In the 17^th century, when the majority of bond-labourers in Virginia were European or European-American, plots of rebellion or escape hatched between Euro-American and Afro-American labourers were common. Then, at the fin of that siècle (especially following Bacon’s Rebellion):

The ruling class took special pains to be sure that the people they ruled were propagandized in the moral and legal ethos of white-supremacism. Provisions were included for theat purpose in the 1705 “Act concerning Servants and Slaves” and in the Act of 1723 “directing the trial of Slaves… and for the better government of Negros, Mulattos, and Indians bond or free.” [Emphasis Allen's.] For consciousness-raising purposes (to prevent “pretense of ignorance”), the laws mandated that parish clerks or churchwardens, once each spring and fall at the close of Sunday service, should read (”publish”) these laws in full to the congregants. [Emphasis mine.]

Sheriffs were ordered to have the same done at the courthouse door at the June or July term of court. If we presume, in the absence of any contrary record, that this mandate was followed, we must conclude that the general public was regularly and systematically subjected to official white-supremacist agitation. It was to be drummed into the minds of the people that, for the first time, no free African-American was to dare to lift his or her hand against a “Christian, not being a negro, mulatto or Indian” (3:459); that African-American freeholders were no longer to be allowed to vote (4:133-34); that the provisions of a previous enactment (3:87 [1691]) was being reinforced against the mating of English and Negroes as producing “abominable mixture” and “spurious issue” (3:453-4); that, as provided in the 1723 law for preventing freedom plots by African-American bond-laborers, “any white person… found in company with any [illegally congregated] slaves” was to be fined (along with free African-Americans or Indians so offending) with a fine of fifteen shillings, or to “receive, on his, her, or their bare backs, for every such offense, twenty lashes well laid on.” (4:129)

Thus was the “white race” invented as the social control formation whose distinguishing characteristic was not the participation of the slaveholding class, nor even of other elements of the propertied classes; that lone would have been merely a form of the “beautiful gradation” of class differentiation prescribed by Edmund Burke. What distinguished this system of social control, what made it “the white race”, was the participation of the laboring classes: non-slaveholders, self-employed smallholders, tenants, and laborers. In time this “white race” social control system begun in Virginia and Maryland would serve as the model of social order to each succeeding plantation region of settlement.
Thedore W. Allen — The Invention of the White Race, Vol. 2: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America

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