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Why Do So Many White Americans Care About Indentured Servitude?
You probably already know the answer.
I teach the literature of the past, and sometimes I have to talk about slavery. Sometimes I have to talk about racism and colonialism. I try to be as objective about it as possible, but I feel a moral obligation to tell the truth about America’s repugnant past and make it clear that it was once legal for white colonizers in the Americas to own black people as property.
Some of my students don’t seem to be capable of understanding the full impact of chattel slavery on the people who were enslaved. They haven’t been told or don’t want to know that Europe’s slave traders forcibly took black Africans from their homes and made them work in the New World for no pay until they died.
Sometimes, I might say often, when the subject of chattel slavery arises in class, a student, usually a white female, will try to derail the discussion by bringing up indentured servitude. Indentured servitude is a kind of contract labor where a person agrees to work without pay for a specified period of time. It was used in colonial America, especially England’s colonies in North America.
Around 500,000 people came to the North American colonies as indentured servants before 1775 according to “Indentured servitude in British…
