Slavery’s labor demands produced juridical racism rather than racial attitudes producing slavery.

Evidence

Again, the common assumption that it was attitudes of racial superiority which precipitated the introduction of plantation slavery needs to be challenged. It might be better to start from the opposite end: by seeing how slavery (the product of specific problems of labor shortage and the organization of plantation agriculture, supplied, in the first instance, by non-black, indigenous labor, and then by white indentured labor) produced those forms of juridical racism which distinguish the epoch of plantation slavery. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 634

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses the conventional causal arrow much as reading purpose emphasizes tracing causes; echoes scholarship on race as a constructed category used to justify economic arrangements. — connects to: Slavery and prejudice were mutually reinforcing causes, each feeding the other
• QUESTION: Worth pursuing the actual historical sequence — how white indentured labor yielded to enslaved black labor in the Americas, and where the juridical racial distinctions first crystallized in law.