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Either Black or White:The Origin of the Binary Racial Project The differences between racial formation in “Anglo” North America, that is, the U.S. North and Upper South, and racial formation in Brazil and other areas of South America, Central America, and the Caribbean, can be attributed to different trajectories of colonization. North Carolina and further northward—particularly New England and the Mid-Atlantic colonies of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania , and Delaware—were settled by large numbers of Europeans with families. Parity between the sexes was established quickly and continued throughout the colonial period (Bender 1978, 36; Fowler 1963, 30; Harris 1963, 79–94; Nash 1982, 162, 279). European patterns of domestic life were thus reestablished. The white family formed by legal marriage remained the standard social unit in Anglo North America, impeding permissive attitudes toward miscegenation. In Latin America, the interracial family based on extended concubinage or common-law marriages was a social necessity, and thus more acceptable. English settlers in Anglo North America, like Portuguese settlers in Brazil and Spanish colonizers in the Caribbean, were unsuccessful at exploiting Native Americans as a captive labor force, unlike Spanish colonizers in Mexico and Peru. The less densely populated Native American communities in Anglo North America were rapidly decimated by Old World diseases. Also, many Native Americans resisted enslavement and encroachment on their lands by escaping into the interior. Moreover, Britain had a surplus of individuals who were eager to settle in the New World, whereas France, Spain, and Portugal were plagued by a chronic labor shortage when they began colonization in the seventeenth century (Harris 1964, 79–94). The Binary Racial Project four the u.s. path The passage from Britain to Anglo North America, however, was expensive, which made emigration difficult. Therefore, Britain developed the system of European indentured servitude to meet its developing agricultural labor needs in the colonies during the seventeenth century. Large numbers of indentured servants were forced into servitude involuntarily, sometimes as punishment for rather minor crimes or simply kidnapped off the streets of Europe. All lived and worked in circumstances that differed little from that of slaves (Breen 1987, 110; Fredrickson 1981, 59–62). Nevertheless, indentured servitude was typically a contractual arrangement of temporary duration between two parties, in which the price of passage from Europe was advanced in exchange for usually five to eight years of voluntary labor. Furthermore, laws provided indentured servants with some protection during their servitude. Although the laws were inconsistently enforced, indentured servants could use the courts if they thought their rights were being violated. Despite the high mortality rate of early European indentured servants, they were accorded full membership in the colonist community upon completing their servitude, and granted “freedom dues” to facilitate their transition . Some former indentured servants became landowners, and a few even rose to positions of influence in colonial society. Most, however, remained propertyless and poor (Fredrickson 1981, 62; Harris 1963, 79–94; Ringer 1983, 63–64). Throughout the early colonial period, the Anglo North American colonies of the North and Upper South were overwhelmingly comprised of white yeomanry, former indentured servants, and wage earners. Although African slavery gradually became established in the 1650s and 1660s, the sheer size of the European American population partially explained the limited introduction of slavery in the region. Compared to a total white population of approximately 369,200, there were only about 50,000 slaves in all Anglo North American colonies in 1715. At no time during the colonial period did African Americans outnumber European Americans in any colonies of the North or Upper South. This was the case even as their numbers expanded more rapidly than European Americans, or when they became a sizable portion of the population, as was the case for example in Virginia over the course of the eighteenth century (Foner 1975, 188–89). During the early seventeenth century in the Upper South, when the African American population was comparatively small, the distinction between the white indentured servant and the black slave was less precise than that between bonded and free. Indentured men and women from the British Isles were bought and sold in the same markets with indentured and enslaved Africans, and were bequeathed in the same wills. They shared similar working conditions, and many jointly resisted bondage by running away together (Williamson 1980, 7, 38). Both groups were represented among the “giddy multitude” of slaves, indentured servants, and the landless poor among the free classes. In 1676 this sector of society...

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