It has been comforting and in some ways easy to cast slavery and racism as the nation's sin of omission, and some people actually view it that way, that it was terrible but it was a sin of omission, an aberration in an otherwise democratic society. And they tend to think that it's isolated in time and divorced from our contemporary society. You often hear people say it's the distant past. Actually, the development and expansion of skin-color or race-based slavery over two centuries made racial norms and beliefs an essential part of the foundation of American society from the colonial times into our own present. It's not an easy subject to take on. I often find that it's a very difficult and even painful subject to study, to understand, and to come to grips with. Two of my favorite quotes that I think about when you have to face the past squarely comes from Maya Angelou, a poet, and the late historian Eugene Genovese. Maya Angelou says that, History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage, need not be lived again. And Genovese reminds us that, Until a people can and will face its own past, it has no future, meaning that we need to face our past squarely in order to understand who we are, what shapes the present, and as well as helping us to prepare for the future. The fateful choice of race-based slavery is critical in establishing the foundations of race in American society. During the second half of the 17th century, a fateful and long-lasting transformation occurred with respect to the enslavement of Africans in the American colonies. Now, the arrival of the first Africans in 1619 was followed by complicated and complex choices about how to treat them, how to absorb this new population into the newly formed British colonies, and also what was their relationship to the rest of society. Early on, these questions were at least far from being resolved. The first Africans that arrived were not enslaved in the way that they would be following the late 1600s. They could become free by becoming Christian. They also could become free through intermarry. It was a time within the colonies in which they still followed the English tradition that children took the status of their father, so if a slave mother married a father that was free, the child could become free. And there was also the belief that it was wrong and inappropriate to enslave Christians. So there were a lot of choices that were yet to be made. There was also other populations there were more indentured white servants than there were slaves. There were also Native Americans. And the populations in general had different kinds of status in society, but they also related to each other. They worked together. In some cases, they rebelled together. In some cases, they were able to sue in the courts and to form contracts. So, the questions of race-based slavery, as we would come to know it in decades to come, were still unresolved in this period in American history. In the early colonies, it was neither a natural or inevitable process that the legal status of people of African descent would come to depend upon ancestry and skin color. There were many factors that combined to bring the shift about. One was the fear of working-class populations, particularly when they coalesced and banded together in rebellions against the planters or against the well-to-do. During the first half of the 17th century, roughly from 1607 to 1650, many colonists believed that it was the Protestant mission to convert non-Europeans rather than to enslave them. So Africans lived in a society where the possibilities for freedom were still there and that slavery was not race-based at that point. Nor was it hereditary at that point. As stated before, early on, Africans, like other servants, could free themselves from bondage by converting to Christianity, fulfilling contract labor agreements, or purchasing their own release from indentured contracts. This began to change in the late 1600s, mid-1600s, when the planters began to realize that their labor forces were banded together. There were rebellions. And they began to emphasize the differences, both the cultural, ethnic or race differences among the different populations, that is, between Africans and indentured servants who were white as well as Native Americans. And then they made a shift to base slavery on skin color and ancestry. In 1662, Virginia made the fateful choice of erasing any doubt as to whether the children of so-called Negro women, irrespective of the father, would be slave or free. Virginia enacted a statute that all children born to a slave mother or, as they would put it at that time, a colored or Negro woman, would also be a slave. And this was a very critical and telling reversal of English law because as early as seven years earlier in Virginia, in 1655, the law was very different. In fact, the law stated that by the common law, the child of a woman slave begot by a free man ought to be free. This changed in 1662, and that was a very, very fateful change because it was a shift toward slavery being based on race and also slavery becoming hereditary. Now, that shift was complicated in so many ways because it didn't compel the colonies and the laws at the time as well as social perceptions to actually think about, what is the definition of a Negro woman and how is this classification arrived at for purposes of law and contract and social relationships? It may have appeared to many people that this was a self-evident truth, that just by looking at someone, they could determine that, but it wasn't easy at the time and became more difficult through a process of intermarry and mixture among the Native Americans and whites. How was a Negro woman defined and how was that represented in law and contract and also in bondage? Now, it's also the case that at the same year, in 1662, Virginia enacted another statue: banning any white person from intermarry with a colored person, and any colored person from intermarry with a white person. By the same logic, how do you define a colored person? How do you define a white person? How do you know who can marry another person? And what was the definition of race at that time? In this time period, people just simply went with their conventional perceptions, but in time, these kinds of laws, both the laws that based slavery on skin color and ancestry as well as laws that would ban intermarriage based on mythology of race, would have to be answered in the colonies, in their laws, as well as in the courts. And we'll see that in time, the courts eventually had to define things like white or black or Negro woman. And in order to have laws to regulate people based upon this perception of race, it was critical to enter into these definitions and to really extend the law into almost every aspect, every phase of society, whether it was voting, whether it was education, slavery, marriage, social relationships, public accommodations. There was no way to avoid having to define race to the nth degree once you base slavery on race.
