Blackness Was Invented in Virginia

Historians look at the Virginia colonies as the origins of what we call race. At the beginning of the 1620s, European settlers discovered that mining, pillaging, and looking for gold were unsustainable get-rich-quick schemes; instead, they could get rich by growing tobacco. And as historian Barbara Fields says, nobody ever got rich growing tobacco by democratic means. The most profitable things to do is to press people into the growing of it.

First the European colonists tried to press native people into this labor, but that failed — the native people were on their home turf, they knew the land better, and they could escape. Native Americans were not a reliable source of the kind of intense labor power the Virginia colonists needed. And these Virginia settlers were not producing the tobacco to smoke it, but rather for someone to smoke it that they’d never see. This is production for a world market, at the pace of the world market, for unseen tobacco consumers thousands of miles away. So this is the origin of alienated commodity production on a mass scale.

The settlers also tried to press fellow Englishmen into this labor, creating indentured servitude, sometimes even kidnapping people. And of course indentured servants were essentially property: they could be bought and sold, traded, they could be put up for stakes in card games, they could be whipped or even murdered.

But this system too had problems and limitations, mostly because the labor supply is drawn from the home country; if you drag indentured workers all the way down to the condition of abject slavery, you ratchet up the class struggle at home. The other problem is that it’s a temporary servitude and if they survived (they didn’t always), formerly indentured laborers become landowners and therefore competitors to their former owners.

So the settlers finally hit upon the idea of kidnapping people from Africa and bringing them to Virginia. But that was not systematic at first, and because it wasn’t systematic there was no coherent set of ideas about those Africans.

Africans existed in many different conditions in the colonies. Some Africans were free; there are even instances of Africans bringing lawsuits against Europeans — then called “Christians” — and winning. There are records of Africans adopting Christian babies. It’s only later that language changes from “free” and “slave” (or “African” and “Christian”) to “white” and “black.” Africans were available for enslavement in ways that other people were not.