Racial habits are learned, transmitted customs deforming moral sense since slavery.

Evidence

For Jefferson, this sense of fear was a consequence of racial habits learned in the context of living with slavery. Customs and manners were indelibly shaped by the transactions that slavery demanded. As Jefferson put it, “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise in the most boisterous passion.” Slaves had to know their place or risk violent punishment. Masters had to exercise their power. Those caught in slavery’s vise grips could see themselves and others only in particular ways: as those who owned people and as those who were owned. Slavery affected and deformed the character of slaveholders by creating habits of mind that distorted their moral sense. These habits were passed along to children. Jefferson wrote: “The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worse of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.” — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 232

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the precise mechanism defining ‘racial habits’ as learned, transmitted distortions of moral perception — distinct in kind from individual prejudice.
• XREF: Contrasts with moral-panic/scapegoat analyses; echoes Frankfurt School work on how social structure deforms moral character transmitted across generations.