Not All Devils are White

This occurs to me to be a necessary corrective to say at a time when we are hearing members of Black Lives Matter today talking about '400 years of slavery' and how 'This country has never done anything for people of color'-they apparently have never heard of the President, Susan Rice, Eric Holder, Colin Powell, Condeleeza Rice to name just a few in a far from comprehensive list.

To be sure, BLM is right in calling attention to things like police brutality and excessive force-they've become synonymous with police misconduct though the movement was born after Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman who wasn't a cop at all-though he was a want to be cop.

And, as an activist group, BLM necessarily going to tend towards the single issue and the one sided view-that's the nature of activism. The more issues you push the more it dilutes your message and focus, so you can't entirely blame them if they don't focus on the fact that most young black men who are killed are not the victims of police but other young black men like themselves who are in gangs, etc.

Still BLM has said some things that are just not true and to simply chalk up everything to 400 years of slavery seems to me a dangerous oversimplification at this time in US history.

BLM has a rather ambivalent relationship with the older black civil rights leaders and activists. Al Sharpton made the point in talking to Martin Luther King's son-of the same name-that MLK had a multiracial coalition.

When Zimmerman gunned down Martin and then was allowed to skate this outraged many Americans, not just black folks either by any stretch. But BLM is clearly a group that is just for black folks by black folks.

Then I haven't even got into the rise of 'emphatic correctness' college campuses which is much worse than political correctness.

http://www.bachelorsdegreecenter.org/political-correctness-campus/

http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/01/a-university-is-supposed-to-be-a-safe-space-for-ideas.html#more

At heart I'm a liberal not a structuralist I will admit. So I tend to prefer the tactics of MLK to a Malcolm X-though I recognize that Malcolm X had some positive impacts as well in terms of increasing black pride.

And Malcolm himself moved off of his notorious line about blue-eyed devils after a trip to Mecca. But while it's been very important to do away with negative stereotypes and prejudices about black folks, it's also important not to create counter myths.

White folks have no innate perpetuity to enslave others either it should be pointed out. At the time of the slave trade there was slavery in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. There were black slaveholders-and of course the Africans were often sold into slavery by other Africans and there were whites held in slavery. It's true in the US later on it became synonymous with Africans.

"Modern perceptions of early modern slavery associate the institution almost solely with Africans and their descendants. Yet slavery was a ubiquitous institution in the early modern world. Africans, Asians, Europeans, and Native Americans kept slaves before and after Columbus reached America. Enslavement meant a denial of freedom for the enslaved, but slavery varied greatly from place to place, as did the lives of slaves. The life of a genizaro (slave soldier) of the Ottoman Empire, who enjoyed numerous privileges and benefits, immensely differed from an American Indian who worked in the silver mines of Peru or an African who produced sugar cane in Barbados. People could be kept as slaves for religious purposes (Aztecs and Pacific Northwest Indians) or as a by-product of warfare, where they made little contribution to the economy or basic social structure (Eastern Woodlands). In other societies, slaves were central to the economy. In many areas of West Africa, for instance, slaves were the predominant form of property and the main producers of wealth."

"As it expanded under European colonialism to the New World in the late fifteenth through nineteenth centuries, slavery took on a new, racialized form involving the movement of millions of peoples from one continent to another based on skin color, and the creation of a vast slave-plantation complex that was an important cog in the modernization and globalization of the world economy. Africans provided the bulk of labor in this new system of slavery, but American Indians were compelled to labor in large numbers as well."

"In the wake of the deaths of indigenous Americans from European-conveyed microbes from which they had no immunity, the Spanish colonists turned to importing Africans. A racist and gross misinterpretation of this event posited that most Indians could not be enslaved because of their love for freedom, while Africans were used to having their labor controlled by “big men” in Africa. This dangerous view obscured a basic fact of early modern history: Anyone could be enslaved. Over a million Europeans were held as slaves from the 1530s through the 1780s in Africa, and hundreds of thousands were kept as slaves by the Ottomans in eastern Europe and Asia. (John Smith, for instance, had been a slave of the Ottomans before he obtained freedom and helped colonize Virginia.) In 1650, more English were enslaved in Africa than Africans enslaved in English colonies. Even as late as the early nineteenth century, United States citizens were enslaved in North Africa. As the pro-slavery ideologue George Fitzhugh noted in his book, Cannibals All (1857), in the history of world slavery, Europeans were commonly the ones held as slaves, and the enslavement of Africans was a relatively new historical development. Not until the eighteenth century did the words “slave” and “African” become nearly synonymous in the minds of Europeans and Euro-Americans."

https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/origins-slavery/essays/indian-slavery-americas
http://www.amazon.com/History-Slavery-Illustrated-Monstrous-Evil/dp/1555217680/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1452507235&sr=1-2&keywords=a+history+of+slavery

Nor was America the last slave holding country by an stretch. The Arab world continued to use slave labor through the early 20th century and the Soviets and Nazis made some in the nations the conquered slaves in WWII.

http://www.amazon.com/Cannibals-without-Masters-Harvard-Library/dp/0674094514/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1452472047&sr=8-1-spell&keywords=george+fizhugh

This last link was actually the work of George Fizhugh who is notorious historically for his blatant advocacy of slavery in the years just before the Civil War. William Lloyd Garrison was particularly outraged by him.

But you know who else argued against ending slavery? Karl Marx. His brand of Historical Materialism argued that while the goal was to end slavery it might not be the right time yet! He actually wrote a letter urging the US not to get rid of it as he thought slavery was necessary to the incredible levels of capitalist productivity.

Some might feel it's unfair to hold this against Marx but what's notable is that in the early Soviet Union in the early 20s Trotsky basically connected the dots in the criticism of capitalist free labor by saying that if capitalist free labor isn't really free then why would out and out slave labor be any more morally perverse?

Indeed, this apologia for Marx here suggests to me that Trotsky's take was understandable in light of Marx's own words:

"Contrary to the pseudoscientific racist justifications of slavery prevalent throughout the nineteenth century, Karl Marx understood that slave status was a condition branded from without rather than a predisposition existing within. In the period of anthropology and ethnology’s rise, Marx was far ahead of his time in asserting that slave status was not a natural phenomenon biologically proscribed by one’s race. Marx took great care to intricately unravel the strands of how racialized slavery contrasted with wage slavery, how it came to be, and why its racialization was another form of similar kinds of weapons used against the unification of the working class."

http://www.internationalmarxisthumanist.org/articles/abolitionists-marx-slavery-race-class-salome-lee

He was ahead of his time? What about Garrison, John Brown, all the abolitionists?

"On the contrast between labor systems, Marx explained that although wage laborers and their labor were also commodified, wage laborers existed as variable capital, and their labor in concrete or abstract forms. In contrast, “the slave-owner buys his laborer [slaves] as he buys his horse. If he loses his slave, he loses capital.”[1] In other words, as Marx added, “in the slave system, money capital invested in the purchase of labor plays the role of the money form offixed capital, which is only gradually replaced after the expiration of the active life period of the slave” (Padover, 21). Then, as a slave, the worker is not even recognized as a living laborer, but as dead labor. Furthermore, in this statement Marx contrasts the level of alienation of the worker as slave from wage laborer by identifying the slave as fixed capital, whereas wage labor has previously been referred to as working capital. Therefore, Marx never suggested that wage labor and chattel slavery are the same. He further distinguished the wage labor of the formally free working class from slave labor in another context when he wrote “We are not dealing here with indirect slavery, the slavery of the proletariat, we are dealing with direct slavery, the slavery of Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern states of North America.”[2]

"On one hand, Marx distinguished the two by comparing the increased freedom and mobility of the wage laborer to “the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence,” but on the other hand, he asserted that the two are connected by mocking the U.S. white Northern worker, who “boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master,”[3] and who therefore deludes himself that he is free when his relative freedom is so small."

But is it me, or doesn't this seem to almost obscure the fact that whatever you want to say about being a 'wage slave' it is not the same thing of being a chattel slave? By obscuring the difference, it's not shocking that Trotsky came to this later perverse position. The 'formal liberties' of capitalism only seem unimportant until they are gone. No way can you draw moral equivalence between the slavery of black slaves in the Old South and white 'wage slaves'-which doesn't mean the other lives in a rose garden."

Another line you here by BLM and some campus protesters is that racism is synonymous with capitalism. The experience of the Soviet Union shows that's false.

Alright so there's some history. While there are still real problems of racism and inequities in our system I think a little context nevertheless can only be to the good. We don't want to go too far the other way into thinking that whites have an innate tendency towards enslaving the Other nor that blacks have some innate tendency not to do so. The real lesson of history is that we are all human and have great capacity for good and bad things.