Opportunities Lost: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Denial of Class and Racial Justice in the United States
Purchase In-Person and Livestream Event Tickets Here
Join us for a lecture from Dr. Michael Blakey, National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Anthropology, Africana Studies, and American Studies at the College of William & Mary, as he examines how the first opportunity for an America unblemished by the immorality of racial slavery and the injustices of class inequity was lost with Bacon’s 1676 Rebellion in Virginia, and had a long lasting effect on efforts to achieve an America with equal rights for all.
About Dr. Michael Blakey, Ph.D.
Michael Blakey is National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Anthropology, Africana Studies, and American Studies at William & Mary where he directs the Institute for Historical Biology. He is former director of Howard University’s African Burial Ground Project in New York City and currently sits on the Scholarly Advisory Committee of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution. He is co-chair of the American Anthropological Association’s Commission for the Ethical Treatment of Human Remains. Blakey is the author of more than 80 articles in refereed journals and anticipates the release of his 3-volume book, The Blinding Light of Race; Race and Racism in Western Science and Society, by Routledge Taylor Francis Press in 2026. He advises many descendant communities and has lectured on bioarchaeology, publicly engaged archaeology, and racism at universities in Africa, Europe, Asia, South America, Australia and across the United States.
“Opportunity Lost: The Historical Anthropology of Aborted American Virtue”
The first opportunity for an America unblemished by the immorality of racial slavery and the injustices of class inequity was lost with Bacon’s 1676 Rebellion in Virginia. The masses of poor workers were dissatisfied with the few opportunities they had to acquire land to determine their own lives after their indentures were served. Large tracts of land were being appropriated by Royalist landowners-cum-nascent-capitalists dedicated exclusively to the profitable drug trade in tobacco. Rebellious indentures, African and European, burned Jamestown to the ground in protest. The Royal Navy, recently charged with the sole purpose of defending profits, stopped the rebellion to offer a deal, effectively to White indentures, for land to the west. Indentured Africans would simultaneously be subordinated by a newly introduced racial chattel slavery that would solve the problem of capitalists, emerging from feudal patronage, to control labor, reduce its costs, and expand trade profitable to them alone. ‘Race,’ a new term to naturalize exclusive Christian entitlement to human rights, would be elaborated in Western science and society for another 350 years. With it, white privilege and elite profits continue to be protected against recognition of the injustices of American slavery, Jim Crow, and White backlash against efforts to achieve an America with equal rights for all.