Were Africans enslaved because they were thought to be inferior?
In colonial America, Africans weren't enslaved because they were thought to be inferior. On the contrary, they were valued for their skill as farmers and desired for their labor.
Planters had previously tried enslaving Native Americans, but many escaped and hid among neighboring tribes or were stricken by diseases brought to the New World by Europeans.
In the early years of the colonies,
the majority of workers were poor indentured servants from England. In fact, during Virginia's first century, 100,000 of the 130,000 Englishmen who crossed the Atlantic were indentured servants.
Conditions of servitude were miserable, and nearly two thirds died before their term of indenture ended. After several decades,
African slaves began arriving in the U.S. and worked side by side with indentured servants.
Many played together, intermarried, and ran away together. Racial categories were fluid, and slavery was not yet codified into law.
In the mid-17th century, a crisis arose in the colonies. As economic conditions in Mother England improved, the number of volunteers willing to journey across the Atlantic to endure such harsh treatment dropped dramatically, causing a labor shortage. At the same time, tension and hostilities were mounting domestically, as more servants were surviving their indenture and demanding land from the planter elite. The entire plantation labor system and colonial social hierarchy was threatened;
the situation came to a head when poor servants and slaves allied and attacked the elite classes during Bacon's Rebellion.
After the system of indentured servitude proved unstable,
planters turned increasingly to African slavery and began writing laws to divide Blacks from whites. Coincidentally, African slaves became more available at this time. Poor whites were given new entitlements and opportunities, including as overseers to police the slave population.
Over time, they began to identify more with wealthy whites, and the degradation of slavery became identified more and more with Blackness.
RACE - The Power of an Illusion . Background Readings | PBS
