Pathogenesis by Jonathan Kennedy;

Author:Jonathan Kennedy; [Kennedy, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC
Published: 2023-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

Freedom and Revolution

In August 2019 the New York Times launched its 1619 Project, with the aim of “placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States’ national narrative.” The inaugural magazine issue, which has been turned into a bestselling book, contained an array of articles that emphasized the profound influence that racialized slavery has had on almost every aspect of contemporary American society, from traffic jams to health care. The project’s title and the date of the publication referred to the arrival of the first trafficked Africans in Britain’s North American colonies exactly 400 years earlier; the twenty-odd men and women had been transported across the Atlantic by Portuguese slave traders, but were then seized off the coast of Mexico by English pirates and brought to Point Comfort in Virginia. The fact that Africans have been present on the continent since 1619 is remarkable: even the Pilgrim Fathers—whose story plays such a central role in American mythology—didn’t get there until the following year.

The year 1619 did not mark the moment when North America became a slave society, however. As in Barbados, indentured servants were the preferred source of laborer in England’s North American colonies at first. These workers comprised two-thirds of the 250,000 Europeans who arrived in the New World in the 1600s.[47] The number of Black people arriving was tiny in comparison: there were fewer than 7,000 across all the colonies in 1680, accounting for less than 5 percent of the population.[48] And they were treated like indentured servants rather than slaves; “set to work alongside a melange of English and Irish servants, little but skin color distinguished them.”[49] Many gained their freedom after working for their masters for a period of time; some of them even managed to amass large landholdings and purchased their own trafficked Africans to work on them.

The first record of what can be recognized as racialized slavery doesn’t appear until 1640, when three indentured laborers from Virginia—two white and one Black—ran away from their place of work. After they were captured, the colony’s highest court sentenced the two Europeans to four additional years of servitude. In contrast, the unfortunate African American—whose name was John Punch—was condemned to “serve his said master or his assigns for the time of his natural Life here or elsewhere.” Still, at the time, John Punch was very much an exception to the rule.[50]

It wasn’t until the end of the seventeenth century that the number of African Americans in North America took off—in both absolute and relative terms. From under 7,000 in 1680 (5 percent of the population), their number increased to almost 17,000 in 1690 (8 percent), 28,000 in 1700 (13 percent), and then kept on growing.[51] By 1750, there were almost a quarter of a million Black people living in the North American colonies, roughly 20 percent of the population. When we look at colony-level statistics, it is clear that the proportion of African Americans barely changed in

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