o intentions of tending to disgruntled slaves themselves. The deficiency laws passed in 1698 saw to it that they would not have to. Too many slaves and not enough whips. Mind you the colonists tried to enslave Native Americans first. They were unsuccessful and through recommendation decided to try blacks instead. Hypothetically speaking, what if Native Americans had become the overseers? Would there be the backlash against them today instead of whites? I believe there would be. There was not, however, an abundance of Native American looking to become masters. There was an ample supply of vagrant poor whites, and colonist knew they were more agreeable than any other stock of people available. And agreeable they were when they began to earn wages, and were given nearly unchecked dominance over black male slaves, and black female slaves. Slave patrols were established manned by who else but white males. I am no slave historian, but one could extrapolate this was when slavery became increasingly brutal. Bored drunk overseers raping, and beating the sense out of slaves in the name of pre-crime, and order.
“Parliament, in 1717, made transportation to the New World a legal punishment for crime. After that tens of thousand of convicts could be sent to Virginia, Maryland, and other colonies,”
The aristocrats used poor whites as pawns. Look to education levels today, and it’s easy to see what they were working with then. Sure blacks were forbidden from reading or going to school, but don’t think that all whites were college educated. Illiteracy was rampant, and being the most educated and worldly people of the time, the task of fooling fools was effortless. Edmund Morgan states,
“If freemen with disappointed hopes should make common cause with slaves of desperate hope, the results might be worse than anything that Bacon had done. The answer to the problem,…was racism, to separate dangerous free whites from dangerous black slaves by a screen of racial contempt.”
Behind the screen lies the truth. Racial inequality was built out of the necessity of wealthy colonists to control their investments. Certain opportunities presented themselves, and though reprehensible, at the time they were more or less just business decisions. A lesson, what some swear are innocuous business decisions in the present, can lead to great unforeseen upheaval in the future.
I wish I had some solution to erase racism from our past, present, and future. I know for sure that the first step is for people to have an “overstanding” of the origins of racism in America. It must be understood, it is the same forces that rob us of our true freedom as citizens that have gifted us with this flawed ideology of race. The same forces that stifle the pay of citizens of every color and background. The same forces that tell a woman what she can and cannot do with her body. The same people that decide how we care for our environment. The same ones who tried to rewrite history. An overly powerful minority, who for hundreds of years have exerted their power through wealth and policy. We must not allow ourselves to be engineered, especially towards a new paradigm incongruent with our human spirit. We do have something working in our favor. We have only one weapon with which to fight back. One weapon that will guarantee that we regain what we were defrauded of long ago. Cooperation.
The assumptions put forth in this paper are not to argue racism did not exist in many forms, on various parts of the globe, as well as for hundreds if not thousands of years earlier than stated in this paper. I only seek to highlight what could have been the introduction of institutionalized racism here in America. Hatred began long before the 1600’s, and justification for reprehensible actions arose with man. It is my hope that once people can see racism as a control mechanism, we can begin to have a conversation about what we can accomplish with our newfound cooperation.
“A People’s History of The United States,” by Howard Zinns (1980)
“Notes on the State of Virginia,” by Thomas Jefferson (1785)
“Penn