ABSTRACT
The creation of the Racism Machine normalized an ideology that treated Africans as property, indigenous people as expendable, and indigenous land as available. The Racism Machine that was gradually built in the late 1600s and early 1700s became fortified through the process of defining and building the new nation decades later. By the time the American colonists started to organize sustained rebellions against British colonial power in the 1770s, the Racism Machine had already been operating for decades. The Racism Machine mediated class conflict between whites and curbed rebellion by poor whites. The Racism Machine was fortified at the nation's founding with mechanisms that normalized the racial hierarchy and established methods to protect and patrol the borders of whiteness. Examining the original language in the directions for the census enumerators will help reveal the mechanism of the census in the Racism Machine.
