The Thirty-Year Rebellion: Race, Revolt, and Repression in Colonial New York

• In Event: Disrupting the Status Quo of Political Repression

Abstract

How does political struggle affect racial hierarchies? Sociological theories of race offer competing explanations: while racial formation theory places political contestation over racial meanings at the center of a linear progress narrative toward “racial democracy,” systemic racism theory emphasizes the durability of racism amid ongoing struggles against it. This paper examines an extreme case of political contestation over racial hierarchies— two slaves revolts against the white colonial elite in eighteenth-century New York City — to argue that neither racial formation theory nor systemic racism theory fully explains the historical significance of slave revolts nor the role of punitive repression in the creation and reproduction of racial hierarchies. Drawing on a diverse set of archival materials, this paper shows how a revolt-repression dialectic became a central organizing force in the formation of one of the most consequential racializing practices of the eighteenth century: criminal law. Because of the gratuitous violence of racial slavery and the resulting mobilization of black slaves against their captivity, New York bureaucrats faced the practical problem of how to suppress revolt that threatened the legitimacy of the colonial project. By intensifying the criminalization of black social life, mobility, and reproduction to address the threat and consequently reinforcing racial hierarchies, colonial elites fed the political will of the enslaved to mobilize against these same hierarchies. Addressing the lack of serious attention given by sociological theory to the realities of racial slavery in general, and the central role of punitive violence in particular, this paper brings together insights from black studies and the sociology of race to suggest that an accurate diagnosis of why racial hierarchies persist requires more critical attention to slavery and slave revolts as key structuring forces of modern ideas of race.

Author

• Jacob Hood, New York University