Freedom and slavery were created simultaneously in Virginia after Bacon’s Rebellion.

Evidence

Following Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, where an alliance of white and Black indentured servants and enslaved Africans rose up against Virginia’s white elite, the colony passed slave codes to permanently enshrine legal and social distinctions between Black and white residents that ensured that all white people, no matter their status, permanently existed in a status above all Black people. These laws divided exploited white workers from exploited Black workers by designating people of African descent as “hereditary slaves” who would serve in bondage for life. “We normally say that slavery and freedom are opposite things—that they are diametrically opposed,” the historian Ira Berlin said. “But what we see here in Virginia in the late seventeenth century, around Bacon’s Rebellion, is that freedom and slavery are created at the same moment.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 109

Categorization

• DEFINE: Berlin’s formulation is the core definitional claim: white freedom was itself constituted by Black hereditary enslavement — they are not opposites but co-created.
• ADDENDUM: Resonates with the ‘Grafting & Growth’ essay’s metaphor of mutual constitution — here the mutual constitution of two political statuses rather than of trees.
• DEEPTHINKING: This inverts the commonsense polarity slavery/freedom-as-opposites and shows they were built together as a single legal-political mechanism — a genuinely paradigm-shifting reframe, the heart of the book’s argument.