Ibram X. Kendi tells us that the Portuguese historian, Gomes Zurara, invented Blackness. That is incorrect, which brings us to another great myth. In his book Kendi goes into more detail as to why Zurara should be considered the first anti-Black racist as the latter was the first to issue a defense of slavery based on the myth of Black inferiority. There are a couple of problems.
In the modern world we are outraged by slavery, but that is a recent development, one occasioned by the industrial revolution. Slavery doesn't work in an industrial setting--it was tried. In order to drive people into "manufactories" in the early days of capitalism traditional ways for commoners to sustain themselves had to be eliminated, so fields were enclosed, food-rich swamps drained, common lands privatized, and a series of prohibitive laws enacted. The powers that should not have been created precarity, now you needed something called a "job." You had to sell your labor for a wage. This is what drove people into factories and initially Europeans across the sea to the New World.
There is copious literature on this subject, for our purpose it suffices to say that our now heart-felt, liberal ideas evolved in parallel with the industrial revolution, capitalism and economic liberalism. The people of Europe and Africa aren't better people, more human, than they were 500 years ago. The means of production changed, society changed, and that spawned new values.
Slavery had been with us since the plow. It was, tragically, a widely accepted part of life, just as capitalism is today. Nobody needed to justify slavery, in both Africa and Europe the deplorable practice was millennia old! Zurara is not the cause of the TAST. Had he written a jeremiad on slavery and a paean to Black people and culture it wouldn't have changed a goddam thing. Don't be ridiculous. Elites in Africa and Europe were about to gain unprecedented wealth. If you think that what Zurara thought mattered to them, you are not living in the real world. It's time to leave kindergarten. Once the New World was discovered by the old, the trans-oceanic dash for the cash was going to ensue and nothing and nobody, certainly no palace historian, was going to alter that in any way. The TAST happens with or without Zurara.
Brace yourselves, racebots, I'm about to shatter another cherished Jim Snow myth: Neither the racial classification of humanity, nor the defamation of Black people, begins with White people. No, neither began with the Enlightenment. I know this will come as a shock to the Blame-Whitey school of Africana Studies, but it's true.
Arabs have/had divided the people of the Old World into a different color scheme than the one developed later in Europe and known today in the West.
The European system:
Europeans are White
Sub-Saharan Africans are Black
Arabs, N. Africans and W. Asians are Brown
The Arab system:
Europeans are Red (ruddy)
Sub-Saharan Africans are Black
Arabs, N. Africans, W. Asians are White
So both systems agree that Africans are Black, and neither have been kind to Black Africans. However, Arab, anti-Black racism predates the Euro by centuries.
There is a wealth of literature penned by Arabs and other Muslims, but mainly by Arabs, which deal with Black Africans, and I am only familiar with a tiny fraction of it. Consequently, what I have read may not be representative of the whole, nevertheless, there are clear, explicit denunciations of Blacks as inferior to Whites (by which they mean Arabs, Berbers, Persians etc.). Major Islamic philosophers and historians, such luminaries as al-Tabari and al-Masudi, "The Herodotus of the Arabs," wrote explicitly racist things about Blacks--unlike Herodotus--in the 9th Century. Ibn Butlan, who wrote a guide for slave-buyers detailing the characteristics of each race or ethnicity, which belittled Blacks. Al-Mutannabbi was no lover of Black people, and the great traveler, ibn Battuta, while kinder and more balanced than the aforesaid, still wrote derogatory things about Blacks. Even the great ibn Khaldun, author of the Muqaddimah, a book which made a great impression upon me, wrote foul things about Blacks.
Also, ibn Khordadbeh, Persian, wrote an invaluable history entitled The Book of Roads and Kingdoms, about the year 900CE. While I don't remember his saying anything defamatory about Blacks, he offers us a detailed look at life, culture and commerce in the early Abbasid period, and Blacks were not much respected.
So, what we have is an explicit belief in the inferiority of Black people--that's racism, and a racial hierarchy of privilege and power with Blacks at the bottom--that's racial oppression. And it predates the Enlightenment, Zurara, Columbus, Myles Standish, and the TAST. The anathemization of Blacks does not begin with any White (European) person.
All Muslims mentioned above are seminal Islamic thinkers. I have refrained from stating exactly what they said out of respect for Black people as the commentary is just so ugly and offensive. The gist is that Blacks are base, intellectually inferior, have unattractive physical features, are hopelessly dissolute, and the women are scandalously immodest.
Further attesting to the racism Blacks endured in Islamic civilization is the books written in their defense. Al-Jahiz, of mixed Black and White (meaning Arab, Persian etc.) heritage, wrote The Glorious Superiority of Blacks over Whites (which I have not read). And al-Jawzi, a non-Black, who wrote On the Virtues of Blacks (which I also haven't read). These titles speak for themselves.
The prejudice against Blacks persists in the Arab world--no diversity campaigns there. So charge Africa-descended people living in Arab/Muslim countries today. Blacks are casually and routinely referred to as "slaves," and many Black migrants to Arab countries complain that the Kafala System is slavery by another name. This notion that White people are entirely responsible for anti-African racism, are its creators, or are the first to essentialize and categorize people into racial groupings, is just wrong.
In Han Dynasty China, there was a government official and/or philosopher who came up with a unique classification model. He said that the Han people were the highest form of humanity, and that every 500 leagues you moved west from the Middle Kingdom there was a proportional drop off in intelligence. Eventually, once you moved far enough west you encounter beings that look like people, but are really just "monkeys with human faces." I don't know if this idea was popular or unique to him, but it's the first racist idea with which I am familiar, if it can rightly be called such.
About ten minutes into Stamped, an unidentified commentator states that in the early days of New World slavery Blacks were not the only enslaved people. She continues that indentured servants came from Europe and that indenture was "just one step above slavery."
Like Morgan, this woman is circumlocuting, her phrasing here allows for misunderstanding. She's saying/implying that Euroes were indentures and Africans slaves, which is not true in the "early days."
The difference between indenture and enslavement is the former is for a specific duration and thereafter the indentured person is free. Slavery is perpetual.
In the early days all unfree in the English colonies were indentures. The father of American slavery, the man who sued, not once but twice, to establish lifelong unfreedom, who succeeded and got it homologated, the man responsible for the eventual enslavement of millions of Africans, was a Black man from Angola named Anthony Johnson. He succeeded in repossessing a former indenture, John Casor, who had left Johnson's service when his indenture expired and had re-indentured himself to a White family not far from Johnson's property. Johnson sued the White family and lost, he sued the family again and won and Casor was returned to him to toil in perpetuity. This is the birth of American slavery. Prior to Johnson's legal maneuvers, all unfree were indentures.
"One of the great fears of White landowners," says Dr. Dorothy Roberts, "is that White indentures would unite with Black enslaved people, would come together in their common interests to fight against the White elite."
Again the wording is problematic. Black indentures arrive in 1619. There were Black landowners/unfree-owners from the 1630s. Over the course of American unfreedom from then until the Emancipation Proclamation, there were literally thousands of Black owners of the unfree. Many of whom were, predictably, staunch supporters of the peculiar institution and of the Confederacy. At least one, I believe all, of the foundries which armed the Confederacy in the Civil War was Black-owned. On the eve of that war, the fourth largest slave-owner in the Carolinas was Black. And he loved Jefferson Davis whatever racist drivel the Confederate leader might utter, it was lining his pockets.
The crucial point here is that racial solidarity dissolves into air where profits are to be had. Class trumps race, every time. Both African and European elites were willing to enslave and/or dispossess and/or declass their own and subject them to impossible hardships. In the English colonies, unfree African and unfree European agricultural workers frequently united and tried to free themselves. In the planter class, Blacks and Whites likewise supported each other in line with their mutual class interests. Neither White nor Black, upper or lower class, gave a fart about race. Even when these social relationships would become racialized, Black slave-owners continued to own and work slaves on their plantations. Nor did the development of White supremacy and racialized slavery in the Americas deter African slave wholesalers from continuing to hunt down their fellow Africans and sell/trade them to Euro slavers.
More truthfully put, White and Black planters were worried about rebellion.
In the race v. class debate, such points are pivotal. The goal of these state-sponsored lies about the history of America is to obscure the underlying class dynamics. The TAST is depicted as a horrible cruelty inflicted by Euroes upon Afroes, that Euroes had elitist racist ideas which allowed them to roam across Africa kidnapping and enslaving. The cause of this horror was the wrong-headed, supremacist ideas held by Whites. The problem was ideological, and perhaps pathological.
The reality simply couldn't be more different. White and Black elites, European and African elites, formed a partnership and profited immensely from it. The lower class people from Europe suffered from the TAST (enclosures, transportation, the Poor Laws, "spiritings," etc.). African commoners suffered horrifically. The kidnapees were ripped from their homelands and families by their fellow Africans to be shipped across the sea to perform uncompensated labor for the benefit of their abusers. The legacy of the TAST still roils W. African politics.
However the Black slave catchers/sellers didn't care about that as long as they were making money, neither did the Euroes. There is no good race and bad race. Victim and victimizer, exploited and exploiter, cannot be differentiated by race. I'm going to say that again, because this is the central myth of the American racedom, the one upon all the others rest, the one upon which Stamped is based: Victim and victimizer, exploited and exploiter, cannot be differentiated by race. Attempts would be made to racialize slavery, which, as noted above, was largely though never fully successful, but the TAST and unfreedom in the Americas does not begin with race. To the extent that it did get racialized, it was welcomed by those of all races who prospered from it, and opposed by people of all races who were disadvantaged by it. Throughout its history in America, there were always Black, White and indigenous owners of the unfree, and Black, White and indigenous unfree. The historiography of American unfreedom got racialized to a greater degree than did unfreedom itself.
And that is no accident.
All the people engaged in this abomination were just that, human beings, with all the good and all the bad which that implies. The universal belief that Whites are guilty in the TAST and Blacks innocent is a filthy, racist lie. Perhaps, the greatest lie ever told. Even if one were insipid enough to accept the ideological explanation, it doesn't work as both races were engaged in the same predations.
So, then, what is the point of this grotesque historical fiction? Whose interest does it serve? The American ruling class. This racial narrative of American history obscures the obvious fact that the TAST was driven by not race but profit. And that the move from indentures to slavery was driven by profit, and that racism is driven by profit, and that members of each race were engaged at every level of the whole inhuman mess. Where does this leave the race-uber-alles lobby? Where does it leave the bourgeoisie?
The racial narrative engenders mutual racial antagonism, that antagonism without which our plutocrats cannot long remain in power.
The class narrative places the problem in the field of political economy and suggests a solution which is wholly unacceptable to the powers that should not be. It also encourages interracial, intraclass cooperation. One does not have to be all broke out with genius to see why the Great White Bogeyman Theory finds favor among economic elites, even and especially among White ones.
Say it plain, Dr. Roberts, White AND Black slave-owners were fearful of rebellion from below. Tell the whole truth.
About 16 minutes in, Kendi says that "Whites were able to work out their indentures and then they were able to receive land...and to make money...and to buy some of the [Black] people who fought side by side with them in Bacon's Rebellion."
Once again, this is misleading. All indentures, regardless of race, were able to "work out" their indentures simply by serving the alotted time--usually about 8 years. Some indentures, again regardless of race, once their time was served, received what were called "headrights." These were grants of land (and presumably heads of cattle). The father of American slavery, Anthony Johnson, Black, received land when his indenture expired. He did quite well, and bought more land and more slaves to work it, most notably John Casor.
It is not known how one qualified for headrights. Some people volunteered for indenture in the Americas so they could get these headright lands when their indenture expired. If it were the case the case that one had to volunteer to receive headrights, then Anthony Johnson and perhaps other Africans volunteered. However, this is uncertain. What is known is that some Black indentures and some White indentures received land grants after their indenture expired. Slaves by definition served for life so none of them were eligible.
Blacks, like Whites, were able to make money and buy slaves, and they did, thousands of them. Listening to Kendi one might think that only Whites served their indentures and became slave-owners, and that is false.
The key point is that unfreedom in the British colonies was not racialized from the beginning. It became so in reaction to specific events which threatened to disrupt the slave-based, agricultural commodity production, Triangular Trade business model that was generating massive profits. Sugar and tobacco and later cotton took the world by storm, huge windfall profits. Racialization developed from rebellions like Bacon's, court cases like Anthony Johnson's suit, and the revolution occurring in England. Racism had to be enacted and enforced. It is not, as some racists of color would have it, intrinsic to European culture or genes. And it must be said that this racialization of Blacks drew nary a murmur of protest from the African slave dealers who were likewise profiting from the Triangular Trade. If they had refused to provide any more slaves unless and until the degradation of Blacks was halted, they might have been able to stop it--maybe. They didn't because for them racialized slavery was good for business. In the history of our species, class interests trump race loyalty every time and in every race.
Kendi then adds that the newly freed White can then turn to his new Black slave and say you are not a slave because of racist policies, but because you are inferior. This is revolting racism on Kendi's part, he's attributing contemptible ideas to people that he cannot know that they possessed. This is a common vice among mediocrities: he's coloring the past to align with his prejudices, or perhaps his financial interests. His Center for Antiracist Research has been heavily funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. They have long been known to favor the racial narrative of American history. They will never fund a Center for Anticapitalist Research.
In reality, as Kendi no doubt knows, there were multiple instances where Whites in the colonies revolted against what would later be called White supremacy. Initially, the attempt by the authorities to institute anti-Black racism didn't work due to White resistance. It is racist and outrageous to omit this fact from accounts of the origin of White supremacy, but that is what invariably happens. Why? To keep the bullshit racial narrative alive. There were laws instituted which punished Whites for opposing racist laws and aiding and/or encouraging Blacks to rebel. Violators endured whippings, incarceration and sometimes expulsion from the colonies.
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