What it was Really like Back Then
Texas settlers did illegally flood into Texas to gain wealth from the cotton trade, but they were also led by the white supremacist ideas of the time which was widespread in the culture of people with lighter skin. Wealth and racism, worked in tandem with one in front of the other, but each reversing position as needed. With the genocidal practices of white militias and slavery existing side by side, it became necessary to justify the horrors of slavery with the ideas of white superiority. The racist images that flooded the minds of whites increased brutality and eventually led to the social policies written into law or practiced by whites as tradition. Using black women as “breeder slaves” was a common practice on plantations to name one such atrocity that was accepted as a norm. The poison of white supremacy was everywhere and cannot be dismissed as a minor influence for white settlers all across America and those coming to Texas.
According to the research, little has been said about the connections between Manifest Destiny, racist destiny, and the expansion of slavery. The Dred Scott Decision (1857), which codified slavery by making Black people non-citizens and subject to the “One Drop Rule,” played an enormous role in the eventual expansion of slavery and the beginnings of the Civil War. Long before they were calling it Manifest Destiny, white racist destiny was the call to oppress people of color. In fact, the term “Manifest Destiny” became a cover for the racism that was the real agenda. Manifest Destiny was the belief that God intended the taking of territory from Indigenous People; this belief was applied in the annexation of Texas into the Union as a slave state in 1845. Manifest Destiny was employed as the ideological tool to strike at Mexico and appropriate Mexican lands by force. At that time, many white Americans were fanatical in their beliefs of superiority in racial, religious, and settler colonialist expansionist ideas. Thus, the ideological racialized narratives of whites, who were expanding across North America as a settler population, made possible the taking of territory. Through a combination of factors, which included hatred for Mexico’s opposition to slavery, and the use of God and racism (Manifest Destiny), and the land that Mexico and Native American territory once claimed was taken by force. The desire to capture land became the racialized mode of conduct, as it allowed poor whites to move up the racialized social ladder as had happened in the American colonies in the 1600s.
Also, criminal elements and war combined in an endeavor for territorial expansion. These landless racialized whites used genocide, ethnocide, and racist persecution against Blacks, Mexicans, Indigenous People, and even other whites that opposed slavery and expansionism. The assigning of free land to Europeans and how it was accomplished is an example of a central detail in American history that is erased from the history books. As a result, people are given the lies which said that Europeans were simply hard-working men. Little, if anything, is said about the free land they received, at the expense of Native Americans, while Blacks and other nonwhites were totally excluded from these economic incentives, providing an easy justification for the development and spread of racial thinking. Blacks and Native Americans were thus painted with an inferior status. These racist arrangements became the mode of advancing white privilege, which was developed over the course of centuries and planted stereotypical images of Blacks and Native Americans into people’s minds. We now know the truth.
A drawing on a post card showing black children as “alligator bait.” All kinds of drawings similar to this were used to build up hatred making white supremacy a force that played a role in the minds of all white settlers.
