Ken Hanly wrote:
> While I agree with much of what Fields says this last bit is quite wrong.
>
> It is not a tautology to see Anglo-American racism as a precondition of
> slavery based upon skin color and ancestry since slavery and racism are not
> identical. Prejudice against black cats may be a precondition of killing
> black cats based upon their color but it is not a tautology to say this. The
> final sentence assumes that the only rational explanation of anything must
> be a causal explanation. Why? Is there a causal explanation of why 2 plus 2
> is 4?
One problem is that white slavery preceded black slavery in the tobacco growing
south,
and black slaves only replaced white slaves slowly. (The seven year period of
indenture
was, in the tobacco fields, more or less a lifetime. Besides planters found
various ways
of illegally extending the period.) If you want to look to pre-18th century
history for a
parallel to 19th century racism, look not to the relations between whites and
blacks but
to the relations between English and Irish.
It is unfortunate that more leftists have not studied medieval and renaissance
literature and
philosophy. It seems almost impossible for many people today to understand a
hierarchical
society without anachronistically seeing those hierarchies as requiring
*justification*. But
in a world where *everyone* had a place in a universal hierarchy (legitimate
because it
*was*, not because it was good), there was no need for the scientific racism and
sexism
of the 19th century. You can get a quick introduction this in Gould's review of
Thomas
Laqueur's *Making Sex* or in Stephanie Coontz's *The Social Origins of Private
Life: A
History of American Families 1600-1900. Modern corporate or even military
hierarchies
are profoundly different from pre-capitalist hierarchies, and really we need a
different
word to describe them. Feminist theories of The Patriarchy also ignore this
profound
historical change. Pre-capitalist male supremacy was legitimated (not justified
-- it
didn't need justification) in a quite diffrent way than modern male surpremacy.
For some
sense of this, see the articles in *Radical History Review 71 (Spring 1998).
Your critique of Fields in fact assumes that ideas & ideologies drop from the
skies rather
than emerge from human practice as ways of explaining that practice.Here is a
longer passage from Fields' essay. (Note, she is serious in claiming that
racism *began* only with the American
Revolution. Not until then did the inferior status of slaves require any
explanation. It was a given,
like any other form of subordination and domination. The *ideologies* of sexism
and racism (as opposed to the actualities of male supremacy and slavery) can be
said to have been born when
Jefferson penned that line, All men are created equal.
*****
Racial ideology supplied the means of explaining slavery to people whose
terrasin was a republic founded on radical doctrines of liberty and
natural rights; and, more important, a republic in which those doctrines
seemed to represent accurately the world in which all but a minority
lived. Only when the denial of liberty became an anomaly apparent even to
the least observant and reflective members of Euro-American society did
ideology systematically explain the anomaly. But slavery got along for a
hundred years after its establishment without race as its ideological
rationale. The reason is simple. Race explained why some people could
rightly be denied what others took for granted: namely, liberty,
supposedly a self-evident gift of nature's God. But there was nothing to
explain until most people could, in fact, take liberty for granted -- as
the indentured servants and disfranchised freedmen of colonial America
could not. Nor was there anything calling for a radical explanation where
everyone in society stood in relation of inherited subordination to
someone else: servant to master, serf to nobleman, vassal to overlord,
overlord to king, king to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
It was not Afro-Americans, furthermore, who needed a racial explanation;
it was not they who invented themselves as a race. Euro-Americans resolved
the contradiction between slavery and liberty by defining Afro-Americans
as a race; Afro-Americans resolved the contradiction more
straightforwardly by calling for the abolition of slavery. From the era of
the American, French and Haitian revolutions on, they claimed liberty as
theirs by natural right. [38] They did not originate the large
nineteenth-century literature purporting to prove their biological
inferiority, nor, by and large, did they accept it. Vocabulary can be very
deceptive. Both Afro- and Euro-Americans used the words that today denote
race, but they did not understand those words the same way. Afro-
Americans understood the reason for their enslavement to be, as Frederick
Douglass put it, "not *color*, but *crime*." Afro-Americans invented
themselves, not as a race, but as a nation. They were not troubled, as
modern scholars often are, by the use of racial vocabulary to express
their sense of nationality. Afro-American soldiers who petitioned on
behalf of "These poor nation of colour" and "we Poore Nation of a Colered
rast [race]" saw nothing incongruous about the language.
Racial ideology in its radical American form is the ideology to be
expected in a society in which enslavement stands as an exception to a
radically defined liberty so commonplace that no great effort of
imagination is required to take it for granted. It is the ideology proper
to a "free" society in which enslaved descendants of Africans are an
anomalous exception. There is no paradox; it makes good, common sense.
Indeed, dare I go further. In the wake of the American Revolution, racial
ideology assumed its greatest importance in the free, bourgeois society of
the Norther states, where both slavery and the presence of Afro-Americans
became increasingly minor exceptions. [41] The paroxysm of racial violence
that convulsed the South during the years after emancipation, and the ever
more detailed legal codification of racial proscription, represent the
nationalization of race, an ideology that described the bourgeois North
much better than it did the slave South.
====================================================
{40. Ralph Waldo Emerson is an excellent illustration of how such racial
*ideology* culd become chillingly systematic and loathsome racial
*doctrine* in the hands of a first-rate Northern intellectual. Lewis P.
Simpson perceptively and relentlessly probes Emerson's bigoted views about
Afro-Americans (and, for that matter, his bigoted views about white
Southerners) in *Mind and the American Civil War: A Meditation on Lost
Causes*, Baton Rouge, La. 1989, esp. pp. 52-57, 65-69, 72-73.}
====================================================
For those living within the maturing slave society of the South, racial
ideology in its radical American form could not fully account for the
social landscape. There, slavery was not a minor exception but the central
organizing principle of society, allocating social space not just to
slaveholders and slaves but to the free black population [42] and the
non-slaveholding white majority as well. Inequality was not a necessary
evil to be tolerated only in the instance of uncivilized Negroes, nor was
its necessity commonly derived from biological science. (In the South, the
heyday of scientific racism -- as of scientific sexism -- came after, not
during, slavery.) [43] Inequality was ordained by God, not by science, and
was applicable not only to relations between slaveholders and slaves, but
also to relations between men and women and between the planter elite and
the non-slaveholding majority. Democracy and majority rule did not rank
high in the aspirations of the planter class. [44] In fact, the organic
intellectuals of the planter class (who rivalled Engels in well-aimed
propaganda denouncing the suffering of workers under industrial
capitalism) regretted that the white labouring poor of their own society
could not be brought under the benevolent regime of slavery -- called by
tactful euphemisms like "warranteeism without the ethnical qualification"
and "slavery in the abstract." It would not do, after all, to tell and
armed and enfranchised white majority that they, too, would be better off
as slaves. [45]
42. During the 1850s, the state of Georgia levied a property tax of $0.39
on each slave but a poll tax of $5.00 on each free black person. (For
white people, the poll tax was $0.25 and applied to men only.) Annual road
duty was required of slavemen and white men aged sixteen to forty-five,
but of free black men *and* women aged fifteen to sixty. . . .In July
1861, a white citizen of Lynchburg, Virginia, complained to Jefferson
Davis, the President of the Confederacy, about the "large number of Free
Negroes in this City," branding them at once a "degraded and worse than
useless race" and "a class who...is more than useless." . . .In the eyes
of that Virginian and of state and county law in Georgia, slaves and free
people of African descent were not the same "race" and neither biology or
ancestry nor prejudice of colour had anything to do with it. By word and
deed, white citizens in slave society proved that they, unlike many
scholars, were not fooled by the language of race into mistaking its
substance.
43. Josiah C. Nott provoked hostile reaction from other pro-slavery
Southerners when he expounded a scientific theory of racism that seemed to
contrdict scripture. See Drew Gilpin Faust, *The Ideology of Slavery:
Proslavery Though in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860*, Baton Rouge, La.
1981, pp. 206-38; Gould, *The Mismeasure of Man*, pp. 69-72. On the nature
of white Southerners' arguments for women's subordination during and after
slavery, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, "The Conservatism of Slaveholding
Women: A Comparative Perspective," Porter L. Fortune Chancellor's
Symposium on Southern History, University of Mississippi, 11-13 October
1989.
44. For example, John C. Calhoun's doctrine of "concurrent majority" was
explicitly designed to frustrate the will of an anti-slavery majority,
should one ever gain control of the Untied States government, by
guaranteeing the slaveholding minority a veto no matter how large the
majority arrayed against it....Many historians, following the lead of
George Fredrickson, characterize the South as "herrenvolk democracy." It
is a specious concept that fails to take account of the ways in which
slavery curtailed the political rights of the non-slaveowning white
majority, the supposed herrenvolk. An obvious example is the
overrepresentation of slaveholders by the three-fifths provision of the
United States Constitution (replicated by the constitution of the
Confederacy). Another example is the requirement for posting bond --
ranging from $1000 to $500,000 -- that replaced property qualifications
for county officers in the plantation districts, ensuring that humble
citizens could hold office only under the patronage of their betters. See
Steven Hahn, "Capitalists All," review of James Oakes, *The Ruling Race: A
History of American Slaveholders*, in *Review of American History* II,
June 1983.
45. Eugene D. Genovese developed this argument long ago in his essay
about George Fitzhugh, "The Logical Outcome of the Slaveholders'
Philosophy," in Genovesee, *The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in
Interpretation*, New York, 1969. A number of historians first dismissed
the argument on the grounds that Fitzhugh was a one-of-a-kind aberration
-- a charge occasionally repeated even today.; for example, George C.
Rable, *Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism*, Urbana,
Ill. 1989, p. 291n. Subsequent work has demonstrated that, although
Fitzhugh was indeed one of a kind in some respects, he was no aberration
in considering slave society morally superior to capitalist society ("free
trade" in his terminology) regardless of the slaves' nationality or
descent. See Drew Gilpin Faust, "The Peculiar South Revisited: White
Society, Culture and Politics in the Antebellum Period, 1800-1860," in
*Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of
Sanford W. Higginbotham*, ed. John B. Boles and Evelyn Thomas NOlen,
Baton Rouge, La. 1987, esp. pp. 102-05; Simpson, *Mind and the American
Civil War*, pp. 30-32.}
*****
> Anyway I assume the author being criticized is assuming that there
> were probably a series of necessary conditions for slavery of blacks that
> were jointly sufficient. The author is making the perfectly reasonable point
> that in complex situations it is wrong to pick out one necessary condition
> as THE cause. This is not very agnostic but it is quite reasonable.
> Cheers, Ken Hanly
> >
> > Incidentally, in my previous post I was plagiarizing more or less from
> Barbara
> > Jeanne Fields (a woman writing in NLR). The following excerpt was my
> source:
> >
> > *****
> >
> > the very facts needing to be explained. The argument ends in explicit
> > tautology: "It may be more useful to see Anglo-American racism as a
> > necessary precondition for a system of slavery based on ancestry and
> > pigmentation." That is, Anglo-American racism is a necessary precondition
> > for Anglo-American racism. The argument ends as well in unseemly
> > agnosticism about the possibility of rational explanation: "[R]acism was
> > one cause of a particular type of slavery, though it may be better to
> > avoid the term *cause*, for causation itself is a shaky concept in complex
> > situations." The quoted sentences appear on p. 353.}
> >
> > *****
> >
> >
