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El_Johns

(1,805 posts)
Sat Feb 22, 2014, 09:00 PM Feb 2014

Slavery and the origins of racism

IT IS commonly assumed that racism is as old as human society itself. As long as human beings have been around, the argument goes, they have always hated or feared people of a different nation or skin color. In other words, racism is just part of human nature. ..If racism is part of human nature, then socialists have a real challenge on their hands...Fortunately, racism isn’t part of human nature. The best evidence for this assertion is the fact that racism has not always existed.

Racism is a particular form of oppression. It stems from discrimination against a group of people based on the idea that some inherited characteristic, such as skin color, makes them inferior to their oppressors. Yet the concepts of “race” and “racism” are modern inventions. They arose and became part of the dominant ideology of society in the context of the African slave trade at the dawn of capitalism in the 1500s and 1600s.

Although it is a commonplace for academics and opponents of socialism to claim that Karl Marx ignored racism, Marx in fact described the processes that created modern racism. His explanation of the rise of capitalism placed the African slave trade, the European extermination of indigenous people in the Americas, and colonialism at its heart. In Capital, Marx writes:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of the continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black skins are all things that characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production.2

Marx connected his explanation of the role of the slave trade in the rise of capitalism to the social relations that produced racism against Africans. In Wage Labor and Capital, written twelve years before the American Civil War, he explains:

What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. The one explanation is as good as the other.

A Negro is a Negro. He only becomes a slave in certain relations. A cotton spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. It only becomes capital in certain relations. Torn away from these conditions, it is as little capital as gold by itself is money, or as sugar is the price of sugar.3


In this passage, Marx shows no prejudice to Blacks (“a man of the black race,” “a Negro is a Negro”), but he mocks society’s equation of “Black” and “slave” (“one explanation is as good as another”). He shows how the economic and social relations of emerging capitalism thrust Blacks into slavery (“he only becomes a slave in certain relations”), which produce the dominant ideology that equates being African with being a slave.

These fragments of Marx’s writing give us a good start in understanding the Marxist explanation of the origins of racism. As the Trinidadian historian of slavery Eric Williams put it: “Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.”4 And, one should add, the consequence of modern slavery at the dawn of capitalism. While slavery existed as an economic system for thousands of years before the conquest of America, racism as we understand it today did not exist...

The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass understood this dynamic:

The hostility between the whites and blacks of the South is easily explained. It has its root and sap in the relation of slavery, and was incited on both sides by the poor whites and the blacks by putting enmity between them. They divided both to conquer each.Ö[Slaveholders denounced emancipation as] tending to put the white working man on an equality with Blacks, and by this means, they succeed in drawing off the minds of the poor whites from the real fact, that by the rich slave-master, they are already regarded as but a single remove from equality with the slave.25

Because racism is woven right into the fabric of capitalism, new forms of racism arose with changes in capitalism. As the U.S. economy expanded and underpinned U.S. imperial expansion, imperialist racism—which asserted that the U.S. had a right to dominate other peoples, such as Mexicans and Filipinos—developed. As the U.S. economy grew and sucked in millions of immigrant laborers, anti-immigrant racism developed. But these are both different forms of the same ideology—of white supremacy and division of the world into “superior” and “inferior” races—that had their origins in slavery.

What does this discussion mean for us today? First, racism is not part of some unchanging human nature. It was literally invented. And so it can be torn down. Second, despite the overwhelming ideological hold of white supremacy, people always resisted it—from the slaves themselves to white anti-racists. Understanding racism in this way informs the strategy that we use to combat racism. Antiracist education is essential, but it is not enough. Because it treats racism only as a question of “bad ideas” it does not address the underlying material conditions that give rise to the acceptance of racism among large sections of workers.32›Thoroughly undermining the hold of racism on large sections of workers requires three conditions: first, a broader class fightback that unites workers across racial lines; second, attacking the conditions (bad jobs, housing, education, etc.) that give rise to the appeal of racism among large sections of workers; and third, the conscious intervention of antiracists to oppose racism in all its manifestations and to win support for interracial class solidarity.


http://www.isreview.org/issues/26/roots_of_racism.shtml

11 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
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Slavery and the origins of racism (Original Post) El_Johns Feb 2014 OP
Such a muddle. Igel Feb 2014 #1
Speaking of muddled thinking and impoverished category sets. You manage to write a lot and say El_Johns Feb 2014 #3
K&R Paka Feb 2014 #2
Thanks. El_Johns Feb 2014 #5
Hannah, you post the best stuff...nt SidDithers Feb 2014 #4
Check out Walter Rodney's malaise Feb 2014 #6
Thanks for the reference, looks interesting. El_Johns Feb 2014 #7
Walter was a genius malaise Feb 2014 #8
kick Blue_Tires Feb 2014 #9
yeah, yeah, it's only about class, not about race. kwassa Feb 2014 #10
Who said anything like that? Not the author. El_Johns Feb 2014 #11

Igel

(35,191 posts)
1. Such a muddle.
Sat Feb 22, 2014, 09:33 PM
Feb 2014

Then again, he had to support his thesis.

Racism is an instance--a rather peculiar one--of the kind of tribalism that you see in pretty much every society. When my half-brother's grandmother said, "Ah, those Calabresi, they're all so stupid they can't even speak right" she wasn't being racist she was being tribal. She was Sicilian.

Line up skin color with tribal boundaries and you're part of the way to having racism. But you need to then pitch in some sort of rationalization. Simple "the worst in my group is better than the best in their group" won't do it. For that you need two things. The first is a strong push to consider all men as equals. The second is a strong reason not to consider blacks as equals. Then you have a neat little syllogism.

"All men are equal.
"Blacks are not equal.
"Blacks are not men."

The belief that all men are created equal, the belief that we're all equal in God's sight, is a valid example of the first kind of push. Making matters worse was that as time went on, the idea that we should be kind to others mitigates against even the usual, older, non-race-based view of slavery. It's hard to have even OT-slavery or Greek-style slavery given Deist or theist views of the NT common in the 19th century. (No problem in the 15th or 16th, mind you.)

The strong need to maintain blacks as property for the economic system was a strong reason not to consider blacks as equals. Avoiding the condemnation implicit in being your brother's keeper and treating him badly is another reason not to view him as your brother. Moreover, as soon as there's an argument saying you're wrong about virtually anything there's another strong reason to argue that blacks aren't equals--you are in an argument and need to see yourself as right and your opponent as wrong.

At that point you don't actually have to buy the reasoning any more. It's just a fact that you've accepted. Somebody else has justified it, it's okay. That's how most people treat most doctrines, whether religious, political, or economic. The good ol' appeal to authority in lieu of understanding the argument and evaluating it.

(At this point, most racism, IMHO, isn't due to this kind of syllogism. It's due to small number statistics and how we evaluate incomplete data in the light of infrequent events. Combined with in-group/out-group biases.)

Muslims had no problem dealing in slaves. More blacks were taken as slaves by Muslims than in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Yet their racism is different from American racism, even if there is still a race/class-based racism that's superimposed on out-group religious bigotry in many cases. Their boundaries weren't primarily ethnic or based on skin tone (even thought that's present), but religious. So that even under the Ottomans your "ethnicity" was things like "Christian" or "Druse".

Marx had an improverished set of categories and values. Many current thinkers share his impoverishment. "Blessed are the poor" is not an appropriate statement for this kind of poverty.

 

El_Johns

(1,805 posts)
3. Speaking of muddled thinking and impoverished category sets. You manage to write a lot and say
Sat Feb 22, 2014, 09:54 PM
Feb 2014

either nothing, or contradict yourself.


"Racism is an instance...of tribalism"

"The strong need to maintain blacks as property for the economic system was a strong reason not to consider blacks as equals"

"racism...is due to small number statistics and how we evaluate incomplete data in the light of infrequent events."


No there there.




 

El_Johns

(1,805 posts)
7. Thanks for the reference, looks interesting.
Sun Feb 23, 2014, 07:06 PM
Feb 2014

Interesting too that the author was assassinated by a car bomb.

In 1974 Rodney returned to Guyana from Tanzania. He was due to take up a position as a professor at the University of Guyana but the government prevented his appointment. He became increasingly active in politics, founding the Working People's Alliance, a party that provided the most effective and credible opposition to the PNC government. In 1979 he was arrested and charged with arson after two government offices were burned.

On 13 June 1980, Walter Rodney at the age of thirty-eight was killed by a bomb in his car, a month after returning from the independence celebrations in Zimbabwe and during a period of intense political activism. He was survived by his wife, Pat, and three children. His brother, Donald Rodney, who was injured in the explosion, said that a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force named Gregory Smith had given Walter the bomb that killed him. After the killing Smith fled to French Guiana, where he died in 2002.

It was, and is still widely believed - although technically hard to prove - that the assassination was a set-up by then President Linden Forbes Burnham.[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Rodney

malaise

(267,797 posts)
8. Walter was a genius
Sun Feb 23, 2014, 07:46 PM
Feb 2014

He was a brilliant historian and activist.
He was banned from Jamaica at the height of the black power movement. One of the most interesting persons from our region.

And yes Burnham had him killed because African leaders had way more respect for Walter than for that corrupt sell out.

kwassa

(23,340 posts)
10. yeah, yeah, it's only about class, not about race.
Mon Feb 24, 2014, 12:05 AM
Feb 2014

what a crock of bullshit.

So, Marx is the one we are going to for an insight on racism?

Puh-leeeese!!!

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