Slavs

clipped from esr.ibiblio.org >tobacco farmers in the late 1600s decided to set up a race concious society in order to keep black slaves. The actual history is more interesting than this. Early English colonists in the Caribbean and southern U.S. imported slaves in order to preserve a social pattern they valued, one in which a squirearchy controlled a large mass of illiterate laborer/tenants (there’s a good explanation of this in Albion’s Seed). What’s now forgotten is that early on most of the slaves were Irish, or English criminals or political dissenters (and technically they were under 7-year indenture rather than being chattels). Blacks became more valued because they survived the tropical climate and the psychological condition of slavery better than whites and Amerinds did. The “race consciousness” came later This is one of the case studies that falsifies the Marxist idea that ideology is determined by the social means of production.