labor was deliberately and obsessively racialized #expands (0.80) — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 77
• Colonial officials ranked the shame of poverty by race. #expands (0.78)
• Colonial administrators misread their own invented rule as natural racial superiority #expands (0.76)
• Race versus ethnicity is a colonial legal construction #expands (0.75)