Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘The reality is, the belief that Blackness is an immutable, genetic racial category that transcends all other identities is in fact the American way — an idea that has been forced upon and enforced upon people with African ancestry by those who have racialized themselves as white since the 1600s.

It was then that European colonists, seeking to codify who could be enslaved and who would be free, began drafting systems of racial classification and the rules of race that still govern our society. These laws determined not only that people of African ancestry were inherently enslavable, but also that the children of European men and enslaved African women would also be enslaved. Their “whiteness” would not be recognized, and they would be entitled to none of the rights the white colonists were crafting for themselves.

We are taught to think of race as being our physical characteristics or our ancestral connection to a certain geography, but European colonists were inventing race rules that were about more than ancestry. They were a means of divvying up power, resources and social status. Under these rules, a person whose ancestors were mostly European — and who looked European — was categorized as Black and could be enslaved and denied rights merely because he or she had a single known or suspected African ancestor. To cement this racial order, colonists passed laws prohibiting marriage between people that the colonial legal and social systems had categorized as Black and those they had categorized as white. Whiteness, rather than being a genetic reality as many people still believe, was and is a social construct.’ (from the New York Times)

Another article it was hard just to excerpt from. If you would like to read the whole argument, clicking on the link should take you to the full article, even without a subscription.