Origin Story: Anti-Black Racism’s Emotional Roots
The roots of racism in the US would be an important subject of study at any moment in US history, but it’s especially important in this moment. The rise of Donald Trump as a political figure, and now as president, and the corresponding rise in racist violence in the US requires Americans to ask some difficult questions of ourselves. Why are so many of the people in the US so deeply in this man’s thrall, and how can we get them out again? Clearly there are economic factors, feelings of resentment and abandonment, and a disdain for perceived elites. All of these explanations are true. But the central role of virulent racism cannot be ignored, and appears to be going largely unexplained in the media. We take it for granted that many white people in the US are extremely, violently racist, but how did that come to be? I think that it is vital that we understand the origins of racism in the United States, not only to mitigate against the worst excesses of a Trump presidency, but also to have any hope of finally fixing what has been broken for the last 400 years.
There are many tales to tell here; many racisms to unpack. This essay will focus particularly on anti-blackness because of its foundational role in our social system, but anti-immigrant and anti-indigenous / settler colonial racism are equally vital to understand, and I recommend that they be explored by the reader in other works. Racism is, as they say, a many-headed hydra.
For our purposes here, we must consider racism as two distinct but related things: On one hand it is an ideological construct that values the lives and property of white people over people of color, and assigns people of color the roles of criminals, villains and scapegoats. On the other, it is a set of deeply ingrained emotional responses to people and situations that utterly overpower logical thought. This emotional dimension is, I think, far more insidious and far more difficult to eradicate. You can show your racist uncle all of the graphs in the world, but he still believes, deep in his gut, that somewhere in our country black people are getting away with something terrible. If you have had these kind of arguments, then you know that at a certain point it feels like there is nothing more that you can say or do. Your uncle has fallen into a racist black hole from which you cannot retrieve him.
This emotional level of white racism is about many things, but I think that at its dark private core it’s about fear. When your uncle who watches Fox News all day talks about black people, or immigrants, his breath gets all fast, his pupils dilate, and his hands sweat. They say that fear and excitement are physiologically identical, and for him clearly both are duking it out, but fear seems to be winning the struggle. Given that white people are the overwhelming power group in this country, this seems strange. What could a white majority possibly have to fear from a black and brown minority?
The answer lies, in part, in the history and legacy of slavery. Specifically, we can find the answer by working backwards from the following question: What kinds of fears and myths might a society defined by slavery be motivated by? The answer is chillingly straightforward: if our nation’s economy and social structure were dependent on forced slave labor, then American anti-black racism would have been animated by an intense fear of slave revolts; the violent implosion of that volatile system.
This should not really surprise us. Slavery was the explicit organizing principle of the southern part (and, by proxy, much of the northern part) of this nation for 245 years. 245 years is a long time. It’s almost double 151 years, which is the amount of time that our country has existed after slavery’s official end. To put it the other way, slavery is 62% of what we have spent our time doing as a nation. Given that fact, it’s very strange that we don’t talk about slavery more often. What was it like, and what cultural legacy does it exert on us?
I think it is important to paint a picture of the kind of society that was created in those years, because it is easy to imagine it incorrectly. One can envision a society very much like our own, with most people doing various jobs and having normal lives, and then a few terrible people owning slaves somewhere off in the distance. In this imagined world, perhaps they knew some details about slavery, or maybe they didn’t, but it was not something that the average person in the south thought about very much.
As the historian Alan Taylor points out, this could not be further from the truth. Plantations, in the era of slavery, were the central organizing features of the communities that they were in. It was not simply the slave owners and the slaves themselves who were involved in the whole sordid business; most jobs in the community were directly or indirectly tied to the plantation’s business. Southern communities were essentially company towns, and the company was the slave trade.
First, there were the overseers, whose job was to brutally extract more labor from the slaves. This was generally done at the behest of the owners, who had a schedule to keep with the sugar, tobacco or cotton crops. Their schedule was tight, because they were often in a great deal of debt from season to season. Due to the inherent volatility of cash crops, money was always hard to predict. The unpredictability created chaos, not only financially but also emotionally and morally. As David Graeber has argued, anxiety about debt, and the particularly intense feelings of shame and moral failure that it can produce, lead many owners to slide into violent alcoholism, and sometimes outright insanity.
This dynamic was not at all helped by the fact that plantation owners were also landed gentry. They were expected to live in the high style of their era; sumptuous rugs should cover every floor, their attire had to be in the latest European fashion, and they needed to throw elaborate balls and feasts to keep up appearances. Therefore, their pride and social standing hinged on something that they could not possibly attain; constantly excellent crop yields. If the crop yields were poor, they often blamed the slaves and their overseers. Blame was meted out in blood, or in the selling of a slave away from their family.
The cycle of terror that this situation lead to cannot be overstated, both for slaves and overseers. As Matthew Parker documents in his book “The Sugar Barons; Family, Corruption, Empire and War”, overseers often lived in fear of the master firing them, or even brutally beating or killing them himself. They were usually expected to mete out severe violence toward any kind of perceived laziness or disobedience, including cutting off ears, noses, and limbs. They were often drunk, and in debt themselves due to their waxing and waning wages. Doing such a job undoubtedly scarred them psychologically, and if they were not already mad they often became so. They passed the violence on to their families and communities, in much the same way as prison guards do in modern America, creating enduring inter-generational trauma.
The overseers were middle-management, but there were countless other people who were pressed into the service of the plantation. Goods needed to be transported to and from town. Slaves and free people needed medical care and food. Everyone needed clothing, newspapers, tobacco, etc. The plantation was where most of the money in the community ended up, either in the form of cash or debt, and so almost any kind of commerce would inevitably pass through its gates and onto its books. Whether you were someone who physically worked there or not, you knew people who did. Perhaps you were married to a plantation worker, or one was your father or brother. You heard the rumors. The dark, open secrets of what went on in those lands was carried in part by almost everyone. No one was innocent, and everyone was complicit. It was this web of complicity that helped to prop up the entire system.
It is not at all difficult to see why people in this situation would be afraid of slave rebellion. The people in these societies knew that their entire social and economic system rested on the brutal enslavement of a group of people who often outnumbered them locally, sometimes by orders of magnitude. They were correct in thinking that some of those people would probably like to kill them. The rational thing to do in this situation would have been to free the slaves, apologize profusely, pay a blood price with land and gold, and try to make amends. This may have seemed plausible in the early days of the slave economy, but as time went on and society became utterly dependent on slaves, it seemed less possible and less appealing to the average person. Instead of doing the reasonable thing, they doubled down on the entire system. Keeping slavery seemed to them to be necessary, but in order to keep it they needed a justifying narrative. The real and reasonable fear of retaliatory violence easily filled this role.
It is useful to illustrate what exactly people feared during these times. Apocalyptic tales of escaped slaves raping and murdering entire towns-worth of people were widely circulated during the time of slavery, on a mythic level that far-exceeded reality. (Taylor) While it is certainly true that these were semi-regular events, the crowning example of which was the overthrow of the French in Haiti in 1804, the average rebellion usually only resulted in the deaths of a few overseers and perhaps the master. Due to the complex familial relationships between slaves and their owners (generally founded on rape, but sometimes mixed with more complex lifelong attachments), slaves often spared their masters when given the chance to kill them. There was almost never rape of plantation families or townspeople in revolts, which is remarkable given how much sexual violence was a feature in the lives of slaves. Even in the cases where slaves succeeded at overthrowing the entire power structure, they usually ended the whole affair by simply fleeing into remote areas and establishing secret communities as far from white-controlled areas as possible. (Taylor, 190) Exodus, rather than apocalypse, was their program.
It should be said that south was not entirely united on point of slavery; there were many who wished to see the system end, or at least change. One popular reform was the ability of masters to free their slaves, known as manumission. Anti-reformers claimed that slaves would simply hold masters at gun point and force them to sign manumission papers. (Taylor) There was no evidence for this, but every actual revolt, no matter how small or quickly ended, reinforced this fear psychologically in the same way that every plane crash causes people to believe that all planes they board are unsafe. It was a negative feedback loop where all information reinforced the belief of imminent catastrophe; if it was not happening in that moment then it was about to, and if it did occur then everyone preaching fear had been right all along. As the myth of the violent nature of black people grew, so too did its power and emotional sway. The supposed violence in the hearts of all slaves became both the justification for slavery, and the reason why the whole thing could come crashing down at any moment. If you read the writings of people from those eras, they seemed to have lived with the belief that the system would come crashing down in the very near future. (Parker)
We should be clear then, that though individual revolts were frightening, the deepest fear was something more. What white Americans feared most was a race war; the final cashing in of the chips that they had been gambling with for so many generations. Their social system was so defined by racial violence that they projected their actions and desires onto the people they held in bondage. If white slave owners wanted to kill and maim every black person who looked at them wrong, then every black person must surely want to exterminate the entire white race. It was impossible for them to understand that their ideology was bizarre and aberrant, and not shared by everyone else in the country. They could not see how that system of violence could end in anything but war. Their fever dreams were all black bodies, machetes and blood. They tightened their grip on slavery, on white supremacy, because they believed that the only alternative was to die at the hands of their captives.
This was the reason for stock piling guns in so many southern communities. In fact, when standing troops were sent away from their communities to go fight in military campaigns, such as the war of 1812, they were constantly being called back to defend their towns from the (perceived) threat of imminent slave revolts. (Taylor) Having armed men ready to defend the town from slaves was more important to the people there than winning a war against England or France. Southern gun culture partly emerged from that belief, and cannot easily be separated from racialized fears and motivations. Remember that the second amendment was never intended to include black people, or any other people of color. The gun owners, like all people covered by the bill of rights at that time, were all property-owning white men. They saw themselves as the sole defenders of their families, cities, and entire ways of life against an enemy who could never been defeated or dislodged, because the enemy was also the foundation of that very way of life. The only course of action they saw available was to always be prepared, and always be afraid.
This terror, then, is one source of anti-black racism; a deep well from which it continues to pour forth. It lingers in the peripheral vision of every cop when he draws his gun. It speeds up your uncle’s heart when Glen Beck tells him to prepare for the coming race war. It stomps on the imagination of every person who cannot envision trying to make any kind of amends to a people held in bondage for 12 generations. It holds some white people’s breath for us when we walk by a black man late at night. It whispers to us that, though the current state of affairs is clearly brutal and unjust, the alternative is so frightening that it must be avoided at all costs.
Much more can be said of slavery in the south, but let us turn to the north for a moment. While it is true that slavery was centralized in the south, two points must be made. First, that the ownership of slaves took place, in a less all-consuming way, in the north as well. The institution was particularly strong in New England, the oldest colonized portion of the country, and continued until the war of independence. The northern economy was never as wholly dependent on slave labor as the south, nor was the practice in place for as long as time, and thus the warping effects on society were less extreme, but still they were in evidence.
This brings us to point two. The fugitive slave act of 1850 declared that it was the duty of white people in the north to catch and return runaway slaves to their “rightful owners”. This created and endless series of moral perils and temptations for white northerners. The law created a system wherein every white person was deputized as a police officer and bounty hunter when it came to slaves. Not only were white people encouraged to see any black person as a potential criminal (for the crime of stealing property, i.e. their own bodies), they also knew that turning someone in to the authorities would net them a large sum of money. The tendency to view black people as potentially dangerous and criminal was already deeply ingrained in the entire country by this time, breathlessly promoted by the burgeoning American press, and the practice of hunting escaped slaves for bounty well-predated the law itself.
Because the process whereby free black people proved that they were “lawfully” free was not straightforward or foolproof to the say the least, the kidnapping of any vulnerable black person became a lucrative option that the worst kind of people took advantage of. Even for decent people, however, the codification of this system into law meant that every white person became an agent of a racial police state, tasked with the constant surveillance of any black person they might encounter. The fear of violence at the hands of black people spread there too, like a vicious contagion though the vector of legally-mandated vigilance.
Slavery may have officially ended in 1865, but the beliefs which held slave society together lived on: black people had to be brutally suppressed in order for white people to feel safe. Not only do the beliefs live on, but so too do the systems of violence and control. In her seminal book “Are Prisons Obsolete?” Angela David documents the seamless transformation of slavery into share cropping, vagrancy laws that put black people in prison work camps, the drug war, and mass incarceration. A longer and more detailed examination of the state of the modern criminal “justice” system can be found in Michelle Alexander’s book “The New Jim Crow”, where she uncovers the cold brutality with which black and brown people are funneled into prisons and lifelong second-class citizenship through neighborhood surveillance, terrible public defenders, abusive prosecutors and felony charges.
These are not merely historical problems and processes; they are some of the most pressing problems that we currently face as a nation. In order to dismantle systemic racism, we white people need to recognize that our fears have always been phantoms. The freedom of black and brown people has never meant our destruction, but our failure to work towards it will mean the destruction of everything good that our country has fought to become since slavery was abolished.
Author’s note:
Several months ago I was listening to an interview with Joan Quigley (Found here:
about the struggle to desegregate Washington DC. She spoke eloquently about the struggle for civil rights, the erasure of black women, and the significance of DC in US politics. At the end of her remarks, during the Q&A session, a black man (he never said his name) raised his hand and asked her to explain white racism. “I’m asking, as a black man asking a white woman, what is at the foundation of this race thing? Is it fear of African Americans, specifically? (…) I don’t understand this. I’ve lived through it obviously, I’ve tried to analyze it, I’ve talked with my associates, I’ve gone to school with them, I’ve slept with them… what is at the basis of this?”
She gave a meandering answer that expounded on how white people had been allies in the struggle, who was who in DC and how they knew each other, for about five minutes. She did not explain why white people are racist. She asked if she had answered his question, with a note of desperation in her voice. He told her that she had not. The audience stepped in to bat the question around a bit, but no one took a particularly convincing stab at it. The subject was dropped in favor of historical concerns that seemed more specific to her book.
I don’t think that her motives were impure, and I certainly don’t want to speak ill of her as a scholar. She is a historian, not a psychologist or an anthropologist. She was simply not prepared to answer such an alarmingly obvious, but deeply complex, question.
I am significantly less qualified than she is. I’m not even a professional scholar of any kind. I’m a white trans guy living in the Pacific Northwest, where we have plenty of our own virulent forms of racism. A young black man named Larnell Bruce was recently murdered in the Portland suburbs by a white supremacist; a horrifying crime deeply rooted in our region’s long Nazi/white nationalist history. Last week the police here shot and killed a 17-year-old named Quanice Hayes, who was armed only with a replica BB gun. Our problems are just as bad as any other community’s, and in some ways even worse. I sit upon no high horse. I go to protests and vigils, and I read a lot of books. Those are my only qualifications.
Yet, as I listened to that interview, I couldn’t help but think that this man deserved an answer. Specifically, he deserved an answer from a white person. Racism is our problem, after all. Only we can really understand the inner workings of our hearts and minds, and the complex family histories that shape our relationships with race. I decided to make an attempt to answer his question, based entirely on the work of scholars I’ve read over the past few years. At first this was just my way of working through the question for myself, but after a few weeks of writing my way through it I discovered that I had a short story of sorts on my hands. Far from original research, this essay should be considered as a kind of book report; a reader’s digest for people who might not want to read entire books about the history of slavery in Virginia or the state of the modern criminal justice system, but who would like to know more about what kind of influence our country’s history might be having on us today. I believe that we need to understand racism’s roots in order to dismantle it, and I hope that my work here is useful to people in their own process of inquiry.
I also want to be up front about the fact that my principle focus here was on how the psychology of white people has been shaped by slavery and its subsequent related systems of racial violence. This is in no way meant to obscure the fact that racism and slavery has overwhelmingly harmed (murdered, imprisoned, tortured, raped) people of color, and benefited (given jobs, wealth, security and political power to) white people. I believe that understanding the origin of the difficult feelings that racism produces in white people is vital to unraveling their power.
Here are some works that I have drawn from in this writing:
Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. The Case for Reparations. Atlantic Media Company, n.d. Web. 14 July 2016. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories, 2003. http://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Angela-Davis-Are_Prisons_Obsolete.pdf (please buy this book, but you can read it here first and spam your relatives with it)
Graeber, David. (2011). Debt: The first 5000 years. New York: Melville Publishing.
Isenberg, Nancy. White Trash: The 400-year Untold History of Class in America. N.p.: Penguin Group USA, 2017. Print.
Parker, Matthew. (2011). The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire and War. London: Hutchinson.
Taylor, Alan. The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.
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