Bernard Lewis The Historical Roots Of Racism

Racism only emerged when American ideals of equality collided with the inherent inequalities of Africans caused by slavery, forcing people to justify why black Africans were not equal. The Founding Father founded America on the basis of innate equality of all men. The Declaration of Independence states that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights”(Jefferson) and implies no person should be unequal to another. Yet no language about black slaves, who were inherently unequal to white citizens, was included in the document. This conflict and its implications were described by Bernard Lewis in The Historical Roots Of Racism. Americans dealt with this conflict

Atlantic slavery was different from other slaveries in the past due to its commercial nature and its dependence on a singular race of slaves(Morgan, 41-42). Its commercial nature, since the labour was used solely to maintain the world economy, lead to slave owners to dehumanize their slaves. They wanted to maximize their profits, so they beat, brutalized, and dehumanized their slave to get the maximum amount of work from them. Since it only used African slaves, this dehumanization spread outside of the plantation and lead the entire populace to dehumanize Africans. The commercial nature of Atlantic slavery was compounded at the advent of the cotton industry. According to Sven Beckert in Empire Of Cotton, in 1862 one fourth of the world’s population depended on the cotton industry(2). At the center of this massive industry was slavery, “slavery enabled the stunning advances of industry, and the accompanying profit”(4). Now two of the world's major industries relied on slave labour, sugar and cotton. Racism finally solidified as a result of emancipation efforts, which threatened to crumble the world’s economy. This sentiment is reflected in Campbell and Oakes review of White Over Black by Winthrop