Vaughan, Alden T. “The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth-Century Virginia.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 97:3 (July 1989): 311-354.

Summary
This article provides a summary of the origins debates and argues that still (in the late 1980s) no consensus on when and why slavery and racism (and their connections) began. However, he does argue that there are agreements on other issues concerning this topic: sharp rise of black population in the 1680s, the shift in legal status in the 1660s and 1670s, that 25% of blacks were free on the eve of such legislation, that racial prejudice/discrimination grew with an increased labor force, and that white Virginians before the 1660s harbored some degree of prejudice. To the points of disagreements - the status of most blacks before the 1660s, the depth of discrimination against blacks, and the reasons for Virginia’s enslavement and antipathy of blacks – Vaughan concludes: slavery was present and dominant from the outset (with some exceptions); white Virginians saw blacks as people markedly different (identified as such in public and private documents); the roots of slavery was economic; and, lastly, based on literary texts in the 16th century, he contends that English opinion during early American colonization held that Africans were innately inferior (religious interpretation) and thus a nascent racist ideology was in place in Virginia from the beginning. Concerning the last point, he argues that this explains why de facto enslavement emerged several decades before Anglo-American law, as blacks were not numerous enough to engender racism as a response to fear over their abundance. Anglo American racism was, in effect, a necessary pre-condition for a system of slavery (Economic). In conclusion, he thus contends: “white Virginians made permanent bondsmen of imported Africans and their descendants because it was economically advantageous to the slave-owners; because Africans were usually powerless to prevent enslavement… and because the planters [and other whites]…. Believed that Africans were an inherently inferior branch of humankind.”

See also: Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom