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Tuesday’s reading revealed the nature of slavery in the Chesapeake and the Carolinas. For some reason, I was under the impression that slavery, especially in the South, had been racialized from the beginning. However, as the reading revealed, the development of white supremacy and racialized slavery actually happened in steps.
Long before the division between black and white, there existed a stark class divide. A sense of “otherness” was thrust upon the common white planters. Wealth inequality was the first existing divide between the inhabitants of the Chesapeake and Carolina colonies. It was very surprising to find that before the commodification of black slaves around 1670, there were black people who actually enjoyed freedom and legal privileges such as property, land, and even slaves or servants of their own after they had finished their terms as indentured servants (154).
When white indentured servants declined, African slaves were the solution to the lack of labor. I thought solidarity had always existed between all white people in the colonies due to their common ancestry, but it wasn’t until the planter elite began to worry for their safety at the growing portion of the population that consisted of slaves that this sense was forged. They relied on the common white men to muster up a sense of racial pride in order to protect the colonists from uprisings (156). In the process, the issues of wealth inequality and social stratification within the white community were put on the back burner while a preoccupation on racial superiority flourished.
Ultimately, after reading these Taylor chapters it became evident that the discrimination created by the planter elite wasn’t motivated by principle. They were neither particularly against common folk nor black people. Rather, they did whatever was economically beneficial to retaining their wealth and status.