Jordan argued similarly that white racism, not economic or legal conditions, produced slavery. In his essay "Slavery and the Genesis of American Race Prejudice," he argued that Africans had never been like other servants in the Chesapeake that "the Negro was actually never treated as an equal of the white man, servant or free." Racism was strong "long before slavery had come upon the scene." It did not result from slavery, but helped cause it. In 1959, Carl Degler became the first of a number of important historians to challenge the Handlins. Racism emerged to justify slavery it did not cause slavery. That it included African Americans and no others was because black people had few defenses and few defenders.
That it emerged in America, the Handlins argued, resulted from efforts by colonial legislatures to increase the available labor force.
It was permanent bondage, and it passed from one generation to the next. But slavery came ultimately to differ substantially from other conditions of servitude. The first Africans who came to America lived for a time in conditions not very different from those of white indentured servants. In 1950, Oscar and Mary Handlin published an influential article, "Origins of the Southern Labor System," which noted that many residents of the American colonies (and of England) lived in varying degrees of "unfreedom" in the seventeenth century, although none resembling slavery as it came to be known in America. At its center is the question of whether slavery was a result of white racism or helped to create it. The debate among historians over how and why white Americans created a system of slave labor in the seventeenth century-and how and why they determined that people of African descent and no others should populate that system-has been a long and unusually heated one. Where Historians Disagree - The Origins of Slavery
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