Actually, if you had read the article Steve linked to: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/20/the-invention-of-whiteness-long-history-dangerous-idea, you would have discovered that skin color was not the main differentiator. It was religion.
“If you asked [an Englishman] to situate himself within the rapidly expanding borders of t…
“If you asked [an Englishman] to situate himself within the rapidly expanding borders of the known world, he would probably identify himself, first and most naturally, as an Englishman. If that category proved too narrow – if, say, he needed to describe what it was he had in common with the French and the Dutch that he did not share with Ottomans or Africans – he would almost certainly call himself a Christian instead.
That religious identity was crucial for the development of the English slave trade – and eventually for the development of racial whiteness. In the early 17th century, plantation owners in the West Indies and in the American colonies largely depended on the labour of European indentured servants. These servants were considered chattel and were often treated brutally – the conditions on Barbados, England’s wealthiest colony, were notorious – but they were fortunate in at least one respect: because they were Christian, by law they could not be held in lifetime captivity unless they were criminals or prisoners of war.
Africans enjoyed no such privilege. They were understood to be infidels, and thus the “perpetual enemies” of Christian nations, which made it legal to hold them as slaves. By 1640 or so, the rough treatment of indentured servants had started to diminish the supply of Europeans willing to work on the sugar and tobacco plantations, and so the colonists looked increasingly to slavery, and the Atlantic-sized loophole that enabled it, to keep their fantastically profitable operations supplied with labour.“
Skin color may have played a part, but it wasn't the main belief that drove the switch from white indentured to black enslaved labor. Whether one was a Christian was the key in-group belief that bound "whites" together. Skin color privilege was afterward politicized and codified into law by granting privileges to whites that elevated them above blacks, etc. And that's when the "I'm better than you because I'm white” overt racism began.
Actually, if you had read the article Steve linked to: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/20/the-invention-of-whiteness-long-history-dangerous-idea, you would have discovered that skin color was not the main differentiator. It was religion.
“If you asked [an Englishman] to situate himself within the rapidly expanding borders of the known world, he would probably identify himself, first and most naturally, as an Englishman. If that category proved too narrow – if, say, he needed to describe what it was he had in common with the French and the Dutch that he did not share with Ottomans or Africans – he would almost certainly call himself a Christian instead.
That religious identity was crucial for the development of the English slave trade – and eventually for the development of racial whiteness. In the early 17th century, plantation owners in the West Indies and in the American colonies largely depended on the labour of European indentured servants. These servants were considered chattel and were often treated brutally – the conditions on Barbados, England’s wealthiest colony, were notorious – but they were fortunate in at least one respect: because they were Christian, by law they could not be held in lifetime captivity unless they were criminals or prisoners of war.
Africans enjoyed no such privilege. They were understood to be infidels, and thus the “perpetual enemies” of Christian nations, which made it legal to hold them as slaves. By 1640 or so, the rough treatment of indentured servants had started to diminish the supply of Europeans willing to work on the sugar and tobacco plantations, and so the colonists looked increasingly to slavery, and the Atlantic-sized loophole that enabled it, to keep their fantastically profitable operations supplied with labour.“
Skin color may have played a part, but it wasn't the main belief that drove the switch from white indentured to black enslaved labor. Whether one was a Christian was the key in-group belief that bound "whites" together. Skin color privilege was afterward politicized and codified into law by granting privileges to whites that elevated them above blacks, etc. And that's when the "I'm better than you because I'm white” overt racism began.