Ask the Scholars

What's distinctive about the American concept of race is that it's almost entirely based on color, and it comes largely out of the need to rationalize the irreconcilable contradiction that we talked about in an earlier question. That is, a contradiction between a belief in freedom, a kind of new Enlightenment ideal, and the maintenance of an institution of human bondage. In societies before, as Audrey mentioned, it was possible to hold a person in slavery because there was not the same k...

The fact that American slavery was racial is what made it distinctive, and the fact that Europeans were no longer enslaving other Europeans. In other words, Slavic slavery had been phased out and the only source of slaves to do plantation work was Africa. You know, I'm not entirely convinced that if there had been other, if there had been real sources of slaves that were white, that there wouldn't have been white slaves. Indentured servants, for example, were the foundation of our early ...

That's one of the major differences between the Africans and the indentured servants. Indentured servants, being basically British or Irish in background, were Europeans who knew they had rights. They were part of a system that had obtained - since the 16th and 17th century - laws that provided protection for them. Africans were not English and were not part of this system, and I think it became easier to enslave Africans for life. Early on, in American colonial history, there were proba...

Although I think it was primarily religious grounds, that they were heathens, not because they were black. One of the justifications of the slave trade - it's hard to take this seriously, but one of the formal justifications was that since our missionaries can't get into Africa, because they'll all die of disease, we'll take the blacks out of Africa and make them slaves, and that way we'll save their souls, because we can convert them to Christianity. But then you get to the point, well,...