Zinn- Chapter 2- Drawing The Color Line

In Chapter two of Zinn called drawing the Color Line we learn more about racism and how it became prevalent in America and lasts even until this very day. The question that is asked is whether it is possible for white and black people to live together without hatred? The only way to answer this question is to find out how racism started, and to see if it can be effectively ended. In this chapter it was found that people were not certain whether it was hatred, contempt, or pity, or even patronization which would place black people into an inferior position for three hundred and fifty years. When the English settlers arrived in Jamestown, Virginia the Indians taught them how to grow tobacco they began to sell this product back to England. The settlers need more money, but they did not know how they could possibly do all the work themselves. But they realized that they could not possibly have the Indians work for them simply because they were outnumbered. The thought of capturing the Indians would also not work for the fact that the Indians were too tough, resourceful, defiant, and at home in the wilderness while the English were not. The only possible answer the settlers could find was to have black slaves. By 1619 a million black slaves had already been brought over to South America and the Caribbean from South Africa to work for the Portuguese. Fifty years before Columbus the Portuguese took black people to Lisbon to be sold as slaves. The black people were torn from their cities, were they were discovered to be living in more civilized cities than Europeans at that time. Often slave traders use the excuse that slavery had already existed in Africa. However there were two major differences of slavery in Africa compared to that of the United States. One major difference was they were more like serfs or indentured servants; the second were the use of slaves for limitless profit and racial hatred. The slaves were put in horrible conditions on death marches, slave ships, only one third of the initial captured made it to America, an estimated fifty million of the population of Africa were lost to slavery and death. The slave trade was first done to escape starvation, and possible extinction, but quickly turned into a blind passion of greed. After learning of these events in more in depth detail I think it will take more than people will ever be willing to give to live without racism. African American people have been living in inferiority for so long that many white people, would most likely decline the right to give away their self-prescribed superior status to become equivalent to African Americans.