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Supporting Caste: The Origins Of Racism In Colonial Virginia, Patrick D. Anderson
Supporting Caste: The Origins Of Racism In Colonial Virginia, Patrick D. Anderson
Grand Valley Journal of History
In 17th century Virginia, lower class whites and blacks coordinated on multiple occasions to resist the power of the ruling class elites. By the late 19th century, white laborers viewed the newly freed slaves through racist precepts and the two groups clashed on a regular basis. The aim of this essay is to explain how the shift from racial solidarity to racial antagonism occurred. Racist ideology originated in the minds of the elites and they attempted to separate the restless lower class along racial lines, first, by legal reforms, second, by creating a separate class of enslaved blacks. Anti-black racism …
Secular Damnation: Thomas Jefferson And The Imperative Of Race, Robert P. Forbes
Secular Damnation: Thomas Jefferson And The Imperative Of Race, Robert P. Forbes
Torrington Articles
Race, we are told, is a “social construction.” If this is so, Thomas Jefferson was its principal architect. Jefferson consciously framed his only published book, Notes on the State of Virginia, to check the rising status of Africans and to combat growing critiques of slavery from America’s European friends. Jefferson did this by importing the slaveholder’s sense of slaves as chattel into an Enlightenment world view, providing a metaphysical foundation for prejudice by transmuting the traditional Christian concept of the saved vs. the damned into material and aesthetic terms. Recasting in quasi-scientific language the ancient doctrine of the mark …