History of America Through 1877 Research Proposal

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Blackness was not an unremittingly negative quality, as it would be seen later on, but the associations of blackness and other stereotypes that would be attached to 'Negroes' began fairly early.

The development of colonies based upon cash crops, including those in the Southern United States, necessitated a large enslaved labor force, larger than whites could provide. As the economic need for slave labor increased, so did negatively expressed views of Africans and blackness in general. Indentured servitude of whites grew more controversial, thus replacing then with Africans who were justified as being 'natural' slaves became an accepted solution. Even Thomas Jefferson would eventually see 'Negros' as existing at the end of a chain of being, the beginning phase of a kind of evolutionary 'erasure' of color, and erasure of the 'mark of Cain' of blackness, as Christian missionaries used to think the Africans possessed.

Jordan believes if there had not been such a crying economic need, Africans would never have been brought to the Americas.

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European racism was not virulent enough, but the availability of a large labor source without the ability to resist European 'guns and steel' proved too tempting. Seeing blackness as evil and Africans as heathen may have preexisted the economic benefits of slavery, but slavery provided the fuel to this ideological tinder. Thus Jordan's book is not about how Africans perceived whites or later perceived enslavement -- it is an intellectual history of white perceptions of blackness and how this contributed to a sociological and economic phenomena. He draws upon a wide range of historical perspectives, including Quakers and abolitionists later in his work. The portrait that emerges is complex -- European racism and fear of African's 'blackness' was not always as virulent as it would become under slavery, but it was always bubbling beneath the surface......

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