by Kyri Murdough

Racism is often framed as hatred, a moral flaw in individual hearts. That definition is convenient because it keeps attention on personal behavior and away from the political, legal, and economic systems that produce unequal outcomes.

Framing racism as an interpersonal feeling is not just a misunderstanding, it is protective. When racism is defined solely as individual animus, innocence is easy: I don’t hate anyone. But the truth is that for centuries, law and public policy distributed advantages along racial lines, shaping who could own land, build wealth, access education, vote, or move freely^{1, 2}. These decisions not only harmed Black communities, but they also benefited white families economically and politically³.

This distinction matters because racial animus describes attitudes while racism as a structure describes how power, advantage, and vulnerability are organized. Systems built this way can endure even where overt hostility declines because institutions, incentives, and policy maintain them.

The Invention of Whiteness as an Incentive Structure

To understand how the system of racism took shape, we can go all the way back to English colonial America. The Virginia House of Burgesses, operating under the authority of the British Crown, developed a racial hierarchy through legal, political, and economic decisions. This racial hierarchy was a strategy to organize power and privilege^{1, 4}. Though the Burgesses did not invent human difference, they transformed difference into rigid political and economic orders—through punishments, property laws, and legal codes that, over time, made racial hierarchy the organizing principle of colonial life.

One of the burgeoning racial hierarchy’s earliest targets was poor Europeans. When Jamestown was founded in 1607, settlers did not identify themselves as “white.” They were English, Irish, Scottish. Virginia relied heavily on indentured servants to fuel its tobacco economy—a corporate venture built for profit that demanded labor¹. Many of these servants were poor Europeans who came voluntarily, bound to years of harsh service in exchange for passage to the colony. They labored under brutal conditions alongside kidnapped and enslaved Africans. They worked together, fled together, built families together, and often resisted together. Their shared hardship created the possibility of common cause¹. In early Virginia, the greatest threat to the planter elite was solidarity.

The Virginia House of Burgesses undercut the solidarity between indentured Europeans and kidnapped and enslaved Africans by creating a racial hierarchy in the law. In 1640, three servants—Victor, a Dutchman; James Gregory, a Scotsman; and John Punch, an African man—escaped from a Virginia plantation. When captured, colonial officials extended Victor and Gregory’s contracts by four years; they sentenced John Punch to lifetime servitude². This ruling ensured the same actions led to different consequences. Punishment based on racial differences was not a function of ideological beliefs, but a strategy to fracture potential alliances before they could solidify.

“[Racism] narrows what people believe they share, and therefore what they believe they owe one another.”

Virginia law soon codified this logic. The colony made slavery hereditary⁵. Legislators severed baptism from freedom⁶. The law shielded slave owners from felony charges for killing enslaved people⁷. Each law deepened the subjugation of Black people while expanding the privileges and protections afforded to white Virginians. By 1705, slave codes consolidated these distinctions into a racial legal order, stabilizing a system first tested through punishment⁸.

What consolidation accomplished through punishment, incentive completed through incorporation. The 1705 Act Concerning Servants and Slaves continued to formalize the racial hierarchy by creating “white” as a legal position⁸. The Act distinguished European (“white”) servants from enslaved Africans, granting the former legal protections, civil recognition, and exemption from lifetime enslavement, while fixing the latter as permanently enslaveble.

These statutes drew hard lines between people who had once shared conditions. They made solidarity dangerous and created a durable racial hierarchy. Colonial authorities reorganized social alignment by offering poor Europeans conditional incorporation into the political order—protection, status, and standing—in exchange for separation from Africans and from cross-class alliances^{1, 9}. Whiteness functioned not as shared culture, but as placement within a hierarchy of rights, punishment, and belonging.

The Incentives That Keep Us Divided

The system built to break solidarity did not disappear when slavery ended. Instead, those in power adapted it many times using the same logic of division. Racial separation still operates as an incentive structure for white Americans, offering relative status or symbolic advantage in place of shared power and prosperity. When political actors frame public goods—such as affordable healthcare, public education funding, or infrastructure investment—as benefiting Black communities, support declines, even when those goods would materially improve life for white communities as well³.

Racism, in this sense, does more than maintain hierarchy. It reorganizes political possibility. It narrows what people believe they share, and therefore what they believe they owe one another. The result is not only inequality between groups, but weakened public goods, frayed institutions, and diminished collective capacity. Everyone loses—but not equally. White Americans forfeit the material benefits of collective investment while retaining the psychological wages of racial status, a trade that sustains the very system that limits their own prosperity.

“If racial hierarchy was built to break solidarity, then building solidarity is itself an act of resistance.”

Racial hierarchy did not emerge by accident and will not fade on its own. Policies, administrative practices, legal frameworks, and political narratives that appear neutral carry forward patterns established in earlier periods. Seeing the system is more difficult than seeing individual prejudice. But being blind to the system does not exempt white Americans from its benefits. It only makes its effects easier to reproduce. And even when people see the system, seeing alone is not enough. Racial hierarchy persists not only through ignorance but through inertia—through structures so deeply embedded in how institutions distribute resources, make decisions, and define belonging that they continue to function even in the presence of awareness and good intentions.

When racism is reduced to feelings, history disappears. Advantage looks like merit. Inequity looks accidental, or worse yet, deserved. Accountability shrinks to interpersonal behavior rather than structural inheritance. It is easier to say, “I treat everyone the same,” than to confront how racial policy shaped present positions. A focus on prejudice invites an individual solution, like kindness. A focus on racism demands a systemic reckoning, like repair. But reckoning with the system is not the same as repairing the damage it continues to produce. If racial hierarchy was built to break solidarity, then building solidarity is itself an act of resistance. This requires more than goodwill—it demands restructuring the material conditions that make division profitable and collective investment feel like loss. A just and equitable future does not begin with people simply seeing one another differently. It begins with building systems where shared prosperity is no longer sacrificed to preserve racial advantage.

Endnotes

1. Morgan, Edmund S. 1975. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
2. Higginbotham, A. Leon, Jr. 1978. In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process. New York: Oxford University Press. 
3. McGhee, Heather. 2021. The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. New York: One World.
4. Karenga, Maulana. n.d. Definition of race as a constructed classification tied to power. Various lectures and writings on social and political classification. 
5. Virginia Colony. 1662. “Act XII: Children to Be Held Bond or Free According to the Condition of the Mother.” Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, vol. 2. 
6. Virginia Colony. 1667. “Act III: An Act Declaring That Baptism of Slaves Doth Not Exempt Them from Bondage.” Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, vol. 2. 
7. Virginia Colony. 1669. “Act I: An Act About the Casual Killing of Slaves.” Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, vol. 2. 
8. Virginia Colony. 1705. An Act Concerning Servants and Slaves. Virginia Slave Codes. 
9. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1935. Black Reconstruction in America. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.