Quote:
Originally Posted by DSTCHAOS
That doesn't make slavery about "race."
Being about "race" requires more than the identifiability of someone whose skin is darker than yours and language is different. It also requires negative beliefs and stereotypes that fuel the use of those people for economic purposes. Not the other way around, which argues that the economic purposes were established first, the people were chosen, and then to reinforce this slavery institution there were negative beliefs of stereotypes such as "these people are immoral savages who NEED to be brought to this land...they aren't even human." So it became more and more about race as the negative beliefs and stereotypes grew but was not initially about this.
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Right, and I do not argue that the initial impetus was not economics, but very early on, before the 1700s, it morphed into a institution that was in many ways circumscribed by race. Not to mention that the negative perceptions of Africans that fueled this transition had their roots in early Enlightenment thought, so even if the codification of these beliefs into law did not happen until later, these ideas were certainly a part of the popular European cultural imagination before colonization even begin in earnest (I think that Gould talks a bit about this in
The Mismeasure of Man; and I am looking for other sources here). Indeed,the fact that the negative beliefs predate the institutionalization of slavery might have aided in the shift from the indentured servitude, "free labor" institution to the system of chattel slavery.
As I clarified earlier, economics were certainly a factor, but race was just as much of a factor from almost the beginning of the institution and to suggest otherwise is just wrong-headed to me. It seems to me that as race was such a defining characteristic for the majority of the time that the institution existed, we are justified in saying that it was in many ways about race. To cite the economic beginnings as a way of negating the racialized history of chattel slavery is problematic to me (not to say that you were doing that, but that this often happens.)