Carolina, were adamant in their resistance to outlawing the slave trade. Despite the loud objections to slavery and the rising abolitionist movement, slavery was too important to the fledgling American nation to be abolished or the slave trade prohibited at that time. Instead the framers of the Constitution compromised again, granting Congress the right to ban the slave trade but not for 20 years. American participation in the transatlantic slave trade officially ended on January 1, 1808. Yet slave trading persisted illicitly for many years thereafter.
America grappled with its egalitarian ideals, as belief in them required contortions and racial exceptions. The rise of democracy, in the late eighteenth century, and the associated belief that “all men are created equal” was at odds with American economic dependence on slavery and Black subjugation. While the “threefifths” compromise solved the dual problems of representation and taxation, it only implicitly addressed the moral conundrum equating Blacks with property not persons. Slavery remained a scourge on the national conscience. Plantation owners, for their part, did not let the questions about the morality of slavery dissuade from their pursuit of economic profit. Wary of reductions in their labor pool, due to the prohibition of importing slaves, slave owners marshalled Black women’s reproduction to stabilize their labor force. Legal scholar Adrienne Davis explains the importance of Black women’s childbearing to the slave economy, arguing: “[It] created economic value independent of the physical, productive labor they [Black women] performed. Southern legal rules harnessed Black reproductive capacity for market purposes, extracting from it the profits one might expect from a factory or livestock … In its centrality to the political economy, enslaved women’s reproduction was arguably the most valuable labor performed in the entire economy” (2002:109). Black women’s designation as property and their reproduction as profit led to particularly cruel forms of exploitation as slave owners desired to extract maximum value from Black women as laborers while ensuring the viability of their progeny (Roberts 1997).
Historian George Fredrickson in his classic book, Racism: A Short History, argues that, while Blacks were always perceived as racially other, the ideology of racism as a fulsome defense of slavery did not emerge until later:
In the United States racism as an ideology of inherent Black inferiority emerged into the clear light of day in reaction to the rise of northern abolitionism in the 1830s – as a response to the radical demands for emancipation at a time when the federal government was committed to the protection of slavery. Defenders of Black servitude needed a justification of the institution that was consistent with the decline of social deference and the extension of suffrage rights to White males, a democratization process that took place in the South as well as the North. They found it in theories that made White domination and Black subservience seem natural and unavoidable. (Fredrickson 2002:79)
Racism played a key role in managing the dissonance between American inalienable rights and Black slavery, ideologically justifying the differential treatment of Black slaves. Indeed, James Henry Hammond, a Democrat from South Carolina, in a speech before the US Senate on March 4, 1858, declared:
In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement…. Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand. A race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes. We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves…. We do not think that Whites should be slaves either by law or necessity. Our slaves are Black, of another and inferior race. The status in which we have placed them is an elevation. They are elevated from the condition in which God first created them, by being made our slaves. (Hammond 1866:318)
The fight for the abolition of slavery in essence birthed the Black problem. As long as Blacks coexisted alongside Whites in a position of dehumanized servitude and did not demand full inclusion into American society, they were not innately a problem. The problem was when they resisted their social conditions, which resulted in the brutal stamping-out of slave rebellions, severe punishment of runaway slaves, and the prohibition of slave literacy. The ideology of racism was intended to quiet the advocates of abolition, justifying slavery as an institution, all in service of maintaining the existing social order of White superiority.
The 1857 Dred Scott v. J-Sanford case codified what was commonplace at the time: Blacks were not American citizens because “the Black man has no rights that the White man is bound to respect” (Davis 2002:106). Even Abraham Lincoln, the “great” emancipator, said, in September 1858:
There is a physical difference between the White and Black races which I believe forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And in as much as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as such as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the White race. (Lincoln and Douglas 1894:164)
Sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois (1935) argues in Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880 that Black resistance, via increased rebellion and organizing, forced social change. Slaves were unwilling to accept the social order as it was and their upheaval of the Southern establishment through persistent strikes led Lincoln to free them. Most historians argue that slavery was abolished in order to preserve the Union from Southern secession (Fredrickson 2002). In either case, abolition and legal equality for Blacks, guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, required a radical readjustment of the American racial order. Blacks forced this readjustment with increasing resilience during Reconstruction, but racial progress was short-lived. In Opportunity Denied: Limiting Black Women to Devalued Work, sociologist Enobong Hannah Branch argues:
The abolition of slavery freed Blacks from their designation as property, but they remained ideologically and, consequently, socially bound by conceptions of inferiority. Racism, once invoked, became valued in and of itself and it was an inescapable consequence that Whites would insist on maintaining a racist order predicated on denying the equality of Blacks. After the slaves were emancipated, there was no space for Blacks, the racialized Other, to coexist with Whites as equal citizens and competitors in the racialized social structure of the United States. (2011:30)
While racism was initially intended primarily to justify enslavement, after emancipation the pursuit of racial stratification and Black subjugation itself became the goal. Racism played a central role in justifying the unequal treatment of emancipated slaves and led to the rise of Jim Crow, which defined Black life in America for nearly a century.
Racial inequality is maintained by racial ideologies and ideological constructs that normalize racial differences in everyday life. One of the key underpinnings legitimizing American racial inequality is the understanding that Blacks are the problem, rather than a group with problems reproduced within a racialized social structure. We began this chapter by describing how slavery and its ultimate abolition birthed the Black problem. In the remainder of this chapter, we will review the active resistance to Blacks coexisting in American society as equals, which produced the racial inequality we falsely attribute to Black intrinsic characteristics today. First, we describe how sociologists understand race, racism and racialized social systems to provide a shared understanding of how these intellectual claims manifested in the lives of emancipated slaves.
Defining the Problem: Critical and Conventional Approaches to Race and Racism
Sociologist James Blackwell has argued that “no single theory can explain fully the authentic Black experience in America … there is no single authentic Black experience in America except that which developed as a consequence of ubiquitous White racism and color consciousness” (1975:5). Although there is a strong connection between race and racism, they are conceptually and analytically different. In the introduction, we
