Coates expresses his main point of the deepness in which racism was rooted in the U.S. and he travels all the way back from the beginning with examples to support this. from the very first colony in Jamestown , he begins to explain and break down how the oppression of the black slaves came to be. here he notes that whites were also used as “slaves” except they were actually servants that served a certain time. he does this to proceed to the point that eventually, the black slaves came to overtake the free labor field and white indentured servants gradually began to fade. furthermore, he continues down the timeline and includes scenarios that paint the picture of how common and disgusting racism was back then, in its most blatant forms. from treating blacks as pure property and not people, to literally lynching a black person and crowding under the body, Coates is able to demonstrate the roots of racism against blacks. by doing this he emphasized his ultimate point of the way that racism has been embedded in the U.S. since the beginning. one statement that is extremely powerful and captures the main aspect of his central idea is “Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy”. this to me really summarized the point that Coates was trying to make because it embodies the way that he paints the roots of racism to a nation that depended on it so financially that it became a reality that blacks were opressed for centuries.
