Historical

How did this come to be? What were the conditions, struggles, and contingencies that produced the current arrangement?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.

Race is not old. As a way of sorting humanity into ranked, inheritable groups, it was made alongside capitalism, in the same centuries and often by the same hands. This lens traces that making: the Atlantic slave trade and the wealth it produced, the invention of whiteness as a tool to divide laboring people, the overthrow of Reconstruction, and the long machinery of Jim Crow, convict leasing, and redlining. It builds on the historical lens of the capitalism theme, which introduces the slavery and capitalism link.

Anchor questions

• Race did not always exist as we know it. When and why was it invented, and by whom?
• How did slavery, and the wealth it produced, shape the world we live in now?
• How were poor whites and enslaved and free Black people kept from making common cause? Who arranged that?
• What happened to the brief experiment of Reconstruction, and who overturned it?
• How did the law build and rebuild the color line, from slave codes to Jim Crow to redlining?
• Whose resistance is left out of the story?

Materials

Free unless marked otherwise. “Free to borrow” means a free Internet Archive account and a renewable one-hour loan.

Books

• Eric Williams (1911 to 1981), Capitalism and Slavery (1944). The foundational argument that Atlantic slavery and the slave trade financed Britain’s industrial rise, and that abolition followed once slavery no longer served capital. Shared with the capitalism theme. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Theodore W. Allen (1919 to 2005), The Invention of the White Race, Volume 1 (1994). Argues that “the white race” was a deliberate ruling-class invention in colonial Virginia, a system of social control built after Bacon’s Rebellion to keep laboring people divided. Free to borrow: archive.org. Note the PDF this entry used to link was the introduction only, about fifteen pages, not the book.
• Edmund S. Morgan (1916 to 2013), American Slavery, American Freedom (1975). Traces how colonial Virginia produced American ideals of freedom and racial slavery together, the paradox at the root of the racial order. No borrowable copy exists, and no honest free companion was found. Paywalled: wwnorton.com
• W.E.B. Du Bois (1868 to 1963), Black Reconstruction in America (1935). The landmark revision that centers the agency of formerly enslaved people, introduces the “general strike” of the enslaved, and names the “public and psychological wage” of whiteness. The single most important book for this theme. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name (2008). Documents convict leasing, debt peonage, and the legal machinery that re-enslaved Black labor after emancipation. A direct link between Jim Crow and profit. No borrowable copy exists. Paywalled: penguinrandomhouse.com. The PBS film of the book, below, is free and carries the argument.
• Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law (2017). Shows that redlining and residential segregation were de jure government policy, a primary engine of the racial wealth gap that persists today. No borrowable copy exists. Paywalled: wwnorton.com. Rothstein’s Fresh Air interview is free with a full transcript, so it can be assigned: npr.org
• Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (b. 1938), An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2014). Recasts US history as settler colonialism and Indigenous dispossession, essential for situating racial capitalism alongside land and elimination. A bridge to Imperialism and the Global System. Free to borrow: archive.org

Primary sources

• Ida B. Wells (1862 to 1931), Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892). Wells’s investigative pamphlet exposing lynching as a tool of economic and political terror rather than a response to crime. Short, and a model of research turned into a weapon. Public domain and free: gutenberg.org
• Loving v. Virginia (1967). Worth reading for Virginia’s own arithmetic: “any ascertainable Negro blood” made you colored, but under one-sixteenth “American Indian” blood did not, so the First Families could keep their Pocahontas story. Racecraft, in statute. Free: law.cornell.edu

Films and documentaries

• Slavery by Another Name (Sam Pollard, 2012, 90 min). The PBS documentary of Blackmon’s book, on how forced labor, convict leasing, and peonage re-enslaved African Americans from 1865 until World War II. Connects the historical record to its afterlives, and streams free. pbs.org

Video

• “Slavery in the American Colonies: Crash Course Black American History #2” (CrashCourse, Clint Smith, 2021). Roughly 11 minutes, about 758,000 views. Clint Smith on how chattel slavery became law and economic engine in the early colonies. A reliable building block for a historical session. youtube.com/watch?v=G4syEkyOzmY
• “Housing Segregation and Redlining in America: A Short History” (NPR, Code Switch, 2018). Roughly 7 minutes, about 1.4 million views. How federal redlining and the unenforced Fair Housing Act built lasting segregation and wealth disparity. A clean visual companion to Rothstein. youtube.com/watch?v=O5FBJyqfoLM

Further reading

For resources behind a paywall, see the note on access.

• Zinn Education Project, Teach Reconstruction. Free lessons and role plays on the period Du Bois put at the center of this lens, and on the campaign to get it taught at all. The best classroom-tested way into Reconstruction. Free: zinnedproject.org

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. The expansion of whiteness and the racialization of Asian and Latino people are now covered; Indigenous dispossession is carried by Settler Colonialism, Land, and Indigenous Sovereignty, which exists now and holds it properly rather than as a subsection here. Contributions welcome, especially Filipino racialization and the colonial ambiguity of US nationals, and the global history of race beyond the United States.