Growth of Race Ideas in North America

Popular belief holds that whites made African Americans slaves because they viewed
them to be an inferior group of people. However, according to the documentary “Race – The
Power of an Illusion (Part 2: The Story We Tell”, this view is erroneous. Rather than slavery
growing out of racial ideas, racial ideas grew out of slavery.

When people of African descent came were brought to the U.S in early 1600s, the
status of people was defined by wealth and religion and not physical appearance (Praxis99,
2020). Thus, both poor European whites who worked as indentured laborers and African
slaves shared low status because of their lack of wealth. As planters came to rely more on
African American slave labor because of their advantages over whites such as large numbers,
physical differences with whites that made them easy to identify when they ran away, and
knowledge of crops that were grown in North America, whites were gradually replaced by
Africans as the main source of labor. To make the poor jobless whites acquiesce to the
slavery system that had taken away their livelihood, rich white planters established new
social structures where social prestige was no longer tied to wealth and religion but race
(Praxis99, 2020). Thus, whites, regardless of whether they were rich or poor, became the
superior people and blacks became the inferior people. The new social prestige and status
acquired by poor whites made them to acquiesce to the slavery system. They vigorously
enforced the system as overseers in the farms and hunters of slaves that had escaped
(Praxis99, 2020). Thus, the ideas about inferiority of blacks and superiority of whites
developed in order to maintain enslavement of African Americans.

Apart from giving poor whites a reason to enforce slavery, ideas about racial
inferiority and superiority were also used to justify the institution of slavery at a time when

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American founding fathers were using the argument that all men are created equal to demand
for greater rights from the British. Thomas Jefferson, the main exponent of the idea of
equality among men, justified denying African American slaves rights he claimed belonging
to all men by claiming that African Americans were not fully men and that they belonged to
an inferior race (Praxis99, 2020). It is for this reason that Jefferson wrote about the inferiority
of blacks in his Notes on the State of Virginia.

In addition to slavery, expansion of land and popular democracy also led to
development of racial ideas especially with regards to Indian Americans and Mexicans.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote “Notes on the State of Virginia” suggesting that African
Americans were an inferior people, he proclaimed that Indian Americans were just like
whites with the only problem being their culture (Praxis99, 2020). Since they were
considered to be like whites, some Indian Americans even got assimilated and became
slaveholding farmers like whites (Praxis99, 2020). However, when whites began their
westward expansion, they needed to take over land owned by Indians. To pave way for the
forceful evacuation of Indian lands, Indians also began being considered as an inferior people
incapable of improving the lands that they owned because of their lack of intelligence,
appropriate moral habits, and industry (Praxis99, 2020). With Indians no longer being
considered to be whites, they were denied property rights and forcefully evacuated from their
lands with a large number of them losing their lives in the process. The same ideas of racial
inferiority were applied to Mexicans when white Americans sought to take over Mexican
lands. They also started being described as an inferior people as a means of justifying war
against them for their land (Praxis99).

Ideas about race were, therefore, developed to justify injustices against some groups
in the U.S. For African Americans, ideas about their racial inferiority were developed to

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justify slavery while for American Indians and Mexicans, their description as being racially
inferior to whites was to justify large scale acquisition of their land by force.

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References

Praxis99 (2020, September 6). Race – The Power of an Illusion (Part 2: The Story We Tell).
https://youtu.be/Wf3zOO63RLM.