Ask the Scholars

In short, it was profitable. Early white planters needed labor. The first African brought to British North America came to Jamestown. Jamestown had been through a series of what were called "starving times" where substantial numbers of people died. They needed labor. They had stumbled upon this crop. They'd been looking for gold forever and discovered there wasn't a whole lot of gold in Virginia, but the closest they could find to gold was tobacco. But they needed labor to grow tobacco, ...

Right. And we live in a competitive society. Everybody wants to be somebody important. Everybody wants to have, if not material wealth, some kind of feeling of being important, and I think that has a lot to do with the way certain whites continue to think in terms of race. It's a racial worldview; it's a way of thinking about the world.

I think the use of the term "ideology" in the question caught my attention, because I don't think it's precisely the same blatant racist ideology of inherent innate inferiority based on the genes. It doesn't have the power that it once did in the sense that, you know, it's no longer respectable. It used to be what educated white people believed, but now it's been discredited as a scientific doctrine. But racism survives in a somewhat altered ideological form. It still exists in subtle an...

I'd like to add that there's a whole new phenomenon we find especially in the African American studies literature, which is that it's the culture of these people that determines why they can't make it or what happens to them in our society: "We're not holding people back as individuals, but if they come from this kind of a culture where they're not used to discipline and where they're not used to working hard and so forth, then you know, they have to change their culture." And this has b...