America’s Ugly Legacy — White Supremacy

America has a deep, long and ugly history of White Supremacy that is still ever present, and felt today, especially among people that are not white. In my view, the principal reason for this is really quite simple, White Supremacy was, and still currently is, baked into the very fabric of our reality, it’s baked into the “system”.

What is White Supremacy? Well for me, it’s quite simple, it is the “root idea” that white people are superior than non-white people. And if we review our history, even if only superficially, we can still see that White Supremacy, that “root idea”, is still ever present and permeates the very fabric of our reality, even to this day. However, I think Elizabeth Martínez’s workshop definition (http://soaw.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=482) of White Supremacy, writing for SOA Watch in 2009, is a pretty darn good place to start in defining what White Supremacy is;

“ White Supremacy is an historically based, institutionally perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression of continents, nations, and peoples of color by white peoples and nations of the European continent, for the purpose of maintaining and defending a system of wealth, power, and privilege.”

Think about that, “historically based, institutionally perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression of continents, nations, and peoples of color by white peoples and nations of the European continent, for the purpose of maintaining and defending a system of wealth, power, and privilege.” and think about the creation of the United States

Early America — The Root of an Idea

If I remember correctly, I think it was around 1501(1) that slaves were first imported into the “Americas”, by Spanish settlers from Africa to Santos Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic at the time. It was in 1522(2) that slaves on the Caribbean islands of Hispaniola, what is now Haiti and Dominican republic, revolted but was quickly and harshly crushed.

It was in 1562(3) that England first officially entered the slave trade as a commercial enterprise. A man named John Hawkins was the first Briton to take part in the slave trade and was reported to have made a huge profit carrying his human cargo from Africa to Hispaniola.

In 1581(4), the first permanent Spanish settlement in St. Augustine Fl., began to import slaves. In 1614(5) The first commercial tobacco crops were produced in Jamestown Virginia, and it was in 1619(6) that the Dutch brought the first load of 20 slaves to Jamestown, to be utilize as free labor with America’s growing tobacco industry.

Let us remember that is was in these early days of the British colonies that the land belonging to the indigenous populations, ie our 1st American brothers and sisters, were stolen, appropriated and settled by the white invading colonists. Let us also remember that if it were not for our 1st American brothers and sisters, their welcoming and support of the original colonists, we would not be here. The original colonists did not have the skills nor the necessary knowledge to be able to survive on their own and if it was not for our 1st American brothers and sisters, the imperial expansion to the new world would have failed.

A great many of the English colonist at the time died as a result of their lack of knowledge and skills to survive in the harsh conditions that was the new world. In the “starving time”(7), the winter between 1609 and 1610, scores of colonist died from starvation and saw their colony reduced from a population of around 500 to less than 70. It’s been reported that these early colonist resorted to digging up corpses, foraging for nuts and berries in the forests as well as abandoning settlements to go live the ingenious populations in order to survive.

Let us also remember that at this time in history the prevailing zeitgeist , that is the “spirit of the age” or “spirit of the time”, ie the dominant set of ideals and beliefs that motivate the actions of the members of a society in a particular period in time, was such that owning people as property, was normal. Poor people and people of color usually suffered the same fate, either in winding up in slavery or indentured servitude for life.

In this time, the vestiges of Monarchy still prevailed among the British elite of society, both here in the colonies and even more so back in England. The “elite” of early Colonial society had no intention of working the land with their own bare hands, such activities were considered beneath them, but the huge demand for labor to work and develop the lands stolen from our 1st American brothers and sisters, presented a very real problem. How to keep the imperial expansion and conquest growing?

The solution was simple, they turned to English merchants who delivered poor teenagers and Africans who had been kidnapped from their homelands and hauled away to the new English colonies. The differences in conditions between the poor and Africans was narrow, both were subjected to harsh conditions, beatings, whippings, denied days of rest as well as subject to near starvation. The cruel and oppressive treatment inflicted upon the poor and slaves was unimaginably horrific, at least by my standards, but at the time, this was acceptable by colonial society, ie the zeitgeist of the era.

As has been the case through out history, when ever a people are abused, oppressed, and subjugated to unspeakable horrors, a growing unrest and resistance builds, usually culminating in revolt or out right rebellion. After about two decades of colonization the slave and working servant populations in the colonies exploded and wound up out numbering the English elites at the time, to about 100 to 1, which presented a rather precarious situation for the establishment. Working servants (poor whites) and slaves began to intermarry, creating bonds of consciousness to their shared conditions, oppression, and everyday struggles for survival, as well as organizing to find ways to relive their subjugation.

It was about this time that records from Virginia show at least 10 documented cases of servant rebellions through out the mid 1600’s, and in 1676 the Bacon rebellion(8). Bacon’s rebellion was rather odd in that in it represented not only a popular resentment of the Virginia establishment (white elites), but also seem to cement the frontier hatred of indigenous peoples. Poor whites and salves had common cause, hate for the establishment as well as hate for American Indians. Bacon himself was from the ruling class and was more or less only interested in being able secure his own power, as well as being free to raid and kill indigenous people at will.

But like many Rebellions through out history, this rebellion was larger than Bacon himself. To the white elite, Bacon’s armed rebellion was more than just a nuance, it represented a larger problem, a class problem. Bacon’s rebellion was comprised of an entire class of people, not categorized by skin color, but by similar shared conditions of oppression; slaves, poor whites, free workers and farmers, all suffered at the hands of the white elites of colonial society. Together, this class of people, burned Jamestown to the ground and chased off the governor, demanding pay and land for their labor.

White Supremacy and Privilege codified into American Law, Society and Culture

To the white elites of colonial society, Bacon’s rebellion represented a turning point in consciousness of African slaves and English servants, their willingness to engage in armed militancy and resistance in common cause and shared struggle. Terrified by this new development the British sent in an army to crush the rebellion and hanging some 23 of it’s rebel leaders in the process.

To me, this was a pivotal and crucible moment in our history, and most importantly to the “idea” of white supremacy taking a direct and formal root in colonial America, and to a larger extent the American psyche. For it was at this time that the old strategy of divide and conqueror was delivered with a new twist, laws were enacted specifically to divide this new class of oppressed people by color, separating whites from blacks. Bacon’s rebellion was an opportunity for the white elite to enact laws that would lay the foundations of the “idea” of white supremacy and white privilege.

For it was between 1680 and 1705(9), that a series of laws were passed which sought to control the working poor / enslaved populations of Colonial America. These laws were designed specifically to drive a wedge between a developing class affinity based on Race, representing a new construct for the time which has become the primary underpinning of Capitalism, and Empire.

Lets stop here for a moment and consider that since salves were first introduced to Santos Domingo in 1501, and by 1705 as new laws and slave codes were introduced into colonial America, 204 years of the “idea” of slavery had flourished in colonial American, especially considering the large profits made by slave and plantation owners.

These new laws, slave codes as they were called, solidified and legitimized chattel slavery in the American colonies as an institution, even going so far as to codifying that children born to enslaved women would also become property of their master. The new slave codes enacted at the time represented and created an important distinction between slaves and white servants who, under the British poor laws, were required to be released after a designated time of servitude, and thus was born the “idea” of ‘white privilege’.

For poor whites, freedom from servitude was only a matter of time, but for black people, slavery was indefinite and for all perpetuity, codified by law and thus codifying (baking) white privilege and white supremacy into the “system”.

These early slave codes (laws) that so severely restricted the rights of free Africans and equated, that for the very first time the terms “Negro” and “slave” , thus codifying the world’s first institutionalized system of racialized slavery. While slavery wasn’t new, slavery based only on skin color alone, certainly was. Additionally these slave codes were designed to reinforce and cement into the minds of slaves and poor whites, the idea of ‘white privilege’, that by offering certain privileges to one servant (whites) and none to the other (blacks), based on skin color alone.

To be certain, originally these new slave codes were equally odious and ambiguously applied to all servants, but over a short time, and as the term slave became equated to mean a black person (negro), and the term servant became equated with poor whites. Simply put, white servants were granted “privileges” that their black counterparts were not.

For example, at one time only white servant women could work in a master’s house while black women had to work in the fields. White servants could file grievances with the court system for unjust treatment by their masters, while black servants (slaves) could not. White servants had access to small plots of land, provided they serve as guards to the frontier, but not black slaves.

Additionally the idea of white privilege was cemented in the hearts and minds of poor white folk by a clever device, by enlisting poor whites to be offered jobs as slave patrols and given a bounty for each captured slave. They were also given arms to defend the colonies against Native Americans as well as escaping slaves within the colonies.

This “privilege” afforded to whites only was a clever way for the white elites of colonial America to use poor whites to enforce their idea’s of white supremacy, and privilege, upon a growing and prospering British colony they wanted to control and exploit for the few, at the expense of the many.

When I see my unarmed brothers and sisters being gunned down in the streets by mostly white cops, I can’t help but think of this ‘white privilege’ afforded to poor whites, given arms to protect the frontier from savages and escaping slaves. I can only imagine this is how many a police officer’s view most people in America, as either as savages or escaping slaves, in their minds, both equally repugnant and deserving of death, without a moment of consideration of law or circumstance, only fear of their life as their guiding principal and ultimate justification of what can only be described as murder by fear.

One need only review a simple time line of the enactment of slave laws, laws designed and based in the ideology of white supremacy, that white people are superior to non white people, to find and or re-discover, that the root of white supremacy and white privilege originated in the American colonies. These laws are the very institution that our society has been developed around, for centuries.

It is We that must Change

Think about it, it was only in 1964(10), that we as a country, decided to pass civil rights legislation, thus finally codifying equal rights for all people, yet we can see today this has not been so easy a task to implement. Not to mention the very same negative forces that enabled and enacted slave laws, white supremacy and white privilege, not only still exist, but are making a come back with a vengeance, ie the rise of people like Donald Trump becoming the epitome of the republican establishment, that is, the representatives of white supremacy, fundamentalism, and whiteness as ideology.

52 years of “technical equal rights” doesn’t wash away nearly 4 centuries of subjugation, slavery, oppression, murder, lynching, rape and every unimaginable horror one can inflict upon another human being.

Think for a moment, can you imagine someone killing your brother or sister, just because they showed signs of literacy, that is, being able to read or write? Killing slaves because they could read or write, back in those days, was considered normal. If a slave showed signs of literacy, they were a threat because they would be able to communicate and articulate their oppressed condition to others, which could, and did, lead to rebellions.

One has to remember, that the hill upon which America, that beacon of democracy was built, is the pile of bodies of the near complete genocide of our 1st American bothers and sisters, who were shoveled onto this heap of death by the slave labor of another people, exploited by the white elite of our society. Our history is replete with case after case of laws enacted, and social norms accepted, that re-enforce this white supremacist and white privilege ideology that permeates the very fabric of American life, even unto this day.

Our country fought a bitter civil war, killing nearly three quarters of a million people, simply because one part of the nation fervently “believed” in the efficacy of White supremacy and slavery as an institutional norm. One need only look to Alexander Stephens inaugural speech(11), known as the “corner stone speech”, to see this horrible manifestation of this ideology within America come to full bloom.

“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. “

We as a country, have still not recovered mentally from the civil war nor have we eliminated this ideology of white supremacy and white privilege, as bitterness among working whites, particularly in the south, as well as across America, still seethe with anger against “others”, manifested in their support for white nationalist politicians from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump.

Add to the fact that the party of Jefferson, once heralded as the party of the people, has all but abandoned white working class and has paid only minor lip service to people of color, not to mention gave rise to the Klu Klux Klan.

And when I see videos, especially like this one with Mrs. Clinton speaking with a Boston area BLM leader, telling him “she doesn’t believe in changing hearts and minds but changing systems”, I have to ask myself, what kind of crazy is she speaking?

Well, think for a moment, how many times in our history have we “changed” the system, ie our laws, but the hearts and minds of the population remain mired in white supremacy and white privilege? States are given rights to implement “system changes”, that effectively hurt minorities as well as help keep them oppressed in seeming perpetuity, which has lead to the development of blaming them for their lot in life.

Most white people don’t have a clue about their own white privilege, nor are they aware that the foundations of our society are rooted in white supremacist ideology. White privilege is a tool used by the elites to provide the illusion to poor whites they mean something more to their white owners, than mere chattel slaves. What many refer too as institutional racism, is just white supremacy baked into the “system”, Mrs. Clinton refereed too.

White supremacy is baked into our laws, our society as a whole, as well as our historical, mythical and national consciousness and “American” ideology. Just because we have technically changed some systems, the hearts and minds of many white Americans is still blind to the ugly legacy that is uniquely American, white supremacist ideology; thus blind to it, as Mrs. Clinton’s reaction to that young man from the Boston BLM group clearly displayed, white American hearts and minds don’t have to deal with it. Especially if we can blame a system, rather than look inside our own darken hearts and poisoned minds for the obvious answers, it is we who must change.

If we don’t change as a people, our systems never will.

Ref:
1 — http://haitilegacyproject.org/index.php/haiti-history/2014-04-17-17-34-37/2014-04-17-17-36-08/item/slave-resistance-a-caribbean-study-2.html
2 — http://library.brown.edu/haitihistory/1sr.html
3 — http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/slavery/pdf/britain-and-the-trade.pdf
4 — https://www.floridamemory.com/exhibits/timeline/
5 — http://modernfarmer.com/2014/05/americas-first-cash-crop-tobacco/
6 — https://www.nps.gov/jame/learn/historyculture/african-americans-at-jamestown.htm
7 — http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/starving-settlers-in-jamestown-colony-resorted-to-cannibalism-46000815/
8 — https://www.saylor.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/HIST312-3.2.1-Bacons-Rebellion.pdf
9 — http://www.history.org/history/teaching/slavelaw.cfm
10 — https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/civil-rights-act
11 — http://www.csaconstitution.com/p/alexander-h.html