Several people on rattumb have discussed the theory of race as spurred by a class-based desire to divide workers. They’ve been generally somewhat baffled by it, and I’d like to explain more, because I don’t know if they’ve heard the full version.
The theory goes like this.
In the 17th century South, poor whites (mainly indentured servants at this time) and blacks tended to work together and at times had children together. They possessed an amount of camaraderie and solidarity. In fact, they had so much solidarity that they started a rebellion arguing for more land and stronger defense called Bacon’s Rebellion. While eventually put down, the rebellion spooked the planter class.
The planters realized that indentured servants were much too unruly and likely to cause trouble; from this point forwards the percentage of indentured servants in the Southern colonies dropped while the percentage of slaves increased.
Moreover, as more slaves arrived, the color line started to develop. Laws deliberately separated blacks and whites, preventing intermarriage and imposing restrictions on blacks, thereby creating servitude as a racial institution in the American South.
The development of the initial color line in America was likely based on the planter class’s desire to exploit and retain control as a divide-and-conquer tactic. Later capitalists would use the system to their advantage after it had been established.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while since I started being more interested in politics again (and more Nationalist). Bloody Southern Plantation owners managed to cost this country an enormous amount of blood and treasure through their sloth, create an entire ethnic group (with bonus ethnic tension) within the country where one didn’t exist before, and create problems that we’re still dealing with the fallout of over two hundred years later.
I still wouldn’t alter the timeline if I could because this timeline is guaranteed to avoid thermonuclear war until at least 2017 (also because literally rewriting history would constitute mass murder), but if we could fork another one off, I’d love to see what America could become if a few key figures could be prevented from starting the country down this path.
I’m not sure how accurate this representation of events is, though.
