Justene Hill Edwards
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And two, the inheritability of slave status.
In other civilizations, an enslaved person could buy themselves out of slavery, could marry out of slavery, or could convert to a different religion to not be enslaved.
And those three factors were very early on eliminated within the Atlantic world.
And that is why this is so important.
Well, this really happens in the late 17th and early 18th centuries as we have increasing populations of enslaved Africans as the status of slave becomes wholly affiliated with kind of black skin.
And so it is in this period, especially by the early 18th century, when we get this idea, this identity of kind of African-Americans being affiliated and associated with enslaved status.
It happens fairly early.
Well, I mean, this idea of white supremacy is so important to understanding not just how slavery kind of developed and evolved and grew, but the kind of racialized aspect of slavery as well.
And it happens fairly early.
Even in the 17th century, you have colonists kind of pushing back on the enslaved attempting to buy themselves out of slavery, of white colonists having a child with or even attempting to marry a Black person or slave person.
And so the idea that kind of slavery and race and these ideas of white supremacy really happens in this early colonial period to further separate kind of
races in terms of status.
It happens from the founding of the colony.
One could say in Virginia, it really starts with this 1662 law and accelerates with Bacon's rebellion in the 1670s.
We have this idea of kind of the separation of races based on status.
And kind of bound up in that idea is the idea of whites being sub-supreme or better than those of African descent.
And so in many ways, you can't separate understanding the origins of American slavery without understanding the kind of parallel track of the expansion and kind of entrenchment of ideas of white supremacy there as well.
Well, I mean, kind of to take a step back, I think it is important to remember that we have historians who say that the revolution is really the kind of beginning of anti-slavery and abolitionist politics.