|
The roots of racism in the U.S. February 23, 2007 | Page 10
IN THIS excerpt from his book Black Liberation and Socialism, AHMED SHAWKI explains how racial oppression emerged as a consequence of the economic system of capitalism.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE LABOR of Blacks, forced to come to the New World as slaves, was essential to the economic development not only of the new colonies, whether in the Caribbean, Latin America or North America, but also the major powers of the "Old World."
Ahmed Shawki's Black Liberation and Socialism, published by Haymarket Books, is a sharp and insightful introduction to the history of racism in the U.S. that is packed with lessons for today's struggles
Caribbean historian Eric Williams' books on racism and slavery are classics. Look for Capitalism and Slavery and From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean 1492–1967.
Another essential book on slavery in the Americas is The Making of New World Slavery, by Robin Blackburn. For a book coauthored by Barbara Fields that follows the rise of slavery in the "New World," through to its overthrow in the middle of the 19th century, see Free at Last: A documentary History of Slavery, Freedom and the Civil War.
Racism and racial oppression have been features of everyday life for Blacks in the United States for more than 350 years. But the persistence of racism is not inevitable, and racism, certainly in its modern form, has not always existed.
Far from being the unavoidable result of interaction between different peoples, racism and racial oppression emerged in Europe's transition from feudalism to capitalism. Ancient and feudal societies before capitalism were able to do without this form of oppression.
Specifically, racism emerged in Western Europe and the New World as a consequence of the slave trade, as the ideological justification for slavery. Prejudice against strangers (xenophobia) and distinctions between "barbarian" and "civilized" existed, but did not take the form of modern racism. So, for example, as one history of Native Americans puts it,
"Thousands of Europeans are Indians," complained Hector de Crévecoeur in his 1782 Letters from an American Farmer, but "we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans!"
As historian Frank Snowden has argued:
The ancients did accept the institution of slavery as a fact of life; they made ethnocentric judgments of other societies; they had narcissistic canons of physical beauty; the Egyptians distinguished between themselves, "the people," and outsiders; and the Greeks called foreign cultures barbarian. Yet nothing comparable to the virulent color prejudice of modern times existed in the ancient world.
This is the view of most scholars who have examined the evidence and have come to conclusions such as these: the ancients did not fall into the error of biological racism; black skin color was not a sign of inferiority; Greeks and Romans did not establish color as an obstacle to integration in society; and ancient society was one that "for all its faults and failures never made color the basis for judging a man."
The slave system that developed in the New World was different in fundamental respects. Chief among these was the fact that it was "racially" based--Africans were the slaves--even if the reasons for the enslavement of Blacks were economic and not racial.
The initial attempts to meet the enormous--and ever-increasing--demand for labor in the New World included attempts to enslave Native peoples and whites. When these attempts failed, Africans became the chief source of labor.
"It has been said of the Spanish conquistadors," writes Eric Williams, one of the pioneering historians of New World slavery in From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean, "that first they fell on their knees, and then they fell on the aborigines." So after claiming their colonies for God and the King, the Spaniards set about pressing into service the local indigenous population to pump out the colonies' wealth for the benefit of the Spanish crown.
The results were devastating, as Eric Williams describes:
In 1548, Oviedo doubted whether five hundred Indians of pure stock remained. In 1570, only two villages survived of those about whom Columbus had assured his Sovereigns, less than 80 years before, that "there is no better nor gentler people in the world.
African slave labor proved more plentiful and cheaper than either Native Americans or white indentured servants and eventually slavery was confined exclusively to Blacks. According to Williams,
The features of the man, his hair, color and dentifrice, his "subhuman" characteristics so widely pleaded, were only the later rationalizations to justify a simple economic fact: that the colonies needed labor and resorted to Negro labor because it was cheapest and best.
This was not a theory, it was a practical conclusion deduced from the personal experience of the planter. He would have gone to the moon, if necessary, for labor. Africa was nearer than the moon, nearer too than the more populous countries of India and China. But their turn was to come.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Unlike the Spanish, whose colonies served to export precious metals back to the colonial center, settlers in the colonies that became Maryland, Rhode Island and Virginia were planters. The settlers' chief aim was to obtain a labor force that could produce the large amounts of indigo, tobacco, sugar and other crops that would be sold back to England.
From 1607, when Jamestown was founded in Virginia, to about 1685, the primary source of agricultural labor in English North America came from white indentured servants, after the settlers failed to build a sustained workforce from the indigenous population.
After their terms expired, many white indentured servants sought to acquire land for themselves. Black slaves worked on plantations in small numbers throughout the 1600s. But until the end of the 1600s, it cost planters more to buy slaves than to buy white servants.
Some Blacks who lived in the colonies were free, some were slaves, and some were servants. Free Blacks in Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Vermont had voting rights. In the 1600s, the Chesapeake society of eastern Virginia had a multiracial character, as historian Betty Wood pointed out:
For most of the 1600s, the planters depended mainly on a predominantly white workforce of English, Scottish, and Irish servants. But planters found the white workforce was becoming increasingly restive and expensive. As the 1600s was a time of revolutionary upheaval in England, many of the servants began demanding their rights. And those who finished their terms often became direct competitors to the planters in agriculture.
With costs of servants increasing, planters asked colonial administrations to begin widespread importation of African slaves. By the end of the 17th century, a planter could buy an African slave for life for the same price as a white servant with a 10-year contract.
This decision to turn to a racially specified labor force had enormous human consequences. Between 1640 and 1800, more than 4 million West Africans were forcibly transferred to the New World. Perhaps 10 to 15 million Black slaves made it to the Americas by the 1800s, an estimated one-third of the total captured in Africa.
The conditions of transport in the Middle Passage (the journey made by slave ships from Africa across the Atlantic) were horrendous, with human beings stacked and chained like firewood, and disease and suffocation killing hundreds of thousands.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
But these arguments invert the process. As historian Barbara Fields has argued:
One historian has gone so far as to call slavery "the ultimate segregator." He does not ask why Europeans seeking the "ultimate" method of segregating Africans would go to the trouble and expense of transporting them across the ocean for that purpose, when they could have achieved the same end so much more simply by leaving the Africans in Africa.
No one dreams of analyzing the struggle of the English against the Irish as a problem in race relations, even though the rationale that the English developed for suppressing the 'barbarous Irish' later served nearly word for word as a rationale for suppressing Africans and indigenous American Indians.
The dominant historical view of slavery places ideas--in particular, racial ideas--as the motor force of history.
This view of history thoroughly underestimates the material connection between capitalism and the development of racism. Colonial slavery, however, was intimately tied to capitalist development, and was not a remnant of an older mode of production. As Karl Marx put it in Capital:
|