An incorrect concept of race

CONSIDERABLE NATIONAL attention and discussion was sparked by the July 30 publication of the New York Times article "Obama Has Ties to Slavery Not By His Father but His Mother, Research Suggests."

In that article, author Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes, "In 1640, Mr. [John] Punch, then an indentured servant, escaped from Virginia and went to Maryland. He was captured there and, along with two white servants who had also escaped, was put on trial."

There is no basis for the claims that John Punch was "indentured" and that the other two servants (a "[D]utchman" and "Scotchman") were "white."

Ancestry.com (in the article Stolberg discusses) cites the following paragraph from the Journal of the Executive Council of Colonial Virginia dated July 9, 1640, as "the only one surviving account that certainly pertains to John Punch's life":

Whereas Hugh Gwyn hath by order from this Board brought back from Maryland three servants formerly run away from the said Gwyn, the court doth therefore order that the said three servants shall receive the punishment of whipping and to have thirty stripes apiece one called Victor, a [D]utchman, the other a Scotchman called James Gregory, shall first serve out their times with their master according to their Indentures and one whole year apiece after the time of their service is Expired...the third being a Negro named John Punch shall serve his said master and his assigns for the time of his natural Life here or elsewhere.

There is no indication in the 1640 document that John Punch was "indentured." While the document specifically indicates that the other two "servants," James Gregory and Victor, did have "Indentures," it does not say this about Punch.

There is no documentation that Punch signed an indenture (particularly not for transportation to Virginia), and it is extremely unlikely that he did. What is likely is that he was previously subjected to limited-term chattel bond-servitude (the passage makes reference to John Punch serving "his said master and his assigns").

THEODORE W. Allen, in his seminal two-volume study The Invention of the White Race, in Volume II on "The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America," sheds important light on this subject. He points out that in Virginia chattelization was imposed on free laborers, tenants and bond-servants increasingly after 1622.

He also emphasizes that it was imposed on both European and African descended laborers, that it was a qualitative break from English labor law, and that the chattelization of plantation labor constituted an essential precondition of the emergence of the subsequent lifetime chattel bond-servitude that was imposed on African-American laborers in continental Anglo-America under the system of racial slavery and racial oppression.

The other two servants captured with John Punch were not "white" and were not described as such. The 1640 record says only that they were "Victor, a [D]utchman" and "a Scotchman called James Gregory."

In Volume I of The Invention of the White Race, subtitled "Racial Oppression and Social Control," Allen emphasizes there were no "white" people in Virginia at that time. He explains that after examination of 885 county-years of pattern-setting Virginia's colonial records, he found no instance of the official use of the word "white" as a token of social status prior to 1691.

This was not merely a matter of semantics; he also found that the "white race" as we know it was not, and could not have been, functioning in early Virginia.

It is important to understand that through much of the 17th century, there was a commonality of experience between European and African descended laboring people in Virginia who fought together, ran away together, made love together and, in general, resisted their oppression together.

When economic hard times worsened after 1660, there were numerous examples of militant labor solidarity, culminating in the later civil war stages of Bacon's Rebellion (1676-77), in which European and African descended chattel bond-laborers fought together demanding their freedom from bondage.

Allen insightfully explains how in the wake of Bacon's Rebellion, the "white race" was invented as a ruling-class social-control formation in response to such labor solidarity; how a system of racial privileges was deliberately instituted as a conscious ruling-class policy in order to define and establish the "white race"; how a system of "racial slavery" was imposed that was also marked by severe racial proscriptions against free people of African descent; and how the consequences were not only ruinous to the interests of African-Americans workers, but also disastrous for "white" workers.

As people organize to protest the growing hard times today, it is most important to accurately learn our 17th century history, and whose class interests are served by white supremacist appeals.
Dr. Jeffrey B. Perry

First published at JeffreyBPerry.net.