While chattel slavery had been outlawed, many of the institutions created by the slave-owning establishment in the US remained intact or were adjusted so that the white ruling class retained full control of the political and economic systems. The wealthy continued to profit from the extreme exploitation of racialized labor through racist, but legal labor practices such as sharecropping, indentureship, and the convict leasing system. And much of the massive, unprecedented accumulation of wealth that white ruling class American families had accrued through slave labor remained in their hands.
Chattel slavery had been outlawed but in many ways, it lived on through structural racism and extreme economic inequality. The “white slavery” panic offered the white ruling class a means to take control over the meaning of slavery and their perceived relationship to it. By presenting chattel slavery as “over” because it was no longer legal, the white ruling class could indemnify themselves against accountability for the ongoing legacy of slavery. According to them, they had abolished it.
Second, the concepts of “white slavery” allowed the white ruling class to position themselves as the “new victims” of slavery and racialized people as the new enslavers. Chattel slavery was something that white people and white society did to racialized people. It involved forcing people to work and often forcing them to move, such as being kidnapped, transported to plantations or sold to faraway enslavers and separated from their families. The “white slavery” panic reversed these roles to position white people as the victims.
This new form of slavery was characterized as something that racialized people did to white people and white society. Stories of “white slavery” focused on racialized migrant men who forced women to work in the sex industry and the stories often featured some form of forced movement (e.g. white virgins being kidnapped and transported to faraway lands). This granted the white ruling class political cover to attack their alleged perpetrators—racialized migrants and workers and justify it as self-protection. They used “white slavery” to justify their campaigns to end Asian migration into the US, and restrict Asian social and political power by claiming this as a necessary form of protection against “foreign enslavers” and sex slaves. The “white slavery” panic—as part of the broader anti-Asian Yellow Peril panic—led to the first US federal immigration exclusion based on race—the Page Law of 1875.