Zinn Chapter 2

In chapter two, Drawing the Color Line, Zinn talks about how racism has been so important in the United States alone. Over the last 350 years feelings of racism has been mixed. Zinn goes on to talk about the history of slavery and how it all came about. Zinn also states that slavery was carried out because of the need for profit, desperate settlers, and for the superior status for the poor whites.
Zinn describes how slavery was the answer to peoples’ problems. For hundreds of years African blacks were stamped as slaves and even Christopher Columbus brought back slaves from his journeys. The people and tribes in Africa were very spiritual and had their own laws, but their punishments were not too harsh. It was not like the Africans did not want the people to come into their land, it’s just that they did not have the weapons like the Europeans had so they were not able to defend themselves or make the Europeans obey them. The reason why African slavery was so cruel and unjust in the United States was because of the status the slaves were given and from the profit that people could make off of them. The slaves were more like dogs than humans. They never got respect and when they were punished for doing something wrong or running away their punishment was always the harshest of them all. There were white indentured servants, but their punishments were still less severe than those of the slaves.
In the chapter Zinn talks about what would happen if slaves ran away or tried to revolt. When slaves ran away how would people really treat them even if they did have the papers to prove they were free? I think that whether the slaves were free or not they were still treated like the scum of the earth. No one ever appreciated what they did or even gave them the time of day. The fear they had instilled in them was horrible and I actually understand why they would jump off the ships they were on. No one, no matter what race, should have to be in such filth and horrific conditions.
It makes me sick to think about what slaves were put through. I don’t think I would even survive something like that. I thought this chapter was well written in how Zinn tells the readers where slavery came from and what it was all about.