PBS Says American Slavery was Natural

Malcom X once said that

You cannot have Capitalism without Racism.

Johnathan Scott explores this theme is his essay at Black Commentator called PBS Says American Slavery was Natural: Eradicting Bacon's Rebellion From Popular History

... Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, the largest and most consequential slave revolt in the history of the continent. At first a small opposition movement within the Anglo-American ruling class, over profit-making opportunities in Virginia, the revolt became hurriedly a mass rebellion of bond-laborers, their sights set on the chief garrison and magazine at West Point.

Nathaniel Bacon was a member of the colony council and a militant opponent of Virginia land policy. He had prepared the revolt a few years earlier by organizing an armed mutiny of angry taxpayers at Lawnes Creek Parish, and, in November of 1676, proclaimed freedom to all bond-laborers, in anticipation they would join his cause against the big tobacco bourgeoisie. He was right. Thousands of bond-laborers – six thousand European Americans and two thousand African Americans – took up arms against the numerically tiny Anglo-American slave-owning planter class. Seizing the day, dramatically, they drove Governor Berkeley back to England, hat in hand, and shut down all tobacco production for fourteen straight months.

Emphasis Mine

To prevent similar events in the future after the British had bombarded the rebels into submission, the ruling class needed a new way of maintaining control by divide and rule.

... To put it differently, how do you run a social control system in a civil society based on chattel-bond slavery?

When I ask this question to students in my early American literature course, the answer comes easily: divide the bond-laborers in two by letting one half go free and the other half – keep them in bondage and have the “free” half patrol them. This common sense has escaped most U.S. historians, ...

Thus, racism is born and encouraged by the ruling class.

Black and White!
Together we are Dynamite!