Legal vs. Religious Excuses

In Joan Dayan’s Legal Slaves and Civil Bodies I found it interesting how she maps out the reasons for why people in history felt that they had the right to enslave people, under the law. According to her theory blacks were considered tainted because of the color of their skin, via their blood. Being tainted is something that cannot continue, and should not, under the law, be allowed to hold land and pass their tainted blood onto the heirs. While disallowing African’s blood to pass along to their children would ultimately mean killing them, instead more legally it meant not allowing them to hold any position or own any land, thus giving the right to whites to make them slaves.
Dayan’s essay maps out the legal justifications and thought process for whites and why they enslaved blacks but that is only the legal justification, not the root cause. The racism is much more deep seeded and the legality of the problem is only an excuse for why the whites did what they did, much like using the Bible as an excuse to have slaves. I think that in actuality the real excuse that was used was Christianity, because during the time I doubt many whites had to legally justify their actions; however, they did feel the need to justify themselves with God. Thus we have many of the slave poems, which reflect the idea of being saved, and that the reason they were brought to America was to be saved and made into a good Christian.