Thread by @blackrepublican

How America Invented Race | The History of White People in America

#RacismIsNotComedy #race #whitesupremacy #racialslavery

"The events in Jamestown were alarming to the planter elite, who were deeply fearful of the multiracial alliance of [indentured servants] and slaves. Word of Bacon’s Rebellion spread far and wide, and several more uprisings of a similar type followed. In an effort to protect ...

... their superior status and economic position, the planters shifted their strategy for maintaining dominance. They abandoned their heavy reliance on indentured servants in favor of the importation of more black slaves.

A New Form Of Slavery: Racial Slavery

"After Bacon’s Rebellion, Virginia’s lawmakers began to make legal distinctions between “white” and “black” inhabitants. By permanently enslaving Virginians of African descent and giving poor white indentured servants and farmers some ...

...rights and status, they hoped to separate the two groups and make it less likely that they would unite again in rebellion."
facinghistory.org/holocaust-and-…

Historian Ira Berlin explains: Soon after Bacon's Rebellion they increasingly distinguish between people of African descent and people of European descent. They enact laws which say that people of African descent are hereditary slaves. And they increasingly give some power to ...

independent white farmers and land holders . . .

Now what is interesting about this is that we normally say that slavery and freedom are opposite things—that they are diametrically opposed."

.... But what we see here in Virginia in the late 17th century, around Bacon's Rebellion, is that freedom and slavery are created at the same moment."

"According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first appearance in print of the adjective white in reference to “a white man, a person of a race distinguished by a light complexion” was in 1671."

"Colonial charters and other official documents written in the 1600s and early 1700s rarely refer to European colonists as white."

The lie that invented racism | John Biewen via @YouTube

"As the status of people of African descent in the British colonies was challenged and attacked, and as white indentured servants were given new rights and status, the word white continued to be more widely used in public documents and private papers to describe the European ....

... colonists. People of European descent were considered white, and those of African descent were labeled black. Historian Robin D. G. Kelley explains:

"Many of the European-descended poor whites began to identify themselves, if not directly with the rich whites, certainly ...

... with being white. And here you get the emergence of this idea of a white race as a way to distinguish themselves from those dark-skinned people who they associate with perpetual slavery."

... with being white. And here you get the emergence of this idea of a white race as a way to distinguish themselves from those dark-skinned people who they associate with perpetual slavery."

Continued here: Inventing Black and White facinghistory.org/holocaust-and-…

"I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white.
But I was Igbo before the white man came."

- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Invention of Race - beta.prx.org/stories/218457… via @prx