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Now that a white elite no longer profited from the children Black women bore, they painted Black women’s procreation as stealing money from white taxpayers.
There has never been a time in United States history when Black rebellions did not spark existential fear among white people, often leading to violent response.
The deep-seated, gnawing terror that Black people might, one day, rise up and demand for themselves the same freedoms and inalienable rights that led white colonists to declare the American Revolution has shaped our nation’s politics, culture, and systems of justice ever since.
In Notes on the State of Virginia, published in 1785, Jefferson admitted that rebellions were a legitimate, rational response to an immoral and inhumane system: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever; that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events; that it may become probable by supernatural interference!”9
Within decades, Carolina law drastically bolstered white authority, mandating that all white people ought to be responsible for policing all Black people’s activities.
the beginning of white people in black peoples business
In an effort to reinforce universal white authority over Black people, lawmakers also empowered all white people to “pursue, apprehend, and moderately correct” any Black person who refused to submit to their authority.
I cannot imagine desiring a bullet & settling for a pen. This is America.
The new American politicians and their British forebears believed that Native people should be treated simultaneously as citizens of nations and as members of lower-order societies.
The Doctrine of Discovery, a longstanding belief that Christian nations had the right to rule over non-Christian nations and their property, helped justify English imperialism despite prior Native presence.
