in the north

...Massachusetts Bay was the first colony to formally legalize slavery in 1641; in 1656 it barred African Americans from serving in the militia; and in 1705 it outlawed interracial marriage, just as the Southern colonies had done in the 1660s. Northern colonists carefully crafted laws to eliminate the possibility of social equality between whites, Native Americans, and people of African descent. Repudiating intermarriage carried powerful legal and symbolic weight, relegating African Americans to the status of “otherness” and alienation, helping to guarantee that Black blood would not flow in white veins. Any Black convicted of raping a white woman would at the very least suffer castration, but a white who raped a Black woman would suffer no penalties whatsoever. Rhode Island even outlawed the right of a Black woman, regardless of legal status, to sue a white man for paternity.

...Northern owners, in what may seem counterintuitive, did not value slave children, as they brought additional costs, remained unproductive for many years, and became an unwanted distraction in the masters’ homes. When enslaved women gave birth, owners often considered the newborns to be burdens and gave them away “as soon as possible…like puppies.” The practice was so common and devastating to Black families that as late as 1774, Black Bostonians petitioned the colonial legislature to defend their marriages and families. “Our children are also taken from us by force,” and some were sold soon after birth. “Thus,” they decried, “our lives are imbittered to us.” But such justified protests and assertions of rights only increased the intensity of white supremacy. The more people of color accepted white practices, methods, and opinions, the more they adopted white institutions such as Christianity, and the more they lived like those about them, as the University of North Carolina history professor John Wood Sweet wrote, “the more adamant [white] settlers grew about drawing new lines of exclusion.”

Yacovone, Donald. Teaching White Supremacy: America's Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity (pp. 31-32). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.