ARU Slavery in The American Colonies Discussion Response

please respond to Kelly

Kelly 

Dr. Tomasz Stanek

This week’s topic was to discuss how slavery came about in the colonies and was able to be sustained for as long as it was.  The enslavement of black people in America first arose from a necessity of labor.  There 

weren’t enough colonists to do the work, so they tried using the natives, which was a failed venture.  The native people were too enriched in their own land to be utilized in a productive way, plus they had unusually 

stubborn temperaments. They were also too familiar with their own surroundings and would successfully run away.  This was infuriating to the colonists so much that as it says in the reading “…made the Virginians 

especially ready to become the masters of slaves.” (Zinn 1) That is when the colonists decided upon the shipping in of black laborers. 

Black people were taken from their homelands where they had established culture and a strong sense of community.  They were inhumanely transported, marched for hundreds to thousands of miles, caged, sold off 

as cattle and dropped into an unfamiliar setting.  That alone would be enough to disorientate and break the spirit of anyone.  However, after all of that trauma, they were then subjected to a physical and 

psychological campaign designed to break them down further and make them submissive.  The brainwashing was targeted to have the black people “…impressed again and again with the idea of their own inferiority 

to “know their place” to see blackness as a sign of subordination, to be awed by the power of the master…”.  (Zinn 5)

It wasn’t just a racist thought process that had the black people enslaved, that would be fully entrenched later.  In the reading it states, “The swift growth of plantation slavery is easily traceable to something other 

than natural racial repugnance” (Zinn 4) The deep-rooted quest for wealth that the colonists possessed stripped the humanity from them, and kept them driven towards the goal for power and control.  They enacted 

such stiff laws designed to terrify the black people that if they ran away or revolted they knew it would ultimately be a death sentence.  There were those that didn’t comply and were made swift examples out of.  

The level of domination that the white man enacted over the black man during that time, was strict and unyielding.  Even though the blacks outnumbered the whites almost immediately, the level of intimidation and 

absence of compassion shown towards the black people is partly why slavery was able to be sustained as long as it was.