Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview By Audrey Smedley
CategoriesCase Studies
“A watershed in the developing ideology was reached when in 1723 the General Assembly of Virginia passed an act ostensibly designed to promote better government and social control. One of its most significant articles state that “no free negro, mulatto, or indian whatsoever, shall have any vote at the election of burgesses, or any other election whatsoever” (Allen 1997, 242).”
“By such disenfranchisement of people who had been free for upward of five generations, according to Virginia’s governor at that time, William Gooch, the assembly sought “to fix a perpetual Brand upon Free Negroes & Mulattos” (245) Allen’s analysis of the significant of Gooch’s letter, often overlooked by historians, is critical to understanding the thinking behind the numerous acts leading to the creation of race ideology.”
“It was the political elevation of notions of separateness and difference that formed the substratum out of which were created the social categories that came to be designated as “races” in North America. For the next two centuries Americans continued to imbue these categories with social meanings and to act as if these meanings were tantamount to reality. The attributes embroidered for each social category were intended to forever maintain the inequality and power differentials that the colonist had established.”
“Black slavery in America, it should be emphasized, was an important economic institution. It was profitable for both the traders and those who wealth was acquired from the labor of slaves. But colonist of all sorts, slave owners and non-slave owners, did not seek to maintain slavery for economic reasons. It became predominantly a social institution, a mechanism integral to the structuring of the colonies social system.”
“The process of creating this new slave system as the domestic level, the plantation production level, and the level of legislated decisions and public policy was cognitively connect to the physical differences between those who had the power to enslave and those, lacking power, who were enslaved. As I have already emphasized, the English, not unlike other Europeans of this era, had found it easy to treat the poor and powerless with contempt and indifference.”
“When society was transformed so that indelible physical differences were linked to such victims, the situation literally called for the exaggerated degradation of all who bore such features. Thus even African Americans who were ostensibly, and legally, free were demarcated from the rest of society and gradually demoted to a status of permanent inferiority. A multitude of decisions made the individual treatment of relatively powerless blacks resulted in, and reinforced, attitudes of contempt and denigration focused on the blacksness itself.”
Source: Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview By Audrey Smedley
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