Slaveholders deployed so-called scientific racism to justify racial slavery.
In trying to address the systemic problem of racial injustice, we would do well to look at abolitionism, because here is a movement of radicals who did manage to effect political change. Despite things that radical movements always face, differences and divisions, they were able to actually galvanize the movement and translate it into a political agenda.
The idea that somehow people of African descent are not part of the same species as whites was accepted by European men of science in the early modern period.
We often forget that the women's rights movement actually grew out of the abolition movement. It is really within abolitionism that many of the leading women's rights advocates gained experience as organizers and lecturers.
In New England enslaved people had the right to sue for wrongful enslavement.
Slave rebellions, especially the [1791] Haitian Revolution, had an ongoing effect on the ways in which abolitionists talked about ending slavery.
