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American Duality: The Legal History Of Racial Slavery In The United States Of America, Conor A. Scalise
American Duality: The Legal History Of Racial Slavery In The United States Of America, Conor A. Scalise
Dissertations and Honors Papers
This paper explores the duality of American law and American culture in the context of American Slavery. On the one hand, White Americans took great pride in the robust and progressive protection of individual liberties and rights guaranteed to them by documents like the Constitution. But, on the other, those same legal documents worked symbiotically with the cultural mores of the day to create and sustain a system that enslaved African Americans for generations. This paper starts with an analysis on the origins of racial slavery in colonial America, which emphasizes the insidious function of the law and preconceptions about …