Surveillance of Black people began with slavery itself, driven by fear of rebellion

Evidence

From the founding of the original thirteen colonies, white people in the North and South lived in constant fear that the men and women they whipped, raped, and forced to work without pay would, if given the chance, rise up and take revenge on their white enslavers. This is why governmental surveillance and severe punishment of Black people began almost concurrently with the introduction of slavery itself. In 1669, the Carolina colony granted every free white man “absolute Power and Authority over his Negro Slaves.” Within decades, Carolina law drastically bolstered white authority, mandating that all white people ought to be responsible for policing all Black people’s activities. Any white person who failed to properly monitor suspicious Black activity would be fined forty shillings. This notion—that Black people were inherently devious and criminal, and that white people were required to monitor and police them—ultimately defined the nature of race relations in the United States. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 352

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s ‘deviation vs design’ framing — the policing of Black people as a design feature from the colony’s founding, not a later deviation.
• CANDY: The “forty shillings” fine for failing to police Black activity is a vivid, tweetable colonial detail.