jan 1, 1691 - Virginia outlaws interracial marriage
Description:
The Virginia General Assembly outlawed interracial marriage. Before this, only three such unions occurred in the colony, one of them being the famous marriage between John Rolfe and Pocahontas. The law was an attempt to drive a wedge between whites and blacks. After Bacon's Rebellion, states began switching to race-based chattel slavery as their main means of labor. In order to justify this system, authorities needed to dehumanize blacks to prevent sympathy towards them, which could undo the labor system that the colonies were based around. Hence, outlawing interracial marriage helped to separate the two races from each other.
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