Development of White Supremacy from Slavery
White supremacy and the development of white identity has been regarded by scholars as the original sin of America. The claim is majorly attributed to the relationship of the British colonial society towards the native Indians, African Americans, and other European groups which settled in the new continent in the 16th century. This paper will explore the development of white supremacy based on how the British colonial society socialized with their European counterparts, African Americans and the native Indians.
Before the settlement of the British in America, the English ancestors regarded themselves as white which made them have a consciousness of being superior to people of color. The British saw the conquest of the “new world” as an aspect of national interest more than economic ventures. The initial objective was to spread Christianity to world’s pagan people to satisfy God and the Virgin Queen. Locke, Joseph, & Ben Wright (ed) ch.2, argues that the race to conquer America was to upset the Spaniards because “the English—and other European Protestant colonizers—imagined themselves superior to the Spanish, who still bore the Black Legend of inhuman cruelty. English colonization, supporters argued, would prove that superiority”. The first English settlers in North America evaluated their identity against the Spanish and the native Indians.
The British monarchy gained control of America’s trading economy from the other European powers such as Spain through informal colonization. Professing the protestant faith which considered the Spanish catholic faith as heresy, the initial instruments of colonization employed by the British portrayed a nation considering themselves superior to Spain (Locke, Joseph, & Ben Wright (ed) Ch.2). The monarchy instituted privateering which plundered Spanish trading ships and looted their settlement in North America. The establishment of the British colonial society in America in the early 1600s was a catastrophe because the settlers were unprepared for the challenges of the new world. There was a huge labor vacuum in Virginia due to development of tobacco trade, which formed settler’s colonial economy. The arrival of a Dutch ship in 1619 carrying African slaves changed the course of racial relations between people of color and whites (Locke, Joseph, & Ben Wright (ed) Ch.2).
Locke, Joseph, & Ben Wright (ed) Ch.2 notes that the development of slavery was based on the notion “English colonists nevertheless judged themselves physically, spiritually, and technologically superior to Native peoples in North America.” there religions, agriculture, knowledge in metallurgy, marine knowledge, magnified their sense of white superiority. Spanish Bartholomew Lacas had suggested the end of native Americans brutality would be the importation of African slaves into America for labor. This is because the ideas of African inferiority were being imitated by settlers from the European ideology. Prior to the exploration of the new world, racial views had already taken root in England. (Locke, Joseph, & Ben Wright (ed) Ch.2)
The fixation of race and skin color was developed from the expansion of trans-Atlantic slavery to serve as labor in the Americas economy. Europeans had developed narratives which equated blackness with sin, and that Africans and Europeans belonged to different races. Locke, Joseph, & Ben Wright (ed) Ch.2 notes that this was compounded by “Old Testament God cursed Ham, the son of Noah, and doomed black people to perpetual enslavement.” Therefore, of all the other European powers in the American continent, it was only the English who practiced the most exclusionist and rigid form of racial ideology.
The conquest of the Native Americans in North America set the precedence on the relationship between settlers and people of color. It would have been impossible for the British colonizers to conquer and establish settlement in the continent if they were undivided. The only way feasible way to succeed was to unite whites based on the identity which they had imported from England. The encroachment of the native American land was instrumental in the formation of the white supremacy. In this case, the ideological construction of the white racial identity developed within the economic context of competing for land. The conflicts between the native Indians such as the Wampanoag were due to land encroachment, resistance to Christianity, and interference of their way of life (Locke, Joseph, & Ben Wright (ed) Ch.2).
The Pequot War, King Philip war, and the mystic massacre were white supremacy machinery which aimed at removing the barbaric infidels from New England. Some puritans saw these wars as holy wars against Indians who were assumed to be devilish (Roediger 54). In this case, they wage war against the native Americans because they termed them as illiterate, uncivilized, inhuman, and non-Christians. Thus Locke, Joseph, & Ben Wright (ed) Ch.2 argues that “referring to themselves as the “Sword of the Lord,” this military force intended to attack “that insolent and barbarous Nation, called the Pequots.” Therefore, puritan colonialists dehumanized puritans to justify the atrocities they committed to them. The Indian savagery in New England was racialized, and the process of white identity construction was set upon the devaluation of the cultural and biological aspects of other inhabitants.
White identity formation developed from the enslavement of the African people who had been brought into North America for plantation labor (Locke, Joseph, & Ben Wright (ed) Ch. 2. The same way the conquest and decimation of the native population developed white supremacy, the enslavement of the African people served the same purpose. The primary factor which progressed the whiteness social construction was the need for cheap, durable labor. Africans were priced because as Locke, Joseph, & Ben Wright (ed) Ch. 3 notes, colonialists believed “West Africans, were far more likely to have a level of immunity to malaria … reinforcing planters’ racial belief that Africans were particularly suited to labor in tropical environments”. In the 1660s legal sanctions changed the lives of black men and women in colonies such as Virginia, West Indies and Barbados setting up racial barriers. Locke, Joseph, & Ben Wright (ed) Ch. 3 “Skin color became more than a superficial difference; it became the marker of a transcendent, all-encompassing division between two distinct peoples, two races, white and black”
The Bacon Rebellion serves a fundamental period where the ongoing whiteness social construction where they had to control poor white people from joining people of color and overthrow the system (Locke, Joseph, & Ben Wright (ed) Ch.3). The Bacon revolt serves as the last activity where white bondservants and enslaved Americans came together against a master. In response, many of the white bondservants were released, given land while the numbers of Africans imported into the country dramatically increased. However, colonialists feared a slave revolt and therefore, invented white supremacy as a means of social control. Locke, Joseph, & Ben Wright (ed) Ch. 3, argues that “Virginia legislators did recognize the extent of popular hostility toward colonial rule, however, and improved the social and political conditions of poor white Virginians in the years after the rebellion” The released indentured white servants were given social class, joined local militias for patrols. Laws and economic incentives were passed to lure the poor whites into class consciousness and deliberately urge loyalty to it. The first legal recognition of white identity and superiority was witnessed in 1691 when legislation was passed having the term “white man and woman” (Roediger 69).
To conclude, the way British colonialist socialized with native Americans, Spaniards, and African Americans played a critical role in the development of white supremacy. To take control over a continent whose inhabitants had been there more than 1000 years prior, colonialists had to use various justifications. They had to be unified under white racial identity to take native American land and fought wars to strengthen their belief in racial identity and sense of racial superiority. Among African Americans, it was developed as a means of social control, where poor whites were incentivized to seek privilege and commit to white supremacy.
Works cited
Locke, Joseph L., and Ben Wright, eds. The American Yawp: A Massively Collaborative Open US History Textbook, Vol. 1: To 1877. Stanford University Press, 2019.
Roediger, David. Working Toward Whiteness: How American Immigrants Became White. New York, Basic Books, 2005
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