LEWISTON — Growing up in rural Connecticut in a log house his parents built, Christopher Petrella didn’t have any particular reason to start mulling over the dynamics of race in America.

A white guy in a nearly all-white town with working-class parents, Petrella enjoyed a loving family, sports and a wide-ranging curiosity that led him one day at the age of 16 to pore over the numbers contained in Census 2000 about his own community.

What he found in them helped propel him to an academic career studying how race, crime and protest have swirled together through American history.

Now teaching at Bates College, which he attended as an undergraduate, Petrella is working on a book about the history of white supremacy in New England.

That interest in the dynamics of race led him to write a post-election piece about the racially tinged origins of the electoral college for The African American Intellectual History Society Blog that quickly won a wide online audience from people suddenly keen to understand the roots of America’s presidential selection process.

With a boost from controversial quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who used his Twitter account with nearly a million followers to tout a couple of Petrella’s items in recent days, the Bates teacher’s historical account made a splash with its argument that the electoral college was created in 1787 to protect slavery.

In his article, Petrella called the electoral college “a retrograde political apparatus whose origins in slavery and anti-black racism challenge the radical proposition of one person, one vote.”

“This is my way of pushing back on the idea of a colorblind Constitution” that some claim for the nation’s founding document, he said.

Petrella said it is only one example of the way history is “buried in the present,” underscoring much of what happens with past decisions only dimly remembered. Race, he said, is an issue that keeps cascading through time, tied to the essence of the country that came together at the same time it built the institution of slavery.

As an undergraduate in the Bates Class of 2006, Petrella focused on religion and history, then headed to Harvard University to earn a master’s degree in religion, ethics and politics. After that, he collected a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley in African-American studies.

It all started because he was “super interested in what was going on in my town” of Somers as a teenager, he said. That got him looking deeply at census figures that showed that about one in 10 residents of his little town was black, something that shocked him, given that his high school only had a few black students.

Then he realized they were counting the prisoners locked up in state facilities in Somers, people who really had no direct connection to the town but whose numbers swelled its state aid and other population-based government decisions.

Petrella said he soon realized what a “huge problem” that created, shifting resources from the embattled communities where criminals came from to out-of-the-way spots that didn’t particularly need the help. He called it “the politics of white dominance.”

That sparked his desire to explore the issues involved more deeply.

“Mainstream history excises race from the equation” all too often, he said, by leaving it out or downplaying its significance.

“I’m reminding people that it’s there,” Petrella said. Race “is already baked into the system.”

The electoral college, he said, was created to protect Southern states, which relied on slavery, from northern ones, which had far fewer slaves. 

James Madison, a key architect of the Constitution and a future president, said it plainly at the time.

In response to a suggestion for direct election of presidents, Madison responded with an argument that carried the day by pointing out “the right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern states” because blacks in the South “could have no influence in the election.”

Creating the electoral college as an alternative, Madison said, “obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.”

Petrella said he’s known about the roots of the electoral college for a long time, but when the close election this month put the institution front and center in the news, he jumped in with his piece to make people more aware of its original purpose.

Even today, the fact that the electoral college gives rural voters from small states outsize power in determining who should sit in the White House effectively dilutes the mostly urban minority vote, Petrella said.

That’s “a striking feature” of the system, he said.

“African-American votes actually count less than white votes,” he said. That lack of equality is a problem the country must address, Petrella said.

“History doesn’t pass,” he said. “It accumulates.”

Petrella said he’s sometimes accused of injecting race into arguments where it doesn’t belong. But, he said, the reality is that issues involving race permeate many ongoing debates.

He said he delves into them, from Flint to for-profit prisons, because he has a strong sense of justice and a passion to recognize the humanity in everyone.

Though some might dismiss him as typical Ivory Tower egghead, he said he doesn’t come from a world of privilege. His father grew up in West Virginia coal country and wound up as a mechanical engineer in Connecticut because of the training he got in the U.S. Navy. His mother was a hairdresser.

“What we lacked in wealth, we made up for in love,” Petrella said. Without lots of financial aid from Bates, he said, he would never have landed in Lewiston to begin with.

“I don’t want to be seen as someone who’s out of touch. I want to be able to speak to folks of all political persuasions,” he said, and to try to bring with him “a clear-eyed assessment of how the world works.”

That’s made it possible for him, he said, to teach students everywhere from San Quentin Prison in California to Harvard University in Massachusetts.

“Being able to work with different folks is so important,” he said.

In the end, Petrella said, the important thing to note is that history matters, that topics such as race and democracy are part of an endless, interactive odyssey.

“We need to figure out what that means today,” he said. “It’s a mosaic of which we’re a part.”