White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son Read Online Free PDF Page A

to Virginia were given fifty acres of land that had previously belonged to one of at least fourteen indigenous nations whose members had lived there.
    Although the racial fault lines between those of European and African descent hadn’t been that deep in the earliest years of the Virginia Colony—race-based slavery wasn’t in place yet, and among indentured servants there were typically more Europeans than Africans—all that would begin to change in the middle of the seventeenth century. Beginning in the 1640s, the colony began assigning blacks to permanent enslavement; then in the 1660s, they declared that all children born of enslaved mothers would be slaves, in perpetuity, themselves. That same decade, Virginia announced that no longer would Africans converted to Christianity be immune to enslavement or servitude. Then, in the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, during which European and African laborers joined forces to overthrow the government of Governor Berkeley, elites began to pass a flurry of laws intended to limit black freedom, elevate whites, and divide and conquer any emerging cross-racial alliances between the two groups.
    In 1682, the colony codified in law that all whites, no matter their condition of temporary servitude, were to be seen as separate and apart from African slaves, and that they would enjoy certain rights and privileges off-limits to the latter, including due process in disputes with their masters, and the right to redress if those masters abused them. Furthermore, once released from indenture, white servants would be able to claim up to fifty acres of land with which to begin their new lives. Ultimately, indentured servitude would be abolished in the early eighteenth century, replaced by a dramatic upsurge in chattel slavery. Blacks, along with “mulattoes, Indians, and criminals,” would be banned from holding public or ecclesiastical office after 1705, and the killing of a rebellious slave would no longer be deemed murder; rather, according to Virginia law, the event would be treated “as if such accident had never happened.”
    The Carters, as with many of the Deanes (another branch of my mother’s family), lived in Virginia through all of this period when whiteness was being legally enshrined as a privileged space for the first time. And they were there in 1800, too—like my fourth great grandfather, William M. Carter—when a planned rebellion by Thomas Prosser’s slave, Gabriel, in Henrico County, was foiled thanks to other slaves exposing the plot. As a result, Gabriel was hanged, all free blacks in the state were forced to leave, or else face re-enslavement, and all education or training of slaves was made illegal. Paranoia over the Gabriel conspiracy, combined with the near-hysterical reaction to the Haitian revolution under way at that point, which would expel the French from the island just a few years later, led to new racist crackdowns and the extension of still more advantages and privileges to whites like those in my family.
    Then there were the Neelys, the family of my maternal great-grandmother, who can be traced to Edward Neely, born in Scotland in 1745, who came to America shortly before the birth of his son, also named Edward, in 1770. The Neelys would move from New York’s Hudson Valley to Kentucky, where Jason Neely, my third great-grandfather, was born in 1805. The land on which they would settle, though it had been the site of no permanent indigenous community by that time, had been hunting land used in common by the Shawnee and Cherokee. Although the Iroquois had signed away all rights to the land that would become Kentucky in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768, the Shawnee had been no party to the treaty, and rejected its terms; not that their rejection would matter much, as ultimately the area came under the control of whites, and began to produce substantial profits for farmers like Jason Neely. By 1860, three years after the Supreme Court in its Dred