ABSTRACT
African slaves and their masters and mistresses created new cultures in the Americas out of the ordeal of Atlantic slavery. The cumulative effects of the slave labor system served to radically change people’s perceptions of their own culture, and their own self. Prior to 1450, few people in Europe, the Americas, or Africa would have defined themselves as white or black. Yet, after the development of slavery in the Americas, racial categories became the primary method of self-identifying and identifying others. This cultural phenomenon became common even in areas that did not experience large-scale plantation slavery. The greatest cultural legacy of slavery in the Americas, and its most unique feature, was not brutalizing labor conditions, but how slavery shaped notions of blackness and whiteness and shaped understandings of racial identity in the New World.
