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Flip the Script: Division by race, gender, and culture
Day Eighty
Division by race, gender, and culture
“Colonial laws prohibiting Black and white people from marrying one another suggest that some Black and white people did marry. Laws imposing penalties on white indentured servants and enslaved Africans who ran away together likewise suggest that whites and Blacks did run away together. Laws making it a crime for Indians and Black people to meet together in groups of four or more indicate that, at some point, these gatherings must have occurred. The social elites of early America sought to manufacture racial divisions. Men of property and privilege were in the minority; they needed mechanisms to divide people who, in concert, might threaten the status quo.” ~The Zinn Education Project
In the United States, the elite, land owning colonists created a division by race to separate workers who were a mixture of indentured servants, mainly poor “white people” from England and slaves, mainly “black and brown people.” Indentured servants and slaves in early Colonial America worked and lived together. They got married, had children, and formed communities.
There was a shortage of women in the colonies, so the first laws created separation between English women and slaves.
In the state of Maryland in the U.S.: A…
