How a desire for profit led to the invention of race

Eric Foner

• Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America by Ira Berlin
  Harvard, 512 pp, £18.50, October 1998, ISBN 0 674 81092 9
• The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492-1800 by Robin Blackburn
  Verso, 602 pp, £15.00, April 1998, ISBN 1 85984 890 7

It is more than 130 years since the Emancipation Proclamation, but Americans have yet to arrive at a generally agreed understanding of either the history or the legacy of slavery. When a Congressman from Ohio recently proposed a national apology for the enslavement of African-Americans as a way of easing the country’s racial tensions, the result only demonstrated how polarised the historical memory of slavery has become. Most blacks felt that the step would be wholly inadequate, a device to avoid concrete measures to deal with such enduring consequences as the persistent racial gap in income, health and housing, for example. Most whites insisted that they had nothing to apologise for – after all, the last of the slaveowners had long since died. Moreover, it was endlessly reiterated, Africans sold other Africans into slavery, as if this somehow obviated white America’s responsibility for creating the most powerful slave system the world has known.