Slavery and the Genesis of American Race Prejudice

Abstract

Over a century ago, Tocqueville named slavery as the source of the American prejudice against the Negro. Contrary to the situation in antiquity, he remarked: “Among the moderns the abstract and transient fact of slavery is fatally united with the physical and permanent fact of color.” Furthermore, he wrote, though “slavery recedes” in some portions of the United States, “the prejudice to which it has given birth is immovable”. More modern observers of the American past have also stressed this causal connection between the institution of slavery and the color prejudice of Americans. Moreover, it is patent to anyone conversant with the nature of American slavery, particularly as it functioned in the nineteenth century, that the impress of bondage upon the character and future of the Negro in the United States has been both deep and enduring.