Cotton’s expansion demanded and produced more racist ideology

Evidence

Enthroning King Cotton, the cotton gin made the value of southern lands skyrocket and quickly dethroned rice and tobacco. King Cotton incessantly demanded more and more to stabilize its reign: more enslaved Africans, more land, more violence, and more racist ideas. Annual cotton production slammed through the ceiling of about 3,000 bales in 1790, reaching 178,000 bales in 1810 and more than 4 million bales on the eve of the Civil War. Cotton became America’s leading export, exceeding in dollar value all exports, helping to free Americans from British banks, helping to expand the factory system in the North, and helping to power the Industrial Revolution in the United States. Cotton—more than anyone or anything else—economically freed American enslavers from England and tightened the chains of African people in American slavery. Uplift suasion had no chance of dethroning King Cotton. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 334

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates Kendi’s core inversion: material demand (King Cotton) generated the racist ideas that rationalized and stabilized it — the causal arrow running policy/economy to ideas.
• SEED: The framing ‘King Cotton demanded… more racist ideas’ as a materialist engine of ideology is a usable analytic lens for an essay placing any economic system’s self-justifying racism.