FEARFUL SYMMETRY: THE UNHISTORICAL SELF OF WHITENESS STUDIES

Abstract

In the years following Bacon's Rebellion of 1676, the rich planters of colonial Virginia hit upon a New World expedient that would be fateful for the entire history of race in America. Edmund Morgan tells the story memorably inAmerican Slavery, American Freedom. Having narrowly evaded death and devastation at the hands of the former indentured servants who comprised the region's lower classes, and still faced with a chronic shortage of labor, the planters began to import African slaves to work the tobacco crops on which their wealth depended. They weren't the first in the New World to try this approach. West Indian sugar planters had already successfully organized the labor on their large plantations along these “racial” lines, and there was sufficient precedent in Western culture at large for associating “blackness” with evil to defuse moral alarm at the practice.