The Black Race in the U.S.

Paper Summary:

It is the classic example of what came first, the chicken or the egg? Did racism promote slavery, or did slavery promote racism? This paper discusses how it can be seen that, prior to slavery, racist notions of Africans did not exist in the same context as they did after slavery. Europeans actually admired and revered Africans, seeing them as pious and royal. When slavery took form, slave owners needed to "declare war" on their "enemies," thus creating racist conceptions of all Africans for their own security. It explains that theorists tried to explain these circumstances through biological classifications and observed behavior; all these "theories" tended to be racist excuses. Jointly, institutional slavery and the following thought processes of Europeans contributed to the making and meaning of the "black race" in the United States.

From the Paper:

T"he making and meaning of the "African race" in the United States originated in the seventeenth century when the British Empire began importing slaves to its American and Caribbean island colonies. As the cash crop enterprises in these colonies expanded in the colonies, the demand for laborers also increased. Plantation owners justified the utilization of Africans as slaves to fulfill that labor demand; racism then took advantage of the uneven social structures, free "whites" and enslaved "blacks," and thrived. Paralleling these historical events were the rise of pseudoscientific theories that developed primitive and uncorroborated hypotheses about race classification."

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