White Over Black

White Over Black is a history of an idea: American attitudes toward Black people from the first English contacts with Africa in the 1550s to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Winthrop Jordan's question is the deepest one the subject offers, how racism and slavery are related, which came first and which fed the other, and his answer changed the field. Englishmen arrived in America already carrying loaded associations, Jordan shows, reading blackness through centuries of language in which black meant sin, death, and danger, and those attitudes and the labor system of the colonies then built each other up in a long unplanned spiral, prejudice making enslavement thinkable and enslavement hardening prejudice into law and doctrine. Jordan pursues the story through an astonishing range of sources, sermons, statutes, travel accounts, medical treatises, newspapers, and private letters, into every corner of colonial culture: the law of bondage taking shape colony by colony, the sexual fears that shadowed the whole subject, the religious argument over whether slaves could be Christians, and the agonized contradictions of the revolutionary generation, with a long unsparing study of Thomas Jefferson at its center. The book is huge and scholarly and reads with the grip of an inquest, because the question never loses urgency. It won the 1969 National Book Award in History and Biography and the Bancroft Prize, and more than half a century later it remains a foundation of the historical study of race in America, the book that made the origins of racism a subject historians could investigate rather than assume.