Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

TWO The Rise of Modern Racism(s)
cans had of course made Europeans aware of their own
light pigmentation, but in other contexts whiteness, as opposed
to national and religious affiliations, was not a conscious
identity or seen as a source of specific inherited traits.
At a time when social inequality based on birth was the
general rule among Europeans themselves, color-coded
racism had little scope for autonomous development. In
the New World, where European pigmentation could be
readily compared to that of black slaves or copper-toned
Indians, color soon became one—but only one—of several
salient identities. In the North American colonies, according
to Winthrop Jordan, “the terms Christian, free, English,
and white were for many years employed indiscriminately
as metonyms.” 3
By the early seventeenth century you had to be black
to be a slave in the American colonies, but it was legal
and religious status rather than physical type that actually
determined who was in bondage and who was not. In every
New World slave society, some proportion of the population
of African descent was acknowledged to be free or
semifree. In early- to mid-seventeenth-century Virginia, for
example, blacks might be slaves, indentured servants, or
freemen, depending on the circumstances of their arrival in
the colony and, in some cases, on whether or not they were
Christians. Blacks frequently sued for their freedom on the
grounds that they had been wrongly enslaved. 4 Slaves on
plantations might be treated as grossly inferior to their masters,
but white indentured servants were not treated much
differently, at least on a day-to-day basis. When they bargained
for cargoes on the Guinea Coast of Africa, Europeans
were forced to treat the indigenous rulers or entrepre-
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