Bacon’s Rebellion and the Creation of Race and White Privilege Ask who knows it? Two trainers tell Bacons Rebellion story sharing back and forth.
VOICE 1: In early 1600’s 50 wealthy Englishmen bought stock in the Virginia Company of London (including parcels of indigenous land in the new colony of Virginia)
VOICE 2: The brought impoverished English teenagers and kidnapped Africans to work the land. By the second decade, the servants, English and African outnumbered the owners by 100 to 1.
VOICE 1: Conditions were horrendous. Whippings, nearly starved to death, no permission to marry.
VOICE 2: The servants worked together, suffered together, made friendships, made love (and most were armed to protect the landowners from the “hostile Indians”).
VOICE 1: And guess what, people resisted together, joining across the color line in mutual interest to end their shared oppression.There were 10 documented slave revolts in mid 1600s.
Nathanial Bacon was a white property owner in Jamestown, who managed to unite slaves, indentured servants, and poor whites in a revolutionary effort to overthrow the planter elite, and in 1676 they burned down Jamestown.
Bacon openly condemned the rich for their oppression of the poor and inspired the alliance demanding an end to their servitude.
VOICE 2: So guess what the landowners did? (take answers) They created the Slave Codes, for first time legalizing slavery and equating slave with negro. They imported more slaves directly from Africa who were more easily controlled. It signaled the beginning of the first racializedslavery system in the world.
VOICE 1: And then, to make sure there would be no more joining together to fight oppression, the white servants poor whites were given a “racial bribe”and were given the chance to be free, to own small parcels of land and most important, given the first paid jobs in the colonies—slave patrols.
Barriers were created so that free labor would not be placed in competition with slave labor and they effectively eliminated the risk of future alliances between black slaves and poor whites.
These privileges were specified as only for white people.
VOICE 2: You can see through this story how race and white privilege were created to keep both Black and white people from threatening the status and structures of wealth and power. And this continues to be the case to this day.
Add conversation about Redlining in the 20th century:
Redliningis the practice of denying, or charging more for, services such as banking, insurance, access to health care, or even supermarkets, or denying jobs to residents in particular, often racially determined, areas.
It refers to the practice of marking a red line on a map to delineate the area where banks would not invest.