Slavery and Racism

Slavery & Racism

Slavery takes very big part of American history. Some say people cannot talk about the American history without slavery. This is how much influence slavery had on the history of the United States. Not only slavery had big influence in the past, but also it continued to have an influence on the present world by creating the concept of racism. Slavery led the racism, which is currently still occurring in a society.

During the colonial periods, European countries were seeking for new lands to expand the nation and to become better nation than neighboring European countries. At the beginning, all different European nations settled at the America, colonists began to grow crops to support their living in the new land. However, with the different environments and settings from Europe, colonists failed to grow their crops and to settle in the new continent. In despite, Spain, France, and England colonies managed to stay at the new land with the support from their mothering nation. Later on, American Indians introduce the cash crop, tobacco, to these colonists. Since America has suitable setting for tobacco to grow and also traded in a good price, tobacco quickly became the main resource among colonies. Also, those mothering nation of the colonies noticed the advantages of tobacco and started to form huge plantations to grow tobacco. Then, colonists needed workers to work in their plantation. However, the problem was no colonists wanted to work for the plantations, and there were not many colonists at the new continent since it was not very stable place to stay. This is when slavery was demanded in colonies for labor. “It was not racism but the demand for labor that led to slavery, and slavery in a democratic republic required racism as a justification.” Eric Foner says this; it clearly defines that slavery came before racism. The concept of racism did not even exist before slavery because the concept of racism is just the nonsense concept, which...