Trump & Racism: Two Peas in a Pod.

I happen to believe that the very worst thing which ever happened to the United States was that it was founded as a colony by Great Britain. The reason I say that is because in creating the colonial society on the North American continent, the British also created the worst, most abhorrent labor system ever devised in Western Civilization, namely a labor system based on chattel slavery which reduced human beings to nothing more than property with values based not on their humanity, but on how much someone would bid to own them and take them home from the auction at which they were sold.

Not only were black men and women who were transported from Africa to America against their consent considered to be no different from a laboring animal like a horse or a mule, but the slave system which took root in the British North American colonies was the only slave system which did not allow for any degree of manumission at all.

A slave was a slave for his or her entire life, a permanent state of servitude which then extended automatically to every person who descended from that slave. The last ship bearing Africans to get sold into the American slave society arrived her in 1806. Meanwhile, until 1865 every black resident of every slave state was still enslaved.

The lack of manumission was not the worst aspect of the slave system devised…