Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America

tags: Racism

Notes

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Race is not an element of human biology (like breathing oxygen or reproducing sexually); nor is it even an idea (like the speed of light or the value of pi) that can be plausibly imagined to live an eternal life of its own. Race is not an idea but an ideology.

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During the revolutionary era, people who favoured slavery and people who opposed it collaborated in identifying the racial incapacity of Afro-Americans as the explanation for enslavement.

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The first boom in what would eventually become the United States took place during the 1620s, and it rested primarily on the backs of English indentured ser- vants, not African slaves.

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Virginia was a profit-seeking venture, and no one stood to make a profit growing tobacco by democratic methods.

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shared colour and nationality set no automatic limit to oppression.

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To have degraded the servants into slaves en masse would have driven the continuing struggle up several notches, a dangerous undertaking considering that servants were well-armed, that they outnumbered their masters, and that the Indians could easily take advantage of the inevitably resulting warfare among the enemy. Moreover, the enslavement of already arrived immigrants, once news of it reached England, would have threatened the sources of future immigration.

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Afri- cans and Afro-West Indians had not taken part in the long history of negotiation and contest in which the English lower classes had worked out the relationship between themselves and their superiors. There- fore, the custom and law that embodied that history did not apply to them.

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Only much later did this become a matter of what we now call race. It took time, indeed, to become sys- tematized as slavery. Although African or African-descended slaves dribbled in from 1619 on, the law did not formally recognize the con- dition of perpetual slavery or systematically mark out servants of Afri- can descent for special treatment until 1661.

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By the 1670s, the rulers of Virginia faced a potentially serious problem: a large class of young (white) freedmen, landless, single, discontented—and well armed.

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suspicion and fear of the growing white lower class in the minds of the rich and powerful.

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As the labour of slaves for life replaced that of servants for a term, the prob- lem of providing for freedmen receded into the past.

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during the Civil War era, the ancient prece- dent of freedom dues had been all but forgotten. When Abraham Lincoln and his contemporaries spoke of compensated emancipation, they did not feel a need to specify compensation for whom.

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A commonplace that few stop to examine holds that people are more readily oppressed when they are already perceived as inferior by nature. The reverse is more to the point.

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The peasants did not fall under the dominion of the nobility by virtue of being perceived as innately inferior. On the contrary, they came to be perceived as innately inferior by virtue of having fallen under the nobility’s dominion.

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When self-evident laws of nature guarantee freedom, only equally self-evident laws of equally self-evident nature can account for its denial.

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Ideology is best understood as the descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existence,

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It was their experience with slaveowners, not least the slaveowners’ hysterical equation of the Republican Party with abolition, that made slaves see Lincoln as the emancipator before he saw himself that way. And, I might add, it was the slaves’ acting on that foreknowledge that forced Lincoln to become the emancipator.

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when nothing remains except force, nothing remains—period.

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during the era of the American Revolution, those who opposed slavery were complicit with those who favoured it in settling on race as its explanation. We must be courageous and honest enough to admit something similar about our own time and our own actions.

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Notes

Race is not an element of human biology (like breathing oxygen or reproducing sexually); nor is it even an idea (like the speed of light or the value of pi) that can be plausibly imagined to live an eternal life of its own. Race is not an idea but an ideology.

During the revolutionary era, people who favoured slavery and people who opposed it collaborated in identifying the racial incapacity of Afro-Americans as the explanation for enslavement.

The first boom in what would eventually become the United States took place during the 1620s, and it rested primarily on the backs of English indentured ser- vants, not African slaves.

Virginia was a profit-seeking venture, and no one stood to make a profit growing tobacco by democratic methods.

shared colour and nationality set no automatic limit to oppression.

Afri- cans and Afro-West Indians had not taken part in the long history of negotiation and contest in which the English lower classes had worked out the relationship between themselves and their superiors. There- fore, the custom and law that embodied that history did not apply to them.

By the 1670s, the rulers of Virginia faced a potentially serious problem: a large class of young (white) freedmen, landless, single, discontented—and well armed.

suspicion and fear of the growing white lower class in the minds of the rich and powerful.

As the labour of slaves for life replaced that of servants for a term, the prob- lem of providing for freedmen receded into the past.

during the Civil War era, the ancient prece- dent of freedom dues had been all but forgotten. When Abraham Lincoln and his contemporaries spoke of compensated emancipation, they did not feel a need to specify compensation for whom.

A commonplace that few stop to examine holds that people are more readily oppressed when they are already perceived as inferior by nature. The reverse is more to the point.

All human societies, whether tacitly or overtly, assume that nature has ordained their social arrangements.

The peasants did not fall under the dominion of the nobility by virtue of being perceived as innately inferior. On the contrary, they came to be perceived as innately inferior by virtue of having fallen under the nobility’s dominion.

When self-evident laws of nature guarantee freedom, only equally self-evident laws of equally self-evident nature can account for its denial.

Ideology is best understood as the descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existence,

when nothing remains except force, nothing remains—period.

The ritual repetition of the appropriate social behaviour makes for the continuity of ideology, not the ‘handing down’ of the appropriate ‘attitudes’.

during the era of the American Revolution, those who opposed slavery were complicit with those who favoured it in settling on race as its explanation. We must be courageous and honest enough to admit something similar about our own time and our own actions.