LEGALLY BLACK: MATERIAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF RACE IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD.

CONTENTS ABSTRACT 242 INTRODUCTION 243 I. THE ORIGINS OF RACE 245 A. Racial Materialism 247 B. Hegemony 249 II. THE UNITED STATES 251 A. A New Nation, Conceived in Liberty: [...]
It is a familiar story: in the world's first post-colonial republic, a nation conceived in liberty had to contend with the contradictions of African slavery. In the beginning, white colonists in what would become the United States assumed that Blacks were fit for nothing more than laboring in chains. With the advent of the Enlightenment, American intellectuals started to take seriously the idea of real equality, and a long struggle to abolish slavery and establish a truly free society began. That story culminated with the American Civil War, and the century that followed compelled white Americans to unlearn their ancient prejudices and eventually grant Black Americans civil rights. This Article offers a different story. The racial prejudice that underpinned American slavery was not ancient; Blacks were not always seen as inferior and what qualified an individual as "Black" changed often in both popular understanding and, especially, under the law. To illustrate these points, this Article examines the development of slavery and racial laws not only in the United States but also in the British colony of Jamaica and the French colony of Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti). In each society, the necessity of labor preceded, rather than followed, the existence of racial prejudice. In each society, the white elite had to contend with how to transform "race "from the amorphous concept it was in the 1600's into a system of laws, and in each society, the realities of racial mixing created a class of individuals who would confound the courts and ensure the fluidity of legal racism. If the familiar story were true, America's brilliant Founding Fathers would have certainly arrived at different solutions than colonial officials in Jamaica or the white masters of Saint-Domingue. Instead, what we see across all three societies is a remarkable convergence of the interests of the ruling class. Both the similarities and differences between racial laws in each society are best explained not by ideology, but by the material underpinnings of each country's economic system. If we are to understand how systemic racism impacts our world and our legal system today, it is crucial to recognize that prejudices will continue to exist until the material conditions that underlie them are overthrown. This Article represents a small contribution towards that goal.