In “I’m Real” I called racism the grotesque child of race. I was wrong. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first use of white as an adjective reference to “a white man, a person of a race distinguished by a light complexion” in print to 1671. The very concept of whiteness, of race, is born out of European colonization and the transatlantic slave trade. In what would become the United States of America ideas of freedom and of slavery are formed in the same historical moment. It is important to understand the complexity of this. Racism is not the child of race. The concept of race, this modern social construct, is the progeny of racism. The parallel evolution of these two concepts, of freedom and of enslavement, of who is more or less deserving of humanity, continue to influence America, and American policy to this day. Which is why the talk of reparations is so inflammatory.
This talk is not new. Talk of reparations for American slavery has been around since at least the Civil War. On a case by case basis, even longer. There was even a fleeting field order, military orders issued during the Civil War, issued by General William Sherman from his Savannah on January 16, 1865. Early on Congress decided that the land and property of men fighting for the Confederacy would be deemed to be abandoned and ripe for confiscation, even if the men’s families were still in residence. Special Field Order No. 15 set aside land confiscated from the Confederacy to be divided into 40 acre tracks and bound over to those formerly enslaved.
In 1894 a woman named Callie House, formerly enslaved, founded the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association in Nashville, Tennessee. One of several such organizations the Association lobbied Congress for pensions and land. Around the turn of the century several bills that would have granted direct payments to those persons the state allowed to be enslaved were birthed but all died in congressional committees. By 1917 sentiment had thoroughly turned and the Federal Government jailed Callie House and others on the grounds that collecting money to fund a lobbying effort instilled a false hope in the formerly enslaved.
In the 1960s, during the Civil Rights Movement, there came a second call for reparations. Then again in the 1980s. From 1955 to her passing in 1997, Audley “Queen Mother” Moore, unwaveringly generated concrete models for how the federal government might address the atrocities of American race-based chattel slavery. The culmination all of this is H.R. 40, the bill that has spurred the current debate, originally introduced by Rep. John Conyers Jr. in 1989. The bill is not one to offer reparations but merely to study the idea. Even this riles up the (mostly, but not entirely, conservative, right wing) masses. But, they say, my family never owned slaves! But, they say, my ancestors fought on the Yankee side! But, they say, my family didn’t even come here until the early twentieth! But, they say, that was 150 years ago! But, they say, slavery wasn’t even a Black thing! But, they say, the first American slaveholder was a Black man!
American slavery was a Black thing. Or, more accurately, a white supremist thing. This is explicit in the Black Codes, the Articles of Secession from what would become the Confederate States, the Jim Crow laws that came after the war, numerous Supreme Court verdicts, the one drop rule, and so on and so forth ad nauseam. There were and are other forms of slavery that were not based in Blackness. But those forms, though no less foul, are irrelevant to this conversation.
Race based chattel slavery in the US evolved. Painfully quickly, but still the laws developed over the course of decades. In 1619 when twenty and odd Africans bound for slavery in other parts of the Americas landed on the shores of Virginia there were no laws of enslavement in the English colonies of mainland America. In 1641, Massachusetts became the first of the thirteen English American colonies to recognize slavery as a legal institution. It is not until 1640 that the Virginia courts sentenced a Black indentured servant, John Punch, to slavery for life after he failed in an escape attempt with two white servants. This is considered the earliest legal documentation of slavery in Virginia.
In 1654 Anthony Johnson, a Black man from Angola, was granted a petition enslave his Black indentured servant, John Casor. This was an important turning point moment in the history of American institutional slavery because Casor’s sentence was not a punishment. He is the first Black American arbitrarily enslaved for life. Ironically, Johnson arrived in Virginia in 1621 as an indentured servant himself.
The successful petition of Elizabeth Key Grinstead for her freedom led to the Virginia law passed in 1662 which determined that a child of an enslaved mother is born into slavery. In 1696 South Carolina passed an Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes and Slaves that dictated harsh punishments for offenses committed by Black people and excused whites who caused the death of an enslaved person while carrying out a punishment. Finally, the Virginia General Assembly passed a law which transformed black indentured servants into slaves: the Virginia Slave Act of 1705.
The Virginia Slave Act was one of many actions America’s founders took to consciously strip the humanity from a people while at the same time developing the philosophy that all men are created equal and have the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This is the birth of race-based chattel slavery in what would become the United States of America. The 1705 Act was comprised of many laws, all of which were calculated to subjugate any human being who was not both white and Christian – with whiteness being the more important aspect. The Virginia Slave Act doomed men, women, and countless generations of their children to a lifetime of slavery. Embraced as legal foundation by other states, the Act allowed white Christian slavers to beat, rape, torture, and kill the people it cast into generational slavery with no fear of repercussions. By the time of the American Revolution race-based chattel slavery had been present in our land for almost a century.
In the run up to and rhetoric of the Revolution enslaved people and their antislavery allies petitioned for their freedom. By the turn of the century almost every state in the North was in the process of phasing out slavery. However, even in the North, Northern governments revived old discriminatory laws and wrote new ones. As in the South free Black people in the North faced curfew and travel restrictions, were forbidden from participating in the militia, could not sit on juries, and could not testify in court. Plus, there was still the worry of being kidnapped and sold down river. For those escaping to the North stringent fugitive slave laws led to the 1857 Dred Scott case which stripped free Black people, North and South, of even the illusion of citizenship and denied them all Constitutional protections.
As for their enslaved brothers and sisters in the South, two things happened to make things exponentially worse. In 1794 Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. Until this slavery had been on the wane. It simply wasn’t profitable. The cotton gin changed this making the crop so lucrative that slavers needed both more land and more slave labor. But on January first, 1808, laws banning the African slave trade went into effect in the United States. Meaning that for slavers to gain the manpower they needed to maintain their profits they had to breed it. By 1860, 1 in 3 Southerners in America was enslaved. Enslaved people of African descent were worked from dawn to dusk; and through the night if the sky was clear and the moon full. Beatings and whippings were common. Those who resisted or attempted escape were mutilated, sold, or killed.
The Civil War, instigated by the proslavery white supremacism of the South as plainly laid out in their Ordinance of Secession ultimately led to emancipation. But the short-lived era of Reconstruction quickly gave way. In the South the descendants of those freed from almost two centuries of state sponsored enslavement were subjected to Jim Crow and anti-Black terrorism. While the South fought to maintain slavery, the North fought to maintain the Union. Perhaps this is why anti-Black segregation implemented by private companies and citizens and by state and federal government entities spread throughout the country confining Black people into overcrowded slums.
The fact that Black people in America continued to suffer at the hands of the state and of society long after 1865 is an accepted part of our history even in this country in which our self-image remains so fragile as to be unable to see many of our most grievous sins much less acknowledge and apologize for them. After enslavement there was still subjugation through sharecropping, convict leasing, redlining, and outright theft and destruction. There is the leveraging of our penal system against our minority populations, especially Black people, that has resulted in the largest prison system in the world. By far. White supremacy is not only not dead it is marching on Charlotte. It is sitting in Washington D.C.
In 2016 the wage gap between Black and white men was thirty percent with Black men earning 70 cents on a white man’s dollar at all levels of education and pay. 41 percent of Black families own homes in comparison to 71 percent of white families. Though Black and white people have similar rates of drug use- Shannon and Becky do not need to drive to the hood to get high- overpolicing in Black communities means that Black people are over six times more likely to be imprisoned on drug charges. Then there is the cocaine versus crack discrepancy. Discrimination by business, brutality from the State, being without access to protection from the law, this was and is the norm for Black people everywhere in America. This is the direct result of generations of intentionally racist policies.
If you want to know what a system is meant to do, look at the results of the system.
Sources
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/21/us/reparations-discussion.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
https://nyti.ms/2FqmkOZ
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/reparations-for-slavery-arent-enough-official-racism-lasted-much-longer/2019/06/21/2c0ecbe8-9397-11e9-aadb-74e6b2b46f6a_story.html?utm_term=.d92287f09962
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/06/24/black-woman-who-launched-modern-fight-reparations/?utm_term=.d45a928c661a
https://teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-historian/24411
https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/history-of-mechanical-engineering/how-the-cotton-gin-started-the-civil-war
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/03/28/redlining-was-banned-50-years-ago-its-still-hurting-minorities-today/?utm_term=.918fe19567e6
https://www.revealnews.org/article/for-people-of-color-banks-are-shutting-the-door-to-homeownership/