Early colonial servitude did not initially distinguish European, African, and Indigenous laborers

Evidence

In the early days of colonial America, the vast majority of people compelled to work for landowners were vagrant children, convicts, and indentured laborers imported from Europe. The wealthy settlers who benefited from their unfree labor did not at first distinguish between the status of European, African, and Indigenous servants. But as the slave trade mushroomed, Africans began to be subjected to a distinct kind of servitude: they alone were considered the actual property of their enslavers. Colonial legislatures enforced the distinction between Black and white people through a series of new laws passed in the mid-1600s that established a legal regime that differentiated the political status of Europeans and Africans. It was particularly concerned with sex because sex between Black and white people produced children who confounded the strict distinctions between those two categories. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 205

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reframing argument — the claim that racial hierarchy was constructed deliberately over time rather than being natural or inevitable — which is central to the reader’s case study of the 1619 Project debate. — connects to: Colonial use of ‘black’ did not necessarily denote African descent — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 124
• DEFINE: Establishes that racial classification was not pre-existing but legally constructed — key to the ‘foundational vs peripheral’ taxonomy the reader is building.