What is known as the “United States of America ” now began with the European colonists traveling to what they knew as the ‘New World’ to settle and gain dominance of the land. In time people continued to settle and in 1619, the turning point, where Africans were forcefully taken from their homes , chained up, placed tightly together on a boat and brought to this ‘New World’ for work. The settlers found that having enslaved Africans was cheap and could capture more of them compared to indentured servants. It turned to chattle slavery where slaves would have White masters and the slaves children would be put into work. Slaves would be sold to other White masters and continued for centuries.
The jusification of slavery would be for the laws written in the consitution, such as three-fifths clause proposed by James Wilson of Pennsylvania that a person who was not free would be founded as three-fifths of a free invididual, the Dred Scott Decision where all Black peole had no legal standing as people in court or turn to Bible to justify slavery. Even though the constitution written by Thomas Jefferson was built on this idea that ‘All men are created equal’. In reality, however, it was that Black people were not equal to White people and that they should be enslaved.
While someone may argue that Slavery had existed way before it started in the Americas that the Greeks had slaves and the Romans had slaves. The problem is, as the author of the “1619 Project”, was about the language written in the consituation that ‘all men are created equal’ and as Thomas Jefferson wrote this he himself owned slaves. That is why groups, such as the Abolitionist Movement and many other groups sought to bring these ideas of people being created equal to a reality as they were written in the constitution.
After the abolishment of slavery, with the fight of the Civil War, Black people still faced reproscussions for the color of their skin and being seperated again. Today, the effects of slavery are seeing in system, such as the prison system for mass incarceration where the majority of people today who are being sent to prison being people of color and being incarcerated they would be background checked and it would be hard for them to find jobs, they can not qualify for any goverment services, so they lead to more crime and once a person has convicted three repeatable offense they are sent to prison for the rest of their life. And what makes it hard enough is that there are no systems that rehabilitate individuals in prison.
So, after 400 years of the first slaves being brough to the United States the effects of the racial oppression of people of color is being seen today.