Admitting that racism is a thing, and calling it racism is an everybody who's actually rational thing
I disagree.
Discrimination is real.
The concept of "race" is fabricated.
Between 1660 and 1690 the RULING CLASS invented the term "WHITE RACE" very specifically as a tool to FRACTIONALIZE poor workers.
The English had a long history of separating themselves from others and treating foreigners, such as the Irish, as alien “others.” By the 17th century their policies and practices in Ireland had led to an image of the Irish as “savages” who were incapable of being civilized.
The social position of Africans in the early colonies has been a source of considerable debate. Some scholars have argued that they were separated from European servants and treated differently from the beginning. Later historians, however, have shown that there was no such uniformity in the treatment of Africans. Records indicate that many Africans and their descendants were set free after their periods of servitude. They were able to purchase land and even bought servants and slaves of their own.
Some African men became wealthy tradesmen, craftsmen, or farmers, and their skills were widely recognized. They voted, appeared in courts, engaged in business and commercial dealings, and exercised all the civil rights of other free men. Some free Africans intermarried, and their children suffered little or no special discrimination. Other Africans were poor and lived with other poor men and women; Blacks and whites worked together, drank together, ate together, played together, and frequently ran away together.
Moreover, the poor of all colours protested together against the policies of the government (at least 25 percent of the rebels in Bacon’s Rebellion [1676] were Blacks, both servants and freedmen). The social position of Africans and their descendants for the first six or seven decades of colonial history seems to have been open and fluid and not initially overcast with an ideology of inequality or inferiority.
The colonial leaders found a solution to both problems: by the 1690s they had divided the restless poor into categories reflecting their origins, homogenizing all Europeans into a “white” category and instituting a system of permanent slavery for Africans, the most vulnerable members of the population.
Between 1660 and 1690, leaders of the Virginia colony began to pass laws and establish practices that provided or sanctioned differential treatment for freed servants whose origins were in Europe. They conscripted poor whites, with whom they had never had interests in common, into the category of free men and made land, tools, animals, and other resources available to them. [LINK]
+proHUMAN +proFAMILY
Your scathing critique is requested.
