objective:
Analyze the concept of white supremacy and its origins of slavery in America
The Construction of Whiteness
The 17th century Chesapeake area is a multi-racial society. Native Americans, people of African descent, and people of European descent are jumbled up. They work together. They play together. They fight. They sleep together.
When we get huge demand for tobacco in Europe and around the world, plantations formed. These plantations require labor to clear the land, till the soil, harvest the crop, hang the leaves to dry. Plantation owners would demand labor and squeeze as much work out of people as possible. The question was who was going to do this backbreaking work? The Chesapeake Bay planter class met this demand for labor with indentured Black and white indentured servants.
When we get huge demand for tobacco in Europe and around the world, plantations formed. These plantations require labor to clear the land, till the soil, harvest the crop, hang the leaves to dry. Plantation owners would demand labor and squeeze as much work out of people as possible. The question was who was going to do this backbreaking work? The Chesapeake Bay planter class met this demand for labor with indentured Black and white indentured servants.
The first twenty-five blacks that arrived in America were sold by a Dutch sea captain to people in the Jamestown colony. Although they were bought and sold, they were not slaves. Virginia had no laws regarding slavery. They were indentured servants like white colonists arriving at the time. Many black indentured servants were assimilated into the colony as laborers under varying contracts like those of Europeans. Some Africans worked off their debts and became freedmen. A few ambitious men obtained land and livestock, built substantial houses, married, and established themselves as well-to-do planters. Some became entrepreneurs and engaged in trading and other commercial activities and had business dealings on an equal footing with whites. However, for the most part, black indentured servants were also treated horribly. Both endured the same horrible working conditions and treatment by the planter elite.
At first white indentured servants did the tobacco farming. Seventy five percent of the earliest colonists were indentured servants who had to work from five to seven years before they could be free. Many of the earliest indentured Europeans were kidnapped in England and Ireland. Others came from prisons. Others came willingly seeking economic opportunity, political freedom, religious freedom, or a fresh start on life. But whatever the reason they came, they were forced to work in horrible conditions. Many died because of the severity of their circumstances. And many others fought back against the harsh regime of their masters or ran away to live with Native Americans. Evidence of the treatment can be seen in this letter from an indentured girl to her father.
“What we unfortunate English People suffer here is beyond the probability of you in England to conceive, let it suffice that I am one of the unhappy Number. I am toiling almost Day and Night, and very often in the horse's drudgery, and then I am tied up and whipp’d to a degree that you’d not serve an animal. There is scarce anything but corn and salt to eat. Even many Negroes are better used. I am almost naked with no shoes nor stockings to wear. The comfort I get after slaving during Masters pleasure, what rest we can get is to wrap ourselves up in a blanket and lie upon the ground. This is the deplorable condition your poor Betty endures.
Now I beg if you have any bowels of compassion, show it by sending me some relief. Clothing is the principal thing wanting. If you should condescend to do so, you may easily send them to me on any of the ships bound to Baltimore Town Patapsco River Maryland. Give me leave to conclude in duty to you and Uncles and Aunts, and respect to all friends.”
Honored Father
Your undutiful and Disobedient Child
Elizabeth Sprigs
Now I beg if you have any bowels of compassion, show it by sending me some relief. Clothing is the principal thing wanting. If you should condescend to do so, you may easily send them to me on any of the ships bound to Baltimore Town Patapsco River Maryland. Give me leave to conclude in duty to you and Uncles and Aunts, and respect to all friends.”
Honored Father
Your undutiful and Disobedient Child
Elizabeth Sprigs
Both endured beating, whippings and abuse. Some indentured servants were forced to iron collars. All had to show passes when they left the planter's property. Because they shared the same abuses, they sometimes joined forces. At times they both would runaway together. There is also evidence of interracial relationships which were punished with whipping or public shaming. For example in 1661, Virginia passed legislation prohibiting interracial marriage and later passed a law that prohibited ministers from marrying racially mixed couples. The fine was ten thousand pounds of tobacco. Then, in 1691, Virginia required that any white woman who bore a mulatto child pay a fine or face indentured servitude for five years for herself and thirty years for her child.
Even if both black and white indentured servants lived the same lives, punishments differed. In 1640 three indentured servant men ran away in Virginia. One was black and two were white. When they were captured, the white indentured servants had their terms of servitude extended to three more years but the black indentured servant was made a slave for life.
By 1650, 70% of Africans in Virginia were indentured for life. This was defacto slavery. In 1661 the Virginia Assembly passed a law legalizing this practice -making it de jure slavery. Africans were enslaved because they were easily identified, they did not know the terrain (like the Native Americans) and they could not escape homeward (like the Native Americans). The enslavement of African people was the way that white landowners resolved their need for cheap labor.
Bacon’s Rebellion (1675) was a critical event in the development of social control. Nathaniel Bacon was a wealthy white planter who united indentured whites in order to take Indian land. The elite power structure responded to this rebellion with shock and horror and charged Bacon with treason. Bacon then marched on Jamestown, Virginia. Enslaved Africans and black indentured servants joined Bacon’s army as it burned down Jamestown. This is the last recorded revolt of black and white bondservants united against their masters. Bacon died of dysentery. The rebellion was quickly put down. The ruling class was frightened by Bacon’s Rebellion.
Bacon's rebellion forced the planter class to come up with an alternative. The answer was the construction of the idea of whiteness. Two important factors led to the social construction of whiteness in relation to African peoples: the need for cheap labor and the desire for social control.
The second critical factor in the ongoing social construction of whiteness was the need for the social control of the poor. How would the establishment keep the indentured white people and slaves under control and how would they prevent these indentured peoples from joining with the Africans to overthrow the system?
According to “The upper class was terrified at their vulnerability to a united underclass. They began to rely more and more on enslaved Africans. Their strategy was to separate and alienate slaves from lower class whites by initiating laws that kept black workers on the bottom. Among other restrictions, blacks could not be armed or move about freely.” 19
After Bacon’s Rebellion there was a massive switch from the use of white indentured labor to African slave labor and the numbers of Africans brought into the country increased dramatically. Theodore Allen, in his book The Invention of Whiteness, argues that the colonial laboring class of southern whites, who made up 60% of the white population, was coerced into being a “superior race” to provide social control over Africans and Native Americans. Whites would create a buffer between the landed elite and slaves.
Laws were passed giving privileges to poor whites. The white indentured servants, after serving their five to seven years of indentured servitude, got 50 acres of land in what was then the western part of the country. They received a smaller poll tax as well. As a result of these economic incentives, poor whites were now economically better off and part of a new caste system and loyalty based on skin color. This was the beginning of working class white people that were now invested in white power and privilege for their class that continues through the rest of American history.
White as a social status first appeared as a legal description in Virginia in 1691 when the legislature used the term “white man or woman.” Gradually however, the idea that being white somehow made you better regardless of social and economic standing became the norm. With “Notes on the State of Virginia”, Jefferson becomes the first prominent American to suggest innate Black inferiority: "I advance it therefore, as a suspicion only, that blacks ...are inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind."