The rise of racism in Anglo-America began as a conflict between the insistence of the Christian elites on spreading the gospel and the defence of property rights by the American slaveholders.Initially,colonisers constructed a social hierarchy of freemen and slaves along religious lines.For the colonisers,black slaves were heathens as opposed to Christians,and heathenish identity was the perceived basis of their enslavement.However,the emergence of the baptism changed the religious identity of black slaves,and it prevented colonisers from conceptually justifying slavery.In order to preserve the previous boundaries of slavery,slaveholders were adamantly opposed to the baptism of black slaves.That attitude of slaveholders was contrary to the principles of the Christian evangelicalism and was therefore rejected by both the Christian elite and the British imperial government.The concept of'the white'was introduced by the colonial legislature in the 1680s to circumvent the dilemma of the baptism by recognising'the skin colour'as the absolute boundary between freedom and slavery.This meant that the basis of enslaving the blacks shifted from religious identity to the skin colour,and a racist idea of slavery emerged.Derived from slavery,racism in turn relied on the boundary of the skin colour to shape the hierarchical distinction between the whites and the blacks in a society of freedom.Afterwards,the combination of different forms of absolute boundaries and social hierarchies has laid the foundation for the persistence of racism over centuries.
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