Slaveholders rationalized African enslavement through pre-existing racist ideas

Evidence

There is no reason to believe that George Yeardley and the other original enslavers did not rationalize their enslavement of African people in the same way that other British intellectuals did—and in the same way that Latin American slaveholders did—by considering these African people to be stamped from the beginning as a racially distinct people, as lower than themselves, and as lower in the scale of being than the more populous White indentured servants. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 90

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Cape settlers imported the biblical Ham myth to rationalize racial control by 1707 — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1352; Europeans already possessed race as a ready concept before enslaving Africans — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 56