Dismantling the Racism Machine Part 3

1. Dismantling the Racism MachinePart 3 Dr. Karen Gaffney English Department Raritan Valley Community College Branchburg, NJ Blog: dividednolonger.com Email: dividednolonger@gmail.com Twitter: @dividednolonger Pronouns: she/her/hers

2. Today’s lecture is the 3rd of 8 based on my recent book:Dismantling the Racism Machine: A Manual and Toolbox (Routledge, 2018) Week 1: Myth #2: Race has always existed. Whiteness has always existed. Today: How did the invention of race serve to divide and conquer people in colonial America, and what impact did that have?

3. Review • Last week, we chipped away at the false ideology that race is biological and recognized the reality that race is a human invention. That allows us to see the Racism Machine more clearly. • We ask: Who built it? When? Why? How?

4. Myth #2: Race has always existed. Whiteness has always existed. Reality Race is an invention, a relatively recent human invention. One location: • Colonial Virginia, 1600s • The line between servant and slave was ambiguous • People didn’t identify as “black” or “white” (nationality, language, religion) • Skin color was not a dividing line • Elite wealthy landowners vs. labor • Bacon’s Rebellion (1676) • Race was invented to protect the elite and divide and conquer the masses through the creation of a racial hierarchy

5. Ethnocentricity vs. racism • From Race: Are We So Different, Goodman et al. 11: • “To be sure, past peoples were ethnocentric. They frequently believed themselves culturally superior to others and sometimes exhibited the nasty habit of painting others as uncultured and brutish or savage” • “Yet . . . ethnocentric and later racial logics differed significantly. . . . Prior to the inception of race, people were much less likely to link cultural practices instinctively and irrevocably to physical differences” • “Moreover where they deemed others to be culturally backwards in language, religion, food, adornment, or other behaviors, they tended to view these deficits as correctable” • “[R]ace represents…an unfortunate shift in primary focus from learned practices and traditions toward static or fixed notions of physical and essential characteristics”

6. An excerpt from . . . 6. Slavery predates race. Throughout much of human history, societies have enslaved others, often as a result of conquest or war, even debt, but not because of physical characteristics or a belief in natural inferiority. Due to a unique set of historical circumstances, ours was the first slave system where all the slaves shared similar physical characteristics. 

7. Colonial Virginia before race was invented • Worsening status of European laborers (who were majority of laborers) in early colonial Virginia (early to mid 1600s) • Tenant farmers lost rights and opportunities to get land; large landowners gained power (Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race) • laws passed to restrict servants’ movements and reflect fear of them running away and rebelling

8. Colonial Virginia before race was invented • Anthony Johnson, an African man, is enslaved and sent to Virginia in 1621. By 1655, he is free and owns his own land and his own slaves. He takes a nearby European farmer to Virginia court over a dispute and wins. • Historian Edmund Morgan: “It was common, for example, for servants and slaves to run away together, steal hogs together, get drunk together. It was not uncommon for them to make love together” (327) • Historian Lerone Bennett Jr.: “‘a great mass of white and black bondsmen, who occupied roughly the same economic category and were treated with equal contempt by the lords of the plantations and legislatures. Curiously unconcerned about their color, these people worked together and relaxed together’” (qtd. In Alexander 23) (see Dismantling the Racism Machine, pages 61-63)

9. Bacon’s Rebellion (1676) • Legal scholar Michelle Alexander: “The events in Jamestown were alarming to the planter elite, who were deeply fearful of the multiracial alliance of bond workers and slaves. Word of Bacon’s Rebellion spread far and wide, and several more uprisings of a similar type followed” (24)

10. Gathering the raw materials to build the Racism Machine • Law, 1662: the children of black women must “serve according to the condition of the mother” • Law, 1691: first time “white” is used in Virginia law when the children of white women and black or Native American men are identified as “abominable mixture and spurious issue”; interracial marriage is banned and such couples are “banished” (Hening, vol. 3 86-87) (see Dismantling the Racism Machine, pages 65, 66)

11. Virginia slave codes, 1705 • Right to vote, right to serve on a jury, right to hold office were all taken away from black people who had property and were now deemed “persons incapable in law” • Black and Native American slaves are now “real estate,” permanent slaves, property with no rights • Servants are white and receive benefits when their period of indenture is over, including food, money, weapons; they can go to court if not treated well (see Dismantling the Racism Machine, pages 68-70)

12. Whiteness • “whiteness defined through European ancestry was a calculated racial solution developed by colonial leaders to the economic and physical threat of laboring-class solidarity” (Goodman et al., Race: Are We So Different 44).

13. Whiteness • Michelle Alexander refers to this strategy as a “racial bribe,” in which white laborers were given a bribe, whiteness, in order to turn against black slaves (25): • “Deliberately and strategically, the planter class extended special privileges to poor whites in an effort to drive a wedge between them and black slaves. White settlers were allowed greater access to Native American lands, white servants were allowed to police slaves through slave patrols and militias, and barriers were created so that free labor would not be placed in competition with slave labor. These measures effectively eliminated the risk of future alliances between black slaves and poor whites. . . . Their own plight had not improved much, but at least they were not slaves” (25).

14. Racial categories were constructed • White: built with benefits and attached to freedom, connected to civilization, humanity, and a newly blended European identity • Black: built by removing rights and chained to chattel slavery and the status of “animal” with a blending of distinct African nationalities and cultures • Native: built by blending distinct indigenous nations into one group often seen as savage and without national identity, with limited or no rights, especially not to the land

15. Questions? Comments? • Thanks to the Leisure Learning Program, sponsored by the Friends of the Bernards Township Library and the Bernards Township Library • Dismantling the Racism Machine: A Manual and Toolbox is available at routledge.com and Amazon • Visit my website dividednolonger.com for this Powerpoint and many resources, inc. a page for this series under My Presentations • Email me: dividednolonger@gmail.com