Racism is not a personal flaw. It is much, much more than that. That's the second aspect my readers ought to understand. It's easy to caricature the racist, to be dismissive. That misses the point.
Racism is a cultural artefact.
"The grooming (gaslighting) of human vulnerability is one of most vile things any human being can do to another."
Racism is a device, Racism is a tool. Racism is a weapon, designed to break asunder the potential of human solidarity across the group of people, all workers, oppressed in different manner, by the same hierarchically violent rulers.
Racists are being utilised. Their bodies and minds are instrumentalised by others, who wield much more power than any ordinary person ever can. The rage of the ordinary Racist is lateral violence, and it does not resolve their problems, it only exacerbates them.
Racism is not a natural phenomenon.
"The working population in late-17th Century Virginia was quite diverse, including white indentured servants, black and Native American slaves, and free whites who had completed their term of service. Outnumbered, plantation owners grew increasingly fearful of threats to their political control. In particular, there was the danger of a cooperative insurrection among the various working demogrpahics.
The solution was to divide and conquer. Through new laws passed by the Virginia assembly, plantation owners consciously encouraged racial hatred between blacks and poor whites."
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2017/08/15/when-white-supremacy-came-to-virginia/The solution was to divide and conquer. Through new laws passed by the Virginia assembly, plantation owners consciously encouraged racial hatred between blacks and poor whites."
A superb historical exploration can be found in the two books The Invention of The White Race by Theodore W Allen.
"When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no “white” people there. Nor, according to colonial records, would there be for another sixty years. In this seminal two-volume work, The Invention of the White Race, Theodore W. Allen tells the story of how America’s ruling classes created the category of the “white race” as a means of social control. Since that early invention, white privileges have enforced the myth of racial superiority, and that fact has been central to maintaining ruling-class domination over ordinary working people of all colors throughout American history.
Volume I draws lessons from Irish history, comparing British rule in Ireland with the “white” oppression of Native Americans and African Americans. Allen details how Irish immigrants fleeing persecution learned to spread racial oppression in their adoptive country as part of white America.
Since publication in the mid-nineties, The Invention of the White Race has become indispensable in debates on the origins of racial oppression in America. In this updated edition, scholar Jeffrey B. Perry provides a new introduction, a short biography of the author and a study guide."
Here is a useful website to use as a resource.
Healthy Behaviour.Here is a useful website to use as a resource.
Healthy human behaviour, on the other hand, is a social, psychological, emotional and material biological reality.
It is a real and natural phenomenon, a fundamental continuum. Every species presents with health behavioural dynamics that support the individual and the collective, that tend to tie into nurturing their habitat rather than toxifying or undermining their habitat. One could say that healthy behaviour is mandated for all species.
We humans are social creatures, a social species. Healthy behaviour is very much part of our 'nature'. Healthy behaviour is a real baseline for humans to thrive.
Sadly, unhealthy behaviour is also real.
What we rarely see is bullying as part of any thriving social species - whilst we do see it in stressed primates, in parts of Africa, we tend to see it less among primates in Bhutan, or the deeper parts of the Amazon, where their populations are not so stressed.
Both dynamics - healthy and unhealthy - have causation at their root. Both are learned. The healthier the situation of the society, then the healthier the general behavioural dynamic will be of those who form that society. Behaviour has roots, there are reasons and there causes for behaviour.
Family, community and society matter hugely in terms of the environment they set for learning how to be fully human.
Healthy behaviour is learned.
From the womb, and from the mothers arms, from the actions of early carers onward, behaviour is learned by example, by feed back, by mirroring .We learn how to walk, how to talk, how regulate our emotions, how respond to others through seeing and experiencing others doing those things. That is what mirror neurons are about.
We learn how to connect, how to resolve conflict, how to meet our needs through direct experience of being connected, through having our needs met, through developing the skills to meet our own needs over time, and through meeting the needs of those around us to what ever degree we can. Our basic setting is one of trust, and the egalitarian mode of social organisation is our most ancient, and that setting is the one we are most perfectly evolved for - our sensitivity, our warmth, our loving all speak to this.
We are learning all the time. We learn how to live. We are born vulnerable, inexperienced yet exquisitely sensitive and therefore we must learn how to live, we must learn how to be and we need to do that learning in safety, within a loving environment, where we are protected and nurtured until we are resilient enough to cope with what the natural world presents, as co-operating, connected human beings. Children want to be helpful to those who treat them with respect and love. Children have an innate desire to contribute, in response to the love they are showered with, and to do that they have to learn how to live, how to co-operate, how to master themselves and the skills they need to thrive.
Hierarchies of Violence are inventions, they are cultural structures, born of traumatised societal, social and individual behaviours that remain unresolved, unhealed. The healthy group of humans is loving, attentive, creative, intelligent, curious and they co-operate because they value each other.
There is no Racist gene code. There is no empathy gene either. There is no kindness gene. There is no 'Warrior Gene' and we know that there is no genetically determined propensity for violence. There is no biological a priori bully disposition. All of these behaviours are learned
Genes and behaviour.
“The brain is heavily influenced by genes. But from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us (frontal cortex) is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you. Because it is the least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortex from genes.”
― Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
There are no genetic components to Hierarchy of power. Socio-economic status is cultural rather than genetic. There is no genetic component for the propensity towards creating and using artificial power disparities. All of this is learned.
Much of it is taught, for that is the nature of a violent culture - the children of that kind of culture will be taught that violence can be rationalised, that some are entitled to utilise violence to maintain their status and position, and they will be habituated to that rationale as part of their education, formal and informal.
All people - you, me, Donald J Trump, Harold Shipman, Boris Johnson, Martin Luther King, Hitler, Mao, your mother, your father, your siblings, your friends and lovers were, and are born, ready to learn to be decent. But we need the experience of decent parents, we all need a decent family and a decent society, and a healthy culture within which to learn and develop those qualities.
Most of us live decently as we can, given whatever circumstances we are born into, circumstances not of our making. Even within a bully culture, bullies are not the majority. That is an amazing fact. Consider what this means, that even within the bully cultures, the majority of people are not bullies. That speaks to something in our 'nature' that leans towards the pro-social qualities. It speaks to our sensitivity as a form of balance making.
Trump and Johnson cannot be held responsible for their parents, or for the society into which they were born. Their responsibility emerges later in life, as they become adults, to some degree aware of their actions, observant of the consequences, and dealing with or denying their roles in outcomes of their behaviour, adverse or benign.
Bullying.
Bullying is quite obviously not a healthy behavioural dynamic, it clearly undermines the social aspect of our nature as a species. Bullying is a profoundly un-cooperative, disruptive, stress inducing behaviour. It is not a useful behaviour for a thriving family, community or society.
This is revealed by the fact that bullies must use force or guile or deceit to maintain their ability to exercise power in their 'interests' at whatever level of social influence they operate within, be they the school bully or the King, the Prime Minster, the President, the Policeman, the Priest, the abusive dominating family member, the abusive spouse or partner must manipulate the other partner to maintain the 'relationship'.
Racism is bullying.
Racism is bullying, with a false logic rationalisation to prop it up. Misogyny is bullying, with a false logic rationalisation to prop it up.
Bullying behaviour is more common place within cultures of hierarchy and violence. The trickle down effect of abuse of power afflicts the entire society. This is easy to understand. Think of a family where one of the parents is a bully, and how that might affect the behaviour of the other members of the family.
Guile, Deceit and Racism.
Racism was invented as a tool of social control and conquest - it was specifically designed at an exact time and place, as a legalised tool with which to divide various oppressed groups, It was invented and institutionalised within the American Colonial system, and it was also utilised to enable expansion by violent conquest into the pre-existing cultures of Native 'America', to underpin and underwrite the Christianisation of their natural ranges and land tenures as a good thing.
Racism is all invention, artifice, falsehood. It does not come naturally, at all. In spite of various pseudo-scientific claims to the contrary.
The many explanations for othering founded on 'survival' and competition and in group/out group as an evolutionary development of the human species are, in my view, the psychological projections of the bully culture.
Rationalise cruelty.
Make it seem normal. Habituate by exposure.
We humans are self organising social beings as a species, and our health/disease profile suggests no adaptive biological mechanisms exist to adapt to chronic trauma, to war fare, to socio-economic status, bullying or poverty.
We become sickened, diseased and unwell under all those stressors: very, very ill indeed. Our bodies are not designed to be so stressed, and though they are resilient, and we can and do survive severe abuse, we do not thrive under such conditions.
The bully system must teach it's children that its lies are truths, and it must mask the truth at every turn.
And a very large part of the problem of Racism and xenophobia lies within various forms of social conditioning: all of that which influences what adults say and do in their relations with each other and with children, formally and informally. How the bully family relates to and treats the children, what the bully culture does to children to prepare them for the world they are to participate in: it is the same dynamic, scaled up.
If the bully culture taught an honest history, it would cease to be a bully society. If our Education systems told the truth about the effects of power upon the lives of the ordinary folk, the oppressed, the poor, the civilians caught in the cross fire of history, then the establishment would not be able to recruit willing participants, it would not be able to convince the grass roots emerging generations of youth to carry on the system. It must teach lies and it must habituate each generation to those lies.
In these days, the internet has posed the power centers a serious problem - a generation of youth who can self educate, who are curious, interested, smart are learning the truth, independently of the education systems. There is a push back by the 'alt-right' movement in reaction to that.
Honesty undermines oppression.
What honestly happened, and what honestly happens, transparency rather than interpretation, is how to make sense of history. Education needs to be honest to be a genuine education - if it is dishonest in any way, it becomes indoctrination. The liar wants the target to think a certain way, the lie is telling the target what to think.
Evidence always speaks for itself, and evidence puts opinion in it's place.
Nobody wins any war, precisely because warfare is a culture: a cultural process activated by human agency, all wars occur within the dynamic of competing (militarised industrialised states) power groups as a cultural continuum.
Looking at who started the 100 Years War, or WWI, or WWII, or The Iraq War or who 'won' those wars is a futile exercise, because the cultural dynamic, the continuum that each of those wars exists within can be traced back to ancient Greece, and further back. European cultures, and others, have been engaging in war as a socio-economic and political tool for thousands of years. They still do.
Racism is a tool, a utility, a war strategy.
So let us look at how and why Racism was invented, and how it was promoted.
Indentured servitude appeared in Virginia by 1620. Initially a device used to transport European workers to the New World, over time servitude dwindled as black slavery grew in importance in the British colonies.
"The Jacobean playwright Thomas Middleton invented the concept of ‘white people’ on 29 October 1613, the date that his play The Triumphs of Truth was first performed.
The phrase was first uttered by the character of an African king who looks out upon an English audience and declares:
‘I see amazement set upon the faces/Of these white people, wond’rings and strange gazes.’
As far as I, and others, have been able to tell, Middleton’s play is the earliest printed example of a European author referring to fellow Europeans as ‘white people’.
A year later, the English commoner John Rolfe of Jamestown in Virginia took as his bride an Algonquin princess named Matoaka, whom we call Pocahontas.
The literary critic Christopher Hodgkins reports that King James I was ‘at first perturbed when he learned of the marriage’.
But this was not out of fear of miscegenation: James’s reluctance, Hodgkins explained, was because ‘Rolfe, a commoner, had without his sovereign’s permission wed the daughter of a foreign prince.’ King James was not worried about the pollution of Rolfe’s line; he was worried about the pollution of Matoaka’s.!
Both examples might seem surprising to contemporary readers, but they serve to prove the historian Nell Irvin Painter’s reminder in The History of White People (2010) that ‘race is an idea, not a fact’.
Source :https://aeon.co/ideas/how-white-people-were-invented-by-a-playwright-in-1613
From this we can see that the rulers of one culture were prepared to acknowledge the rulers of another culture as equally elite, superior to the common person over whom they ruled.
That said, both groups in this example misread the other as equivalents, when they were certainly not equivalent - King James was an absolute Ruler, whose position was ordained by God, the Algonquin culture had no such custom. Theirs was a federated deliberative democracy, and their leaders were spokespersons, rather than absolute rulers. The community governed itself.
So there we have the earliest recorded references to Whiteness as a distinction. Before that distinctions were made, but more by religion or culture or language than by skin tone.
Skin-colour Racism was institutionalised in the the 13 Colonies of North America, during the latter 1600s, as a political and economic utility, designed to undermine solidarity across oppressed groups within the Colonial dynamic.
A 'Brexit-style' campaign of deliberate political grooming.
"The Virginians legislated a new class of people into existence: the whites. They gave the whites certain rights, and took other rights from blacks. White, as a language of race, appears in Virginia around the 1680s, and seems to first appear in Virginia law in 1691. And thus whiteness, and to a degree as well blackness, was born in the mind of America."
source :
A 'Brexit-style' campaign of deliberate political grooming.
"The Virginians legislated a new class of people into existence: the whites. They gave the whites certain rights, and took other rights from blacks. White, as a language of race, appears in Virginia around the 1680s, and seems to first appear in Virginia law in 1691. And thus whiteness, and to a degree as well blackness, was born in the mind of America."
source :
https://medium.com/message/how-white-people-got-made-6eeb076ade42 - How White People got Made
and
"Smith's conclusion is supported by a more recent study of servants in seventeenth-century Maryland, where it was found that the first batches of servants became landowners and politically active in the colony, but by the second half of the century more than half the servants, even after ten years of freedom, remained landless.
Servants became tenants, providing cheap labor for the large planters both during and after their servitude.
It seems quite clear that class lines hardened through the colonial period; the distinction between rich and poor became sharper.
By 1700 there were fifty rich families in Virginia, with wealth equivalent to 50,000 pounds (a huge sum those days), who lived off the labor of black slaves and white servants, owned the plantations, sat on the governor's council, served as local magistrates.
In Maryland, the settlers were ruled by a proprietor whose right of total control over the colony had been granted by the English King. Between 1650 and 1689 there were five revolts against the proprietor."
https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncolorline.html - The People's History of the United States, chapter 2 and 3.
-- so there you have it, Racism invented by a class of Northern European Christian Rulers as a means to divide the population over which they held power, in order to dilute the numbers of potential alliances among that group that might unite and rebel.
Racism as a defence of the establishment.
"The first recorded slave revolt in the United States happened in Gloucester, Virginia, in 1663, an event involving white indentured servants as well as black slaves. In 1672, there were reports of fugitive slaves forming groups to harass plantation owners."
Those over whom they had power included black and white free people, men and women who were landowners, small business people, farmers, merchants, artisans and labourers, slaves and the native peoples.
and
"Smith's conclusion is supported by a more recent study of servants in seventeenth-century Maryland, where it was found that the first batches of servants became landowners and politically active in the colony, but by the second half of the century more than half the servants, even after ten years of freedom, remained landless.
Servants became tenants, providing cheap labor for the large planters both during and after their servitude.
It seems quite clear that class lines hardened through the colonial period; the distinction between rich and poor became sharper.
By 1700 there were fifty rich families in Virginia, with wealth equivalent to 50,000 pounds (a huge sum those days), who lived off the labor of black slaves and white servants, owned the plantations, sat on the governor's council, served as local magistrates.
In Maryland, the settlers were ruled by a proprietor whose right of total control over the colony had been granted by the English King. Between 1650 and 1689 there were five revolts against the proprietor."
https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncolorline.html - The People's History of the United States, chapter 2 and 3.
-- so there you have it, Racism invented by a class of Northern European Christian Rulers as a means to divide the population over which they held power, in order to dilute the numbers of potential alliances among that group that might unite and rebel.
Racism as a defence of the establishment.
"The first recorded slave revolt in the United States happened in Gloucester, Virginia, in 1663, an event involving white indentured servants as well as black slaves. In 1672, there were reports of fugitive slaves forming groups to harass plantation owners."
Those over whom they had power included black and white free people, men and women who were landowners, small business people, farmers, merchants, artisans and labourers, slaves and the native peoples.
This was a time when the owners of the plantations, and urban land owners, the wealthy and influential people operated as a divinely appointed ruling class. The system was ordained by God.
The Ruling class were a network of families and organisations, they were the institutionalized power of the colonies, in the sense of occupying and dominating Governance systems, as overlords of the economic and cultural organisation of life in the colonies. Each family that had risen to wealth and power over time, and in time the men that had inherited it formed a power center, they all knew each other, they intermarried around the edges of their family alliances. And those alliances were critical to the emergence of an elite who felt entitled to rule.
They were a devout, white Anglo Saxon protestant elite.
Their position was proof of Gods favour, God's World Order. The GWO.
"If this seems like a crazy way for people to behave, it’s important to think about what was believed about the natural order of things back in the 1600s.
Nowadays, we don’t really think about class as a thing that often, and certainly not a natural thing.
But when the concepts of white and black people were conceived, the idea of class was literally believed to be handed down from God.
Aristocracy flowed from the divine right of kings, and by their blood or elevation. The poor were poor because God so wished it.
Keeping peasants in line and using them to their fullest was what the aristocracy was for, and the tactics that accomplished this were considered wise stewardship. Sometimes that meant concessions, and sometimes divide and conquer, but as long as you didn’t have peasant rebellions, you were doing a good job.
This view of the world, never universal but powerful and prevalent, held on in one form or another for a very long time. It infected the views of British, Spanish, Dutch, and French imperial masters all over.
Nowadays, we don’t really think about class as a thing that often, and certainly not a natural thing.
But when the concepts of white and black people were conceived, the idea of class was literally believed to be handed down from God.
Aristocracy flowed from the divine right of kings, and by their blood or elevation. The poor were poor because God so wished it.
Keeping peasants in line and using them to their fullest was what the aristocracy was for, and the tactics that accomplished this were considered wise stewardship. Sometimes that meant concessions, and sometimes divide and conquer, but as long as you didn’t have peasant rebellions, you were doing a good job.
This view of the world, never universal but powerful and prevalent, held on in one form or another for a very long time. It infected the views of British, Spanish, Dutch, and French imperial masters all over.
The powerful were those God had chosen, and those in their power were chosen by God to be of use. While fainter, this idea is so strong it still leaks into the modern era in places like the atheological ideas of Prosperity Christianity. In the frame of mind of aristocracy and a divinely ordained ruling class, such a plan to reorder people and make them pliant was understood to be a move of genius blessed by god and king, if it worked.
This plan worked, in fact it worked so well it became the blueprint for the next few centuries of colonization, revised and spread all over the world, even beyond the conception of white and black."
The Ruling class were a network of families and organisations, they were the institutionalized power of the colonies, in the sense of occupying and dominating Governance systems, as overlords of the economic and cultural organisation of life in the colonies. Each family that had risen to wealth and power over time, and in time the men that had inherited it formed a power center, they all knew each other, they intermarried around the edges of their family alliances. And those alliances were critical to the emergence of an elite who felt entitled to rule.
They were a devout, white Anglo Saxon protestant elite.
Their position was proof of Gods favour, God's World Order. The GWO.
They saw themselves as a series of co-operating dynasties, building a potential political and economic Empire, even then. Manifest Destiny.
They had a problem. They were outnumbered. They could not trust in God alone to protect their interests.
They had troops, British regiments, loyal to the Crown, protecting them. They were a British Colony, they paid taxes to the British Crown, which was at least 12 weeks sailing round trip away. Getting more troops was difficult, and a lengthy process.
The American Revolution was still a century away in the future.
They did not have enough well equipped, well trained professional and loyal troops to cover their expanding territories.
Never enough, it would seem.
The owner class were outnumbered by slaves, indentured workers,convicts, free labourer, farmers, small land owners and other assorted working folk by a factor of many, many times and then there were the locals, the Native peoples. In terms of a numbers game, the owners were a vulnerable minority.
The Minority Rules
The Colonial economy was based on taking land by force or scam, by importing labour to develop that land, using indentured workers and convicts, and then slaves, to do all the backbreaking work, so that cash crops could be planted and processed, and sent to Europe. Tobacco, Cotton, Sugar and others. It was backbreaking work, the living conditions were harsh and therefore the attrition rate of the workforce was high.
For that reason the Owners had to have a steady supply of indentured workers, who worked for a set number of years to pay off their sea fare and lodgings, or convicts who worked to pay off sentences and fines for petty offences, for periods of 5, 10, 15 years as labourers and some few as skilled workers.
17th Century 'interns'.
They needed compliant, cheap labour for everything from plantation work to building roads, infrastructure, housing, extracting raw materials, processing those into product, trading commodities, and of course, the potential of the workforce as consumers, as indentured workers earned their freedom, and gain plots of land to become a compliant lower middle class.
Some land owners had been taking on bonded labourers from West Africa, as well as Irish Slaves and English convicts, and English and European indentured skilled workers. Many of those black people, while they were badly treated, and lived effectively as slaves for the duration of their bond time, managed to survive their bonded time, and were freed and became homesteaders, labourers and artisans.
Once freed, those indentured or bonded workers were most often given a plot of land, some tools, feed, seed, basic shelter, some cash and let at it.
These suffering people had to go through quite a lot of pretty dreadful abuse, to eventually end up with land, and a chance for a better life - the American dream. They were, of course, very tough people. Hardened, seasoned, robust.
They were most often given land on the edges of 'civilisation', and the buffer zone they created between native tenure and the European establishment became a regular friction point. Tension between the Native peoples and the new homesteaders was a constant theme.
That attrition rate for cheap labour was the impetus to start institutionalised slavery as a replacement source of cheap labour. Slavery was an answer to a cheap labour shortage. Freeing indentured workers to be a buffer was an answer to the tension at the fringes.
We are all in this together, sometimes.
The first case of African slaves in the Colonies is recorded as happening in 1619. They were booty from an English pirate attack on a Portuguese slaver. Though they were enslaved by the Portuguese, in the Colonies they were sold on as indentured workers, and in time became free men.
Spain and Portugal had been operating slavery in their colonies since the 1400s. Their first targets were the indigenous peoples they conquered, and when those peoples were destroyed they sought slaves from Africa, for their colonies in the Caribbean, in South and Central America, and in Mexico. Slavery was an old practice in Spain, dating back to Roman times.
Slavery was not indigenous to the American colonies.
As colonial Capitalism expanded, slavery expanded with it.
There were frequent incidents when the the native folk and the indentured worked together or worked around each other, respectfully.
At different times it was in their best interests, in many cases to work together, to co-operate, to trade, to be civil in their approach to one another.
There are quite a few documented incidents, where groups of the oppressed labourers ran away together, and either ran away as far as they could go into native lands, and sought to hunker down, and get by, to integrate to a degree, and some succeeded for a while.
Sometimes they resisted, they rioted, they organised armed rebellions and tore the owners homes apart and held sway for short few weeks, until a military response could be mustered by the ruling elite to quell the disturbance.
Bacon's rebellion is a famous example of how the different oppressed groups - in this case landless ex-indentured labourers and slaves banded together, albeit lead by a landowner, to target the owning, ruling class.
The owners, bankers, industrialists, urban affluent working class and the troops, and others, clerks, doctors, lawyers, farmers etc were outnumbered, by slaves, indentured workers and free labourers and they obviously felt those were dreadful odds.
They felt that vulnerability keenly.
They did not trust the British Crown, so far away, to be able to secure their position.
And so they devised a plan.
A political grooming exercise that would play out over decades, and into centuries.
Racism was a Capitalist solution to the twin problems of cheap labour, and a restive labour force.
The owners, naturally enough engaged with the compliant churches they funded, (remember the colonies were deeply religious, and they believed status was ordained by God, and in that civic spirit, they set up new media, they had printed pamphlets, broadsheets, news papers and sent agent provocateurs to stir the story among the people, and as the brew started to ferment, the media portrayal of African and Native American was steadily becoming more dehumanised.
A familiar pattern, we note.
The starting point was the Biblical narrative of The Tribe of Ham.
They used the Bible as a reference point for a righteous basis for Racism.
The Native peoples were Heathens, beyond redemption, whereas the Africans were descended from the 12 tribes of Israel, and could therefore be Christianized, and this was promoted as a way of saving their souls, as an act of mercy.
In other words, slavery was a way to save their souls. Very clever.
The Native people's were categorised as Heathen, Pagan, hardly human and that meant they were already condemned to Hell.
Murdering them could be religiously rationalised, seen as a 'kindness'.
Putting them out of their misery.
Taking their lands and making the land Christian and 'fruitful' was God's work,
"When Virginia decreed in 1667 that converted slaves could be kept in bondage, not because they were actual heathens but because they had heathen ancestry, the justification for black servitude was thus changed from religious status to something approaching race.
Beginning in the late seventeenth century laws were also passed in English North America forbidding marriage between whites and blacks and discriminating against the mixed offspring of informal liaisons.
Without clearly saying so, such laws implied that blacks were unalterably alien and inferior. "
Source : http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-02-01.htm
It is worth noting that we know much of this because, in the spirit of civic democracy, the oligarchy funded the Free Press, the News Papers of the time. They operated legislative assemblies, and therefore they made laws, and recorded proceedings, and they kept records of births, deaths, marriages, land ownership, slave ownership, fines, criminal cases, executions and so forth. A bureaucracy of control.
From the pulpit, and on the media of the times, we find caricatures, grooming, fake news. We find that the tactics we are so familiar with in the 21st Century are old hat.
A deliberate propaganda campaign over decades to entrench racial superiority as a normal Christian thought form, leading to the legal definitions of black and white race.
And in this manner a racial hierarchy was being normalised, socialised, habituated.
White ex-convicts were invited into the new club of reformed, hard working land working Christians.
Indentured workers were promoted.
Artisans, and urban working class were invited.
They were no longer just above the lowest of the low.
Convicts themselves, even in goal, were still above African people and the Native peoples.
Two new 'inferior' dehumanised societal enemies, sanctioned by the Bible, promoted through the media. A clash between The Civilised and The Barbarian.
Thus the Native peoples of The Americas, were recast as existential to threats the newly liberated, newly defined White People, God;s people, ordinary folk who, having earned their freedom by enduring years of hardship, were now working and living the American Dream, intent upon improving their own socio-economic positions.
And the politicians, the corrupt churches and the media kept it up, and it became 'common knowledge' that 'Heathens' and 'Africans' were un-human, un-Christ-like, unGodly, dangerous and uncivilised, and deserved to be extirpated or enslaved to work.
Enslavement was even touted as a mercy, if they could convert them to Christianity, in what ever idiom was locally prevalent that was compliant.
God makes an invisible whip.
And that is the true story of the origins of Racism in the USA, and across the Industrialised Earth.
When folks understand that, it all looks very different.
Honesty in History would be a superb preventative..
The claims of an evolutionary basis for racism is false.
Healthy human beings notice difference, and are ready to explore it to see what it is before making any judgement, and the healthy human does not bully anyone.
Casting different groups of people is a socio-behavioural dynamic of Hierarchically Violent Cultures.
Sadly, the fact that they can still play this game so well, that so many fall for it, through wide ranging socially mediated factors, rather than solely a matter of personal flaws, it is not good news.
However more and more people are working it out, and seeking ways to not play that game.
It's not good. Nobody is happy.
Just ensuring that state schooling taught an honest history would reduce further expansion of racist ideology.
It is that easy...
However, an honest history would lead, inevitably, rapidly to multiple, posthumous and living indictments for War Crimes, Slavery, Conquest and Corruption in practically every Judiciary extant - if the sordid nature of the bully domain be revealed as it really is, and understood then it will be reduced to a pathetic fetish that cannot cause any actual harm, and becomes them an object of public remorse.
Baggage we have let go of, but cannot until we unpack it.
Three years of honesty in history, for one key group - secondary schools.
Honesty in Universities, and in Government - evidence above opinion or belief, when making decisions that have an effect on the commons, as a matter of duty of care would help deal with Racism.
Democratic schooling where children assume responsibilities for the site, their resources, the content and the implementation of their own education collectively, retaining autonomy and responsibility and with support from adults as mentors, - we know this works for the children who get this kind of education.
They are never satisfied with merely voting - democracy is a collective exercise, voting is a tiny part, which of itself alone does never confer democratic power, merely the illusion of agreeing.
The resolution of Racism has many elements, and the more radical response is to look to a much deeper analysis than integrating all peoples into the industrial militarised hierarchy of violence culture as an example of equality and equity.
Racism was an evil solution to a requirement for cheap labour.
Racism is not a personal flaw. It is much, much mote than that.
We must also end the concept of cheap labour, and all that it stands for.
They had a problem. They were outnumbered. They could not trust in God alone to protect their interests.
They had troops, British regiments, loyal to the Crown, protecting them. They were a British Colony, they paid taxes to the British Crown, which was at least 12 weeks sailing round trip away. Getting more troops was difficult, and a lengthy process.
The American Revolution was still a century away in the future.
They did not have enough well equipped, well trained professional and loyal troops to cover their expanding territories.
Never enough, it would seem.
The owner class were outnumbered by slaves, indentured workers,convicts, free labourer, farmers, small land owners and other assorted working folk by a factor of many, many times and then there were the locals, the Native peoples. In terms of a numbers game, the owners were a vulnerable minority.
The Minority Rules
The Colonial economy was based on taking land by force or scam, by importing labour to develop that land, using indentured workers and convicts, and then slaves, to do all the backbreaking work, so that cash crops could be planted and processed, and sent to Europe. Tobacco, Cotton, Sugar and others. It was backbreaking work, the living conditions were harsh and therefore the attrition rate of the workforce was high.
For that reason the Owners had to have a steady supply of indentured workers, who worked for a set number of years to pay off their sea fare and lodgings, or convicts who worked to pay off sentences and fines for petty offences, for periods of 5, 10, 15 years as labourers and some few as skilled workers.
17th Century 'interns'.
They needed compliant, cheap labour for everything from plantation work to building roads, infrastructure, housing, extracting raw materials, processing those into product, trading commodities, and of course, the potential of the workforce as consumers, as indentured workers earned their freedom, and gain plots of land to become a compliant lower middle class.
Some land owners had been taking on bonded labourers from West Africa, as well as Irish Slaves and English convicts, and English and European indentured skilled workers. Many of those black people, while they were badly treated, and lived effectively as slaves for the duration of their bond time, managed to survive their bonded time, and were freed and became homesteaders, labourers and artisans.
Once freed, those indentured or bonded workers were most often given a plot of land, some tools, feed, seed, basic shelter, some cash and let at it.
These suffering people had to go through quite a lot of pretty dreadful abuse, to eventually end up with land, and a chance for a better life - the American dream. They were, of course, very tough people. Hardened, seasoned, robust.
They were most often given land on the edges of 'civilisation', and the buffer zone they created between native tenure and the European establishment became a regular friction point. Tension between the Native peoples and the new homesteaders was a constant theme.
That attrition rate for cheap labour was the impetus to start institutionalised slavery as a replacement source of cheap labour. Slavery was an answer to a cheap labour shortage. Freeing indentured workers to be a buffer was an answer to the tension at the fringes.
We are all in this together, sometimes.
The first case of African slaves in the Colonies is recorded as happening in 1619. They were booty from an English pirate attack on a Portuguese slaver. Though they were enslaved by the Portuguese, in the Colonies they were sold on as indentured workers, and in time became free men.
Spain and Portugal had been operating slavery in their colonies since the 1400s. Their first targets were the indigenous peoples they conquered, and when those peoples were destroyed they sought slaves from Africa, for their colonies in the Caribbean, in South and Central America, and in Mexico. Slavery was an old practice in Spain, dating back to Roman times.
Slavery was not indigenous to the American colonies.
As colonial Capitalism expanded, slavery expanded with it.
There were frequent incidents when the the native folk and the indentured worked together or worked around each other, respectfully.
At different times it was in their best interests, in many cases to work together, to co-operate, to trade, to be civil in their approach to one another.
There are quite a few documented incidents, where groups of the oppressed labourers ran away together, and either ran away as far as they could go into native lands, and sought to hunker down, and get by, to integrate to a degree, and some succeeded for a while.
Sometimes they resisted, they rioted, they organised armed rebellions and tore the owners homes apart and held sway for short few weeks, until a military response could be mustered by the ruling elite to quell the disturbance.
Bacon's rebellion is a famous example of how the different oppressed groups - in this case landless ex-indentured labourers and slaves banded together, albeit lead by a landowner, to target the owning, ruling class.
The owners, bankers, industrialists, urban affluent working class and the troops, and others, clerks, doctors, lawyers, farmers etc were outnumbered, by slaves, indentured workers and free labourers and they obviously felt those were dreadful odds.
They felt that vulnerability keenly.
They did not trust the British Crown, so far away, to be able to secure their position.
And so they devised a plan.
A political grooming exercise that would play out over decades, and into centuries.
Racism was a Capitalist solution to the twin problems of cheap labour, and a restive labour force.
The owners, naturally enough engaged with the compliant churches they funded, (remember the colonies were deeply religious, and they believed status was ordained by God, and in that civic spirit, they set up new media, they had printed pamphlets, broadsheets, news papers and sent agent provocateurs to stir the story among the people, and as the brew started to ferment, the media portrayal of African and Native American was steadily becoming more dehumanised.
A familiar pattern, we note.
The starting point was the Biblical narrative of The Tribe of Ham.
They used the Bible as a reference point for a righteous basis for Racism.
The Native peoples were Heathens, beyond redemption, whereas the Africans were descended from the 12 tribes of Israel, and could therefore be Christianized, and this was promoted as a way of saving their souls, as an act of mercy.
In other words, slavery was a way to save their souls. Very clever.
The Native people's were categorised as Heathen, Pagan, hardly human and that meant they were already condemned to Hell.
Murdering them could be religiously rationalised, seen as a 'kindness'.
Putting them out of their misery.
Taking their lands and making the land Christian and 'fruitful' was God's work,
"When Virginia decreed in 1667 that converted slaves could be kept in bondage, not because they were actual heathens but because they had heathen ancestry, the justification for black servitude was thus changed from religious status to something approaching race.
Beginning in the late seventeenth century laws were also passed in English North America forbidding marriage between whites and blacks and discriminating against the mixed offspring of informal liaisons.
Without clearly saying so, such laws implied that blacks were unalterably alien and inferior. "
Source : http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-02-01.htm
It is worth noting that we know much of this because, in the spirit of civic democracy, the oligarchy funded the Free Press, the News Papers of the time. They operated legislative assemblies, and therefore they made laws, and recorded proceedings, and they kept records of births, deaths, marriages, land ownership, slave ownership, fines, criminal cases, executions and so forth. A bureaucracy of control.
From the pulpit, and on the media of the times, we find caricatures, grooming, fake news. We find that the tactics we are so familiar with in the 21st Century are old hat.
A deliberate propaganda campaign over decades to entrench racial superiority as a normal Christian thought form, leading to the legal definitions of black and white race.
And in this manner a racial hierarchy was being normalised, socialised, habituated.
White ex-convicts were invited into the new club of reformed, hard working land working Christians.
Indentured workers were promoted.
Artisans, and urban working class were invited.
They were no longer just above the lowest of the low.
Convicts themselves, even in goal, were still above African people and the Native peoples.
Two new 'inferior' dehumanised societal enemies, sanctioned by the Bible, promoted through the media. A clash between The Civilised and The Barbarian.
Thus the Native peoples of The Americas, were recast as existential to threats the newly liberated, newly defined White People, God;s people, ordinary folk who, having earned their freedom by enduring years of hardship, were now working and living the American Dream, intent upon improving their own socio-economic positions.
And the politicians, the corrupt churches and the media kept it up, and it became 'common knowledge' that 'Heathens' and 'Africans' were un-human, un-Christ-like, unGodly, dangerous and uncivilised, and deserved to be extirpated or enslaved to work.
Enslavement was even touted as a mercy, if they could convert them to Christianity, in what ever idiom was locally prevalent that was compliant.
God makes an invisible whip.
And that is the true story of the origins of Racism in the USA, and across the Industrialised Earth.
When folks understand that, it all looks very different.
Honesty in History would be a superb preventative..
The claims of an evolutionary basis for racism is false.
Healthy human beings notice difference, and are ready to explore it to see what it is before making any judgement, and the healthy human does not bully anyone.
Casting different groups of people is a socio-behavioural dynamic of Hierarchically Violent Cultures.
Sadly, the fact that they can still play this game so well, that so many fall for it, through wide ranging socially mediated factors, rather than solely a matter of personal flaws, it is not good news.
However more and more people are working it out, and seeking ways to not play that game.
It's not good. Nobody is happy.
Just ensuring that state schooling taught an honest history would reduce further expansion of racist ideology.
It is that easy...
However, an honest history would lead, inevitably, rapidly to multiple, posthumous and living indictments for War Crimes, Slavery, Conquest and Corruption in practically every Judiciary extant - if the sordid nature of the bully domain be revealed as it really is, and understood then it will be reduced to a pathetic fetish that cannot cause any actual harm, and becomes them an object of public remorse.
Baggage we have let go of, but cannot until we unpack it.
Three years of honesty in history, for one key group - secondary schools.
Honesty in Universities, and in Government - evidence above opinion or belief, when making decisions that have an effect on the commons, as a matter of duty of care would help deal with Racism.
Democratic schooling where children assume responsibilities for the site, their resources, the content and the implementation of their own education collectively, retaining autonomy and responsibility and with support from adults as mentors, - we know this works for the children who get this kind of education.
They are never satisfied with merely voting - democracy is a collective exercise, voting is a tiny part, which of itself alone does never confer democratic power, merely the illusion of agreeing.
The resolution of Racism has many elements, and the more radical response is to look to a much deeper analysis than integrating all peoples into the industrial militarised hierarchy of violence culture as an example of equality and equity.
Racism was an evil solution to a requirement for cheap labour.
Racism is not a personal flaw. It is much, much mote than that.
We must also end the concept of cheap labour, and all that it stands for.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"
Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be calmly honest, responsive to the evidence we find, and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is made easier, though no less difficult.