2.3: Regions of British Colonies
Dr. Fields Busts Myths About Race and Indentured Servitude
Dr. Barbara Fields, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America,” 1990
“American racial ideology is as original an invention of the Founders as is the United States itself. Those
holding liberty to be inalienable and holding Afro-Americans as slaves were bound to end by holding race to be
a self-evident truth. Thus we ought to begin by restoring to race—that is, the American version of race—its
proper history.”
Identify the claim made by Dr. Fields: (what is her main point?)
The claim made by Dr. Fields is that American racial ideology is not origiinal to the United States and we
should benign to restore race equality.
A claim we discussed in Unit 1:
Demand for labor on Portuguese sugar plantations led to chattel slavery. Therefore, Portuguese kings hired
writers to describe Africans as less than human in order to justify the immoral act of profiting off of their torture.
Racist policies of the slave trade led to racist ideas of African inferiority. The English used the same racist
policies as the Portuguese and therefore Africans were seen as inferior since the beginning of the American
colonies.
How does Dr. Fields’ claim DIFFER than the one written above?
This Dr. Fields’ claim differs from the one written above as the one above shifts the blame of the start racial
ideology to another country while the US adopted it, while this one blames the Portugese for setting false
justification of slavery.
Claim #2 from Dr. Barbara Fields
Indentured servants in Virginia could be bought and sold like livestock, kidnapped, and stolen… Whatever
truths may have appeared self-evident in those days, neither an inalienable right to life and liberty nor the
founding of government on the consent of the governed was among them. Virginia was a profit-seeking
venture, and no one stood to make a profit growing tobacco by democratic methods. Only those who could
force large numbers of people to work tobacco for them stood to get rich during the tobacco boom. Neither
white skin nor English nationality protected servants from the grossest forms of brutality and exploitation.
Identify the claim made in this passage from Dr. Fields: (what is her main point?)
Africans were not the only ones who suffered brutality as indentured servants were treated horribly as well,
being sold like enslaved peoples led by the goal of making a profit.
Dr. Field’s argument highlights: Race was not a major factor in the British colonies in the 1600s
1. Look at history: the British nearly committed genocide against the very pale-skinned Irish. The Russians
enslaved most of their population in Serfdom. Look at Mao in China or Pinochet in Chile. Humans are very
good at torturing their “own kind.” Fact: For all of history, humans have repeatedly abused other humans to try
to gain wealth and power.
2. English lower class who became Indentured Servants could not be sold as “slaves for life” by law ONLY
because they had spent hundreds of years resisiting the rich landowning class of England
“… The freedoms of lower class Englishman were not gifts of the English nobility, tendered out of solicitude
for people of their own color or nationality. Rather, they emerge from centuries of day to day contest, overt
and covert, armed and unarmed, peaceable and forceable, over where the limits lay on how much the rich
Englishman could oppress poor Englishmen.” - Dr. Fields, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the USA”
3. Between 1619 and 1661: Africans had more rights in the colonies than free people people had in the US in
the 1800s (Ex: “intermarriage” was not uncommon in the 1600s, the first laws against “biracial” marriage
were not enacted until 1664) Why? Because race wasn't a fully formed idea in the 1600s but it was a dominant
idea in the 1800s.
So what happened?
4. 1660’s the price of tobacco fell, plantation owners became desperate and developed a new strategy: they
wanted to control their laborers for life.
5. (See point #2) Poor English laborers had won certain rights over centuries of struggle with rich Englishmen
and this meant British laws existed to protect poor Englishman. However, no Brittish laws existed to protect
Africans. British servants could not be controlled for life, African slaves could. This was not about race, it was
about trying to make as much money as possible within the laws of the day.
6. In 1664, Maryland first said African slaves would be held in bondage for life. They needed to invent a
description for race. At first, they said race was based on the father, if the father was “white” than the children
would also be “white.”
7. A few years later, Maryland switched their rules about race and said that race would be determined by the
mother. (This way, slaveowners who raped their female slaves could add to their property) The fact that
people’s “race” was changing with different laws in the late 1600s proves that race was not yet a fully formed
dominant idea yet.
8. British colonists did not abuse Africans because of their “race” which did not exist yet. British colonists
abused Africans because they could and because they were getting rich. Again, if you look at history, this is a
crappy thing humans do.
IF RACE WAS NOT A MAJOR FACTOR IN EARLY 1600’s AMERICA, WHERE DID AMERICA’S OBSESSION
WITH RACE COME FROM? Dr. Fields’ answer: The Founding Fathers.
Explanation:
America’s obsession with race originated from the founding fathers in a direct result of the failure to admit
hypocrisy. If the founding fathers saw the enslaved peoples as equal, they would have to admit to their own
hypocrisy. In light of this, they justify it rather than resolve it.