Ask the Scholars

I think in some ways it would have been better for race relations in America, for African Americans and all Americans, if slavery in America had been based purely on power. If slaveholders could have actually stood up and said, "We are holding these people in bondage because we need their labor and we have the power to do it." The advantage of that would have been that once the power was removed, then bondage was over and the justification for bondage was over. But because we were living...

I would add that when slavery ended, the status remained, and the status was underscored by the physical features that were markers of the status. Race affects us now because many people still follow that dictum laid down by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney that the Negro has no rights that a white man is bound to respect. It's like a bad habit that people can't break.

Race or racism is a legacy of slavery to some degree. De Tocqueville sort of predicted what was going to happen when he said that in the ancient world, in Rome, when they emancipated slaves, two or three generations would pass and you wouldn't know who was of slave ancestry. But, he said, where the slaves are a different color, then slave ancestry will be detectable, will be recognizable. The marks, in other words, of servitude or probable slave ancestry would remain. So I think slavery ...