Even colonial anti-slavery writers accepted assumptions of Negro biological inferiority

Evidence

Milton Cantor, in his essay on seventeenth-century America concludes that “The Negro then was permanently bound by biological and anthropological chains. In order to guarantee the viability of his debasement, pro-slavery writers pulled out all stops. Slavery was justified by climate and economic necessity; by reliance upon history, the Bible, the Providential design. It was argued, in the colonial period, that English America could not be developed without the peculiar institution. White men were physiologically unable to labor in hot climates; Negroes alone had this power.” Nor were these opinions limited to those sympathetic to slavery: “So widespread was this conviction of inequality that many anti-slavery writers acknowledged it.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1704

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the chapter’s argument on the hegemony of slave-era racial ideology — early ideological justification spans the sympathetic/anti-slavery divide, echoing themes of ideology’s grip on reason found in the Frankfurt School readings.