The Racial-Sacrifice Covenants

In Prehistoric Times, a people fearing that they had irritated their gods would seek to make amends by sacrificing a lamb, a goat, or sometimes a young virgin. Somehow, the shedding of innocent blood effected a renewed connection between the people and their gods. A similar though seldom recognized phenomenon has occurred throughout American racial history. To settle potentially costly differences between two opposing groups of whites, a compromise is effected that depends on the involuntary sacrifice of black rights or interests. Even less recog­nized, these compromises (actually silent covenants) not only harm blacks but also disadvantage large groups of whites, including those who support the arrangements. Examples of this involuntary racial-sacrifice phenomenon abound and continue. Afew of the more important are: the slavery understandings, the Constitution, universal white male suffrage, the Dred Scott v. Sandford case, the Hayes-Tilden compromise, and the southern disenfranchisement compromise. Contemporary sacrifices of black rights and interests underlie policies on the death penalty, drug-penalty sentencing rules, and reliance on standardized test scores in college and graduate school admissions procedures. Historian Edmund Morgan explains that plantation owners in the early seventeenth century recognized that they needed a stable work force to grow and profit from tobacco. Because Native Americans woulde scape or die, and the indentures of whites came to an end, the solution, over a decade or so, was to sentence African laborers to slavery indenture for life. The landowners convinced working class whites to support African enslavement as being in their interests, eventhough these yeoman workers could never compete with wealthy land owners who could afford slaves. Slaveholders appealed to working-class whites by giving them the chance to vote and by urging them, owing to their shared whiteness, to unite against the threat of slave revolts or escapes. The strategy worked. Wealthy whites retained all their former prerogatives, but the creation of a black subclass enabled poor whites to identify with and support the policies of the upper class. With the safe economic advantage provided by their slaves, large landowners were willing to grantpoor whites a larger role in the political process. Thus, paradoxically, slavery for blacks led both to greater freedom for poor whites and aneconomic structure that would keep them poor.