Race Relations with Abolition in the 1700s

Rather, this would mean the elimination of African-Americans as a distinct group. By 1900, with extra European integration taken into account and everything, most Americans will have only about 5-10% of their DNA be African-American, with few noticeable features. Assuming history similar to OTL in growth, this number may shrink even further, and by the alt-present we're looking at only 3-5% (Around 1940, the percentage of Americans that were White was in the upper eighties, and that's with African-Americans having a higher birthrate). And that's not even taking into account a lessened slave trade.

So race relations won't really be a thing, because there won't be any other races. There will be certain characteristics passed down from African DNA, but it will be hardly noticeable in most people.

Are you really saying that intermarriage will eliminate the African American race? African Americans today have more than 5-10% of their DNA as African. What White people have as their DNA is irrelevant to the discussion. Plus, we already see today that mixed individuals are almost always described as "Black" by default. Look at Barack Obama, he's half White and half African, not even African-American we're talking about straight African, and yet he's described as "Black" and the "first African-American president" which is not true, he's the 44th White president in a row.

Even if you get to a point where intermarriage makes African Americans look superficially "white" (which will take a LONGER time than from the POD to alternate today), you're simply talking about putting alternate Blacks to the position of OTL Jews, still discriminated and considered both by themselves and outsiders as "different" than the rest. We see this with Hispanics, which is not even a race, that "White" Hispanics aren't even classified as Hispanics! We have to create the category "Non-White Hispanics" which generally doesn't include "Black Hispanics" either. Race is a murky and subjective category, evidenced by the fact that the US Census allows to be "whatever you see yourself as" and not worry if it contradicts "bloodlines" and clumps North Africans, Arabs, and Iranians as "Caucasians" yet Pakistanis and Northern Indians as South Asians when on a genetic level those are closer to Europeans than Berbers or Yemenis. The point of all this is- people will always find a way to classify "others" as "others" and there will ALWAYS be a concept of race.
 
There were free black churches in Philly in the 1780s and 1790s, and I think some free blacks formed churches in the South earlier than that. In parts of the south there were slave churches before 1800. It really wasn't until Nat Turner's revolt in the 1830s that the white preacher rule came into play (he was a Baptist minister himself).

In the South, there were slaves who preached to their fellow slaves. Many even developed their own, more rhythm-based, style of religious song, which were what were called 'Negro spirituals' at the time.
 
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