Netflix 8
About 24 minutes in, Jennifer L. Morgan tells us that "In the 18th century, European and American philosophers are arguing that Black people should only be working...are only good for brute labor, because the highest form of human expression is European and the lowest...African...that the only place where good art and higher thinking is happening is in Europe or among people of European descent. They are so accustomed to the stories they've been telling about Black people that they literally cannot imagine that a Black woman could produce art."
The "documentary" then proceeds, in a racist way of course, to tell the story of Phyllis Wheatley. [sp?]
This is Jennifer L. Morgan's second bit of commentary, and she is wrong again.
But first, this is disgusting racism. Can you imagine had a White said anything so contemptuous of Black philosophers, so demeaning and dehumanizing, the kind of condemnation it would provoke? A key element of racism, I would argue a necessary one, is to reduce the targeted group to an undifferentiated mass. Without such, it's difficult if not impossible to essentialize human beings as Morgan has done. As should be clear by now, Stamped's purpose is not anti-racism. There is no person, White or not, who will counter Morgan's blanket racial defamation, and certainly there will be no discussion of what Black Africans were thinking in century 18. That would be honest inquiry, but that is not what Stamped is for. There is no balance, no real search for the truth. That is not its mission. It's purpose is to cast this history in an unapologetically racist, anti-White way, and no deception will be abandoned in the effort.
This history, European thought in the 18th century, has to be falsified. The most important word is the one Morgan omits: some. What she says describes some European philosophers, but not all. As will come as a surprise to Morgan, White people are human beings, with all the good and all the bad which that entails. There is no uniform Whiteness, that's a racist myth. There is and has always been divergence of opinion, just as in any other race. In fact, it is among White intellectuals in this period that the movement which would later be called abolitionism coalesces.
This is a huge subject, much too big to be done justice here, but as long as there has been records of how White people have thought about the world and its non-White peoples, there have been White people who have expressed appreciation for them. We could begin with Herodotus, later there are numerous Roman philosophers, including such luminaries as Cicero, who had much more respect for Ethiopians than for the blue-eyed, blonde-haired barbarians who lived over the northern mountains. Throughout the Middle Ages there were quite a few White, Xian philosophers who engaged with their Muslim and Jewish counterparts.
In the two centuries preceding the 18th, in the highest strata of Spanish government and academia, there was a maelstrom. It began as a debate about the ethics of the Encomienda System, and evolved into a discussion of slavery and imperialism. Astonishingly, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, then also monarch in Spain and its colonies, declared that what was being done to the indigenous of the Americas was sinful and ordered an end to their enslavement. He also ordered a halt to further expansion in the New World. The pope then issued a bull in unequivocal support of Charles, declaring that the indigenous were "fully rational" human beings (meaning fully human, equal to Whites) "even if they were heathens." Charles approved of the use of African slaves because it was widely believed that these were enslaved because they were criminals, and not because they were inferior human beings. When the true nature of African slavery was discovered, the same scholars and clerics who supported the American indigenous then denounced the African slave trade. However, the conquistadors and nouveau riche colonists were having none of this and rebelled. Profits trump ethics every time.
Although neither Charles nor the pope referenced Africans specifically, this was an example of White potentates, an emperor and a pope!, explicitly asserting racial equality, and that all human beings had rights. They weren't successful, nevertheless, this is one of history's great moments. And just in case there is any doubt, both emperor and pope were White.
Morgan absurdly states that in century 18, Europeans believe that only White people can produce "good art." She simply couldn't be more wrong. In fact, that century perhaps marks the apex of European interest in and acquisition of Asian and African art. I believe some of these efforts could rightly be called thefts, nevertheless, European appreciation of non-European art is at or near its highest when Morgan insanely claims it doesn't exist.
Brilliant.
As regards European attitudes towards Africans and slavery, she doesn't tell the whole story. In the century she references, there is a growing movement against slavery organized in Europe. It must be said that in England, a few people who were wholly or in part Black played significant roles in this campaign, Robert Wedderburn notable among them, however, the various associations/societies that would coalesce into the unabashedly abolitionist London Corresponding Society were dominated by White men, the kind which bear no resemblance to those Morgan describes. Among them are Thomas Hardy, Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Thomas Spence, William Blake, to name a few, all of them believing in racial equality and all of them full-blooded Englishmen. I think even Morgan would agree it doesn't get any Whiter than that.
And there was the estimable Quaker-founded Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, also in London, which included among such notables as Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, which succeeded in getting the first anti-slavery legislation passed. Like the London Corresponding Society, they worked in cooperation with the Sons of Africa. The latter was an abolitionist organization of English Blacks, many of whom had been slaves.
In the US we have Benjamin Rush, Herman Husband and other revolutionary figures who opposed slavery and explicitly endorsed full citizenship for Blacks. The First Great Awakening was largely, perhaps exclusively a White movement, whose grandees at least, explicitly endorsed racial equality and an end to slavery.
And what of Africa in century 18? Who were its abolitionists? I'm not familiar enough with W. African history where I feel comfortable saying that there were none, however, I have never heard of any. There were efforts in Senegambia to stop the transport of slaves through that territory, but no real abolitionist sentiment. There were other efforts on the part of a given tribe to stop the capture and enslavement of their own people, but, again, there was no effort to bring slavery to an end with which I am familiar. Anton Wilhelm Amo, a Ghanian raised by rich Whites in Europe, oddly argued against slavery in Europe, but not the institution itself. Lourenço da Silva de Mendouça was a true abolitionist, but he was a Christian fluent in Portuguese, he had been Europeanized to a great extent. If there was a truly indigenous abolitionist movement, A truly African abolitionist movement, I have not encountered it.
Abolitionism, the desire to end slavery worldwide, is a White thing. It grew out of specifically White liberalism, the kind that didn't exist anywhere else. And global abolition was effected almost entirely by White people. Not all of them had altruistic motives, nor do I mean to suggest that Whites are more virtuous than Africans. As Europe industrialized, slavery became a hindrance to capitalist development and expansion. As methods of production change, values change with them. Had Africa industrialized first, Abolitionism would have been a Black thing. [1]
W. African history is not often discussed in America as an accurate accounting destroys the racial narrative which the US government has taken such pains to fabricate and maintain. However, when the topic is broached we usually hear of Afonso I of Kongo and Queen Nzinga, who are often falsely depicted as abolitionists. (Wikipedia's entry on Nzinga states "she fought against the slave trade," when in fact she fought to control it, which is rather different. In the end she did, getting a cut on every slave sold by her kingdom. You wanted to buy a slave in Ndongo (Angola), you had to pay the queen. She died perhaps the richest person in W. Africa.) I imagine that over the centuries of the TAST, despite all the silver pouring into Africa because of the trade, there had to be some abolitionist sentiment, which must have been successfully repressed. Apparently, profits trump ethics in Africa too.
Morgan says that Europeans "literally cannot imagine that a Black woman could produce art" as the documentary details the circumstances under which White men came to interview a Black female about her art. Predictably, Stamped depicts these White men in a negative light, which I think is quite inappropriate. They were part of a racist culture in which it was widely believed that a Black woman couldn't produce such work. However, unlike Morgan, they were open-minded, willing to put long-standing societal mores to the test. And to their eternal credit, they had the courage to transgress those normativities and declare Wheatley the poet she was. Bravo! Well done. "Justice done, a battle won." Phyllis Wheatley's White interrogators should be credited with overcoming their racial programming and seeing through it to the truth. We can only hope that some day Jennifer L. Morgan can do the same.
[1] Read Eric Williams' Slavery and Capitalism.
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