“Did Racism Cause the Enslavement of Africans in America?”

Carl N. Degler believes that prior to the development of slave statutes in any of the North American colonies, whether servant or free, were treated as inferior to whites. Degler states that when the Negroes were first imported into the English colonies there was no law of slavery and therefore whatever status they were to have would be worked out in the future. From this absence of a status for black men made it possible …

…as the token of the slave status; the trace of color became the trace of slavery. It had not always been so. (The compiler of the Virginia laws took the liberty of altering the text to bring earlier legislation into the line with his own new notations.) Ultimately the complete judicial doctrine begins to show forth, a slave cannot be a white man, and every man of color was descendent of a slave (Handlins 76-84).