Drawing The Color Line Summary

In this chapter Howard Zinn explicitly describes his title, “Drawing the Color Line”. Zinn is really trying to get his common point across that we as a society created the racism that we know as the white and black difference in our society. He talks about racism as a human choice and is not a natural occurring phenomenon. In other words slavery was not predestined or fated to the idea of slavery. Just by the title “Drawing the color line “the reader can get the feel of the article. In “Drawing the Color Line” we learn about the white slaves rather than the African counterpart. I like how we learned about the punishments and unfair treatments the two races encountered. The white slaves were subject to different and less harsh punishments, whereas the black slaves were punished

and subject to exponentially harsher punishments.
I think the less harsh punishment was done on purpose.

With this in mind I feel that the slave owners noticed that it was possible for white and black servants to get along and possibly they thought they would be able to get together and conspire against them. I also noticed that the freed White slaves were given fifty acres when freed, however that was not the case for the African or African American counterparts. This is an example of othering because the slave owners will give one race better treatment than the other only die to skin color and the safety of themselves. It can also be seen as a way to keep their power and place in society at the time.
Africans were slaves in other parts of the world besides Europe and the America’s. Zinn mentions the conditions the slaves faced during capture and transfer, they were placed on boats and many died due to the cramped space and the lack of nourishment. There was a good number of them that fell ill due to the conditions, this is another source of othering because the slave traders held themselves up on a pedestal and thought they were better than the slaves therefore felt that they were the ones that needed to be feed more often and

lavishly.
It is believed that African slavery lacked two things that made American slavery exponentially cruel in comparison, Zinn states "the reduction of the slave to less than human status by the use of racial hatred, with the relentless clarity based on color, where white was master, black was slave and the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture". In my opinion this is why African Americans felt inferior to the White man, Zinn also said that it was both a psychological and a physical system. The White men used othering to get into the mind of the slaves to think that they were in the proper place in society.
Ultimately slavery initially began and prospered due to racism which was caused by the human choice to other, the othering to discriminate and enslave Africans due to their skin color. They are all related because the choice to other can be caused by