Since the colonial era, the term ‘race’ has undergone significant evolution in its definition and significance. ‘Race’ was initially used for the sole purpose of categorizing people into a group that they had an ancestral or familial connection to. However, the concept of race later became the primary justification for slavery and has been used for centuries to argue for white superiority while diminishing the value of people of other races. Race was not always the defining characteristic of a person’s merit in the colonies. “The Story We Tell” states that in the early 1600s, the concepts of religion and wealth were used to categorize people into different hierarchical groups. As referenced in Katheryn Gin Lum’s writing, people who did not …show more content…
These laws are among the first that illustrate how the United States was built on a foundation of policies that benefit white men and are detrimental to everyone else. Many white people were complacent with this system, as it either directly benefited them or in the case of poor whites, allowed them to associate with other white people and no longer be part of the lowest social class. Decades after the practice of enslaving Africans in the colonies began, Thomas Jefferson wrote "I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstance, are inferior to the whites in the endowment both of body and mind." This statement articulates a commonly held belief that many white people thought that they were superior to others based on the arbitrary distinction of their race. This belief also allowed Thomas Jefferson to exclude black people from his statement that “all men are created equal”, in that he did not support assimilating black people in a similar manner to how he did with Native