Affirmative Action For Colonial White People
Whiteness, as a concept, dates back to the early 1700s when slave holders wanted to basically destroy any solidarity slaves and non-slave laborers had with each other. T.Coates quotes a bit about this below, but for more check out Tim Wise's works.
Affirmative Action For Colonial White People - Ta-Nehisi Coates - Personal - The Atlantic
Much of this pioneering work involved using the law to sever ties between white servants and black slaves who, in the early to mid 1600s, intermixed and intermaried. The new laws elevated the status of white servants, while lowering the status of black slaves.
This particular bit from Morgan caught my eye:
In an act that created perhaps the most invidious distinction between them, the assembly protected the property of servants while confiscating what belonged to slaves. During the seventeenth century it had been common for masters to give a cow or a pig to a favored slave or to allow slave to acquire such property by extra efforts of their own.
But in 1705,in the same act that authorized the dismemberment of unruly slaves, the assembly provided that servants were to have the sole use, benefit and propriety of any property they owned or that came into their possession by gift or any other lawful means, but that "all horses, cattle and hogs, now belonging, or that hereafter shall belong to any slave, or of any slaves mark...shall be seized and sold by the church-wardens of the parish...and the profit therof applied to the use of the poor of the said parish."
Thus even the small property previously allowed to slaves who had the excess energy and industry to work for it was handed over to poor whites--a highly effective device for dissociating the two.
