In Thelma Wilis Foote’s Black and White Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation in New York City, she notes, “According to the Manichean symbolism of darkness and light, whiteness symbolizes moral purity and blackness moral pollution” (Foote 184). This quote represents the foundation for the belief among mid 1700’s whites that all “dark skinned people” were inherently inferior to their white counterparts. Foote sheds light upon the white conviction that blacks held the short end of the stick in every facet of life, from genetic makeup to intellect and everything in between. Hence, the white population utilized this notion of supremacy as justification for marginalizing the African race. Each of this week’s readings touches upon the prejudice faced by Africans in the colonies of North America. In “Slaves in Colonial New York,” Harris notes that upon their arrival to the Western Hemisphere, blacks were destined for servitude because their “inferior skill set and competence.” Binder and Reimers illustrate that even in New Amsterdam, in which blacks were empowered with equal judicial rights and the ability to serve in the military, the Africans were still enslaved and were only given “half freedoms” for partaking in a particular service. Finally, Foote demonstrates how many blacks were convicted for playing roles in a vicious crime spree in New York even when the evidence against them was circumstantial at best. The common theme in these three cases is the white’s tendency to unite into one group, thereby ostracizing the African race as a whole. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in Foote’s description of the “plot of 1741-42.”
In her text, Foote paints a picture of a New York colony marred by government factionalism and contentious politics. She delineates how the electorate, constituted by white landowners, was stuck in binary division between loyalty and disloyalty to the English crown. However, a string of fires left the colony at an impasse. With nobody else to blame, the whites put their differences aside and unified to channel their fears and animosities downwards towards blacks. People immediately began to speculate that blacks were conspiring to rise up and overthrow the whites. Hundreds of blacks were jailed and/or executed for no reason other than the color of their skin. White people who associated with Africans were condemned to prison or exiled from the colony altogether. In some cases, the whites went so far as to bring translators to court to further humiliate the blacks and their apparent “inability to speak coherent English.” By doing this, the whites constructed an identity of “otherness” for blacks, labeling them as “dangerous” and “immoral.” The isolation of the blacks by the “team” of whites laid the foundation for centuries of slavery and persecution. The indelible impact of white subjection in the mid 1700’s is encapsulated in the horrible discrimination endured by blacks in the Jim Crow South. 200 years later, blacks were scapegoated and abused in almost identical fashion to their ancestors long past. 200 years later, and whites continued to join together to exclude an innocuous race plagued by nothing more than a different skin color.
