From practically the inception of the European settlement of North America the emerging societies have been marked by racial oppression, first of the indigenous population, and then of the imported and enslaved Africans. For almost the entire history of the United States, this state of affairs was taken as normal, and quite acceptable. Only slowly, over time, did white voices begin to be raised, first against the institution of slavery, and then more basically against the treatment as second class citizens of both of these oppressed races. But never has there been official public acknowledgement of these pervasive crimes, and the appropriate assumption of collective national responsibility for them. It is certainly long past time for such action, and the reparations appropriate thereto.
The challenge before us as a nation is, therefore, profound and historic. It is to build a public consciousness and consequent effective majoritarian movement for social and racial justice that will finally remedy these deep-seated and pervasive injustices.
But if we are to successfully address these challenges, we need to build the widespread social support that any such profound movement of public opinion and official policy directed toward such collective national healing requires. I have been troubled by the tendency of many progressive groups to speak in simplistic and ideological terms, while creating a climate of group think in which sensitive and thoughtful discussion of values, policies, and programs are effectively suppressed. But it is vital that we think and speak with the sensitivity, care, and appropriate nuance about issues as emotionally charged as those of race, of its intimate connection to our personal and social identity as “Americans”, and of the place of each of us within the unfolding drama that is the history of the United States. It is in that spirit of mutual respect, cultural sensitivity, commitment to human dignity, appreciation of historical context and the complexities of social and institutional development, and our determined and abiding commitment to advancing that inclusive vision of social justice, that I offer the following remarks.
It should be obvious that the US was founded for the most part by Europeans, primarily English, and then Scots-Irish, who effectively invaded North America – they didn’t “discover” it since it wasn’t lost, however new it was to them. They then proceeded to practically exterminate the indigenous population, and build a good part of their society on the enslaved labor of Blacks purchased from Africa. As they expanded across the continent, economic growth required a rapidly expanding population which widened the pool of primarily European Immigration, first from Great Britain and Northern Europe, then southern, and Eastern Europe. In addition, from the mid-19th Century on the US incorporated a significant number of Mexicans in the process of appropriating large areas of the now United States Southwest and Far West. Only in the later part of the 19th and early 20th centuries did the European transplanted civilization of the United States expand further to include significant numbers of people from Asia.
Nothing that I have so far said is particularly controversial. It is thus quite clear that the United States (and to a large extent Canada, also), was founded, controlled, and developed primarily by Europeans. Thus it was a civilization essentially created by white people, who, in the process, imported and enslaved Africans and drove the native population into ghettos, euphemistically called reservations. It is thus understandable and completely non-surprising that, as the book White Fragility correctly asserts, the United States established “a society in which all key political, economic, social, and cultural institutions are overwhelmingly controlled by white people.” Throughout human history, the politically primary, culturally dominate, and majority population have always determined the structure of normality in the societies they controlled. Thus, there was nothing exceptional about this state of affairs, in which “white control of society became … ‘normal’ or ‘standard’” in the United States.
What was probably exceptional, however, and certainly completely indefensible, was precisely the nature and extent to which the developing American society was built upon the systematic destruction of the culture of the indigenous population and the enslavement, systematic degradation and pervasive exploitation of its Black population.
As Peter Nabokov comments, reviewing Jeffrey Ostler’s carefully researched study, Surviving Genocide, “For the new republic and its pioneering settlers to thrive, the aboriginal citizens had to be displaced, removed, extirpated, eliminated, exterminated….(thus) during the formative years of our republic and beyond, there was a mounting, merciless, uncoordinated but aggressively consistent crusade to eliminate the native residents of the United States from their homelands by any means necessary ….” (NYR, LXVII, #11, p. 52, “The Intent Was Genocide”, Peter Nabokov).
A couple of illuminating examples of this attitude are provided by the notorious comments of two celebrated Northern Civil War Generals. Philip Sheridan’s statement that, “The only good Indians I know are dead,” was far from an unusual expression of prevailing sentiment. And similarly with General William Tecumseh Sherman’s directive that “his troops must confront the enemy Sioux ‘even to their extermination, men, women, and children.’” In short, the European invasion, conquest, and settlement of the North American continent involved the more or less explicit destruction of the civilization, and most of the people, that were native to the land.
Further, white political domination produced, once again in the words of White Fragility, “centuries of history during which people of color (especially black people) were systematically enslaved, expropriated, disenfranchised, segregated, and marginalized.” While the nature of that degradation in the pre-Civil War period could vary from the gang labor plantations of South Carolina to the possibilities of domestic servitude in some northern communities, it became increasingly clear that legally, in the words of the infamous Dred Scott Decision of 1857, the Negro “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Blacks were to be treated as legal non-persons, chattel property, whose owners could do with them as they wished. And, of course, that is precisely what they all too often did.
Then, after the Civil War, in spite of the legal abolition of slavery, and the constitutional guarantee of full voting citizenship for Blacks, racist attitudes continued to prevail, North and South, finding increasingly innovative and violent ways to institutionalize that racism, with Blacks treated, at best, as second-class citizens, when not further subjugated, exploited, oppressed, and even lynched.
No adequate discussion of the history of the United States can fail to address these profound injustices. And no comprehensive current political programs should be developed that do not seriously attempt to address their on-going consequences.
This sad history, nevertheless, should be seen as the United States’ unique development of slavery’s long history in the West. Even more, slavery is practically universal throughout all human history. It was certainly pervasive and accepted as normal in Africa long before the Europeans arrived. However, even though it is clearly approved of in both the Judeo-Christian Bible and the Islamic Koran, its racialization in early modern Europe is, to my mind, without historical precedent. With the possible exception of earlier suggestions in the development of Christian anti-Semitism, this racialization involved the claim that Africans were, somehow by nature, not only inherently inferior to whites, but not really fully human. Often, they were even identified with monkeys or orangutans, while the indigenous population of North America came to be viewed as nothing more than savages. Once you designate a group as less than, or even, non-human, it is not surprising that they can be considered as having no rights that humans need respect. Then you can feel free to treat them however you will.
American racism emerged out of this historic development in early modern Christian Europe, that had its initial roots in large part in the Spanish Inquisition’s concern to insure the purity of blood of true Christians. Racial slavery and the Atlantic slave trade followed in its wake, growing with European overseas expansion, and fueling early European capitalist development, particularly with the wealth generated by the fantastically profitable sugar plantations, initially in the Caribbean, but then migrating to include rice, tobacco, and cotton plantations in North America.
Here is not the place for an extensive discussion of the history of slavery and racial oppression. Rather, my concern is to understand the scope of the United States’ continuing struggle with racism, and its institutional operation, and to place it in its appropriate cultural context so that we may more adequately address its continuing significance. It is vitally important in discussions of race that we avoid falling into the trap of thinking that one race is inherently good, and another race is inherently bad. We must avoid viewing the world like the ancient Manichaeans, for whom the world was divided between the Forces of Light and the Forces of Darkness. A racialized Manichaeism of the good race and the bad race, endowing one race with intrinsic goodness or innocence, and another with intrinsic badness or evil, is just a reversed modern version of deplorable racist thinking. Such an either/or perspective is neither adequate nor constructive, but rather quite socially harmful, and in the long run politically self-defeating.
Perhaps nothing makes this clearer than considering some key facts concerning the early history of the Atlantic slave trade itself. As historians have now well documented, “European[s] and [the] white Americans who succeeded them did not capture and enslave people themselves. Instead they purchased slaves from African traders . . . .
Sometimes African armies enslaved the inhabitants of conquered towns and villages. At other times, raiding parties captured isolated families or kidnapped individuals. As warfare spread to the interior, captives had to march for hundreds of miles to the coast where European traders awaited them. The raiders tied the captives together with rope or secured them with wooden yokes around their necks. It was a shocking experience, and many captives died from hunger, exhaustion, and exposure during the journey. Others killed themselves rather than submit to their fate, and the captors killed those who resisted….” (Hine, Hine, & Harold, The African-American Odyssey, 2ed., vol. 1, Prentice Hall, 2005, pp.27, 30)
African rulers “restricted the Europeans to a few points on the coast, while the kingdoms raided the interior to supply the Europeans with slaves . . . . Tribe stalked tribe, and eventually more than 20 million Africans would be kidnapped in their own homeland….” (Drescher and Engerman, Historical Guide to World Slavery, pp. 370-375)
Historians estimate that ten million of these abducted Africans “‘never even made it to the slave ships. Most died on the march to the sea’—still chained, yoked, and shackled by their African captors—before they ever laid eyes on a white slave trader.” (Johnson, et al., Africans in America, pp. 69-70) “The survivors were either purchased by European slave dealers or ‘instantly beheaded’ by the African traders ‘in sight of the [slave ship’s] captain’ if they could not be sold.” (Drescher and Engerman, p. 34)
In sum, “the idea of European responsibility for disrupting an Eden-like continent” rests on promoting “the false impressions that Europeans had themselves gone ashore to kidnap Africa’s people . . . . Africans had themselves captured and sold nearly all the people that Europeans had bought as slaves along the coast.” (Finkelman and Miller, Ed’s., MacMillan Encyclopedia of World Slavery, vol. 1, 1998, p. 34) Thus virtually all Africans brought forcibly to the Western Hemisphere in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been enslaved long before they left Africa.
Let me reiterate, however, so that there is absolutely no misunderstanding. I do not report these facts in order to justify the role of Europeans involved in the slave trade. Nothing can justify their actions, which are outrageous, and completely morally indefensible. I only wish to underline the complicity of many communities, and particularly in this context, of the contribution of African tribes in order to make quite clear how indefensible and unjustifiable is the use of racialized categories and simple “black and white” Manichaean thinking for understanding and addressing the issues of race in America.
In sum, as expert historical analysis makes quite clear, the history of the slave trade proves that everyone participated and everyone profited—whites and blacks; Christians, Muslims, and Jews; Europeans, Africans, Americans, and Latin Americans. Once we recognize the shared responsibility for sustaining and profiting from the Atlantic slave trade, we can turn our attention to what we must do together today to eradicate its corrosive legacy.
While it is obviously true, therefore, that it was a white European society that essentially built its American empire in significant part through the enslavement of black Africans, there is nothing in European whiteness that by nature predisposes them to oppress and subjugate, any more than there is anything that by nature predisposes black Africans to be enslaved. Clearly, there were numerous theoretical and pseudoscientific efforts developed, particularly in the West in the 19th Century, to provide a moral justification of such enslavement. Modern scientific research has, however, quite convincingly, and I believe definitively, refuted all aspects of such racialized “science.” The human race is one race, tracing its evolutionary origin to the east Africa of some two million years ago. And there are no biologically fundamental differences among humans across the globe today.
Nevertheless, in so far as racist attitudes continue to have a grasp on the minds and sentiments of far too many people, there remains a large receptive audience for such racialized propaganda. We have even seen it appear in the US in recent years in pseudoscientific studies of IQ and academic performance, to be used to justify racist policies.
Perhaps not surprisingly, but unfortunately, there have also been counter-movements, even spurred by humanitarian sentiments, that have tended to demonize all white people as racists and oppressors, while often romanticizing oppressed blacks and native Americans. Some quite recent examples of such Manichaean “reverse racism” can be seen in such popular books as White Fragility, How To Be An Anti-Racist, and Journeys of Race, Color, & Culture. Consider a brief example – which could be in essence replicated in the others – from the latter book, which speaks of “the sin of Whiteness,” claiming that all “White People” are inescapably racist; that all have a common nature and a common way of thinking, while people of color similarly have a singular opposed narrative. But whiteness and blackness are not essential characteristics that define the natures of two distinct races, as if they were distinct species. It is neither correct nor constructive to promote such black and white racialization, however well-meaning may be the intent.
Further, if we are to successfully address and redress this sad history of oppression, we need to maintain an historical perspective, one that does not simply demonize Western civilization, but also appreciates its accomplishments, particularly its continually expanding efforts on behalf of human rights and social justice. For example, it remains true, in spite of, and to some extent even because of, the indefensible exploitation of oppressed minorities, (even including at different times and places, Hispanics, Asians, and diverse Europeans) which I have described, that American society has been able to produce one of the wealthiest, most powerful societies, with one of the highest standards of living the world has ever seen. And that is true for practically all of its citizens, however unequally those benefits have been distributed. Using only one measure of that success, average life expectancy has essentially doubled since the founding of the United States. Currently that life expectancy, even for its generally and often systematically disadvantaged African-Americans, is significantly greater than that for the vast majority of people in today’s “Third World,” including sub-Saharan Africans. And I have said nothing of the effective institutions of representative government and official commitment to human rights, however flawed both of those are in their actual execution. I have further said nothing about the advances contributed by Eurasian civilization to: the scientific revolution, technological advances made possible by the quantum revolution in the natural sciences, as in communication and transportation, advances in industrial and food production, modern medicine, public health, and in the creative arts.
In short, Eurasian civilization, and particularly its “American” offshoot, has contributed unprecedented and truly astounding advances in the quality of life of the human species. And yes, this has been primarily the work of “privileged white people.” Unfortunately, however, this development has a tortured legacy, as I have clearly said and continually underscored, involving completely indefensible subjugation and exploitation, most particularly of many non-European peoples, and non more heinous than the indefensible enslavement and oppression of the ancestors of our current African-American citizens. The consequences of that legacy are, of course, still with us, in both personal and institutional forms. Those unacceptable consequences are the legitimate target of today’s mass protests, on behalf of Black lives, the rights of indigenous peoples, on behalf of gender diversity, and in numerous, diverse, and contested efforts to insure the effective implementation of equal and fair treatment for all people, regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, or gender identification.
But it is important to note, however, that these struggles are undertaken in the effort to realize ideals and values which are themselves, for the most part, the product of that very same Eurasian civilization that gave birth to this United States in the first place. Those ideals were the product of centuries of political, social, economic, religious, and philosophical struggles. Struggles pursued by people of many nationalities, ethnicities, races, and religions, but who for the vast majority were also white people. However painful be our civilization’s legacy of indefensible historical oppression, its legacy of internal struggles against all forms of human enslavement, and for these higher ideals of human rights and equal justice before the law is truly unprecedented in the human history of all peoples. In what other civilization do you have such material advances in the quality of human life joined with such sustained and increasingly effective campaigns on behalf of the human rights and dignity of people of all races, religions, and ethnicities?
One of the greatest of all Americans, and a particular hero of mine, was Frederick Douglass. I will not repeat his astounding career, a self-educated escaped slave who became a brilliant advocate for American blacks. I know of no more brilliant and chilling indictment of American racism than Douglass’ 1852 address “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” And yet, through all his years of struggle, he never lost his faith in that promise of America, of its ideals, of what he called in an 1883 address “making the nation’s life consistent with the nation’s creed.” And he maintained his faith and trust in, and commitment to, the numerous forces and people in the US working with him for social justice to the end of his life.
We, residents of the US who were born in the late 20th or early 21st Centuries, are the inheritors of that complex and scarred tradition. We are responsible neither for its successes nor its failures, no more than are we responsible for who our parents were, nor for their economic and social position, nor for our genetic endowment, including the color of our skin. But as we mature, we do become increasingly responsible for what we do with the particular historical condition into which we find ourselves to have been “thrown,” to use the suggestive Existentialist expression.
Being so born, we are all among the truly privileged, in comparison with most all people that have ever lived, as well as with the vast majority of those alive today. And that is basically true for the vast majority of people living in the United States today, regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, or system of belief. But, of course, those privileges are not shared equally – far from it!! And that leaves much for all of us to do: to address and correct those continuing injustices, and to make real and significant progress toward the equitable realization of those ennobling American ideals.
But let me take a moment to talk about this notion of privilege, and particularly the increasingly popular discussions of “white privilege,” and the related notions of “white fragility” and “white supremacy.” Privilege means unearned benefit. Is there only one kind of unearned benefit in the world? Or many? For example, I feel blessed that I do not suffer from any debilitating inherited disease, from which many others unfortunately do suffer. There is nothing I did to earn that benefit, that privilege? What about you? Are you similarly privileged? Or are you one of the unfortunate in this matter? And if you are healthy, and black, are we entitled to say you are similarly privileged?
But, of course, one can benefit from many privileges, and also many disadvantages at the same time. For example, I had the misfortune to have a father who died when I was six years old, a mother who was certified paranoid-schizophrenic, and ultimately institutionalized. I had no significant supportive extended family, and, around the age of ten, experienced being evicted from the house, and displaced from the community, in which I had grown up. In these matters, I was clearly disadvantaged, to say the least. But certainly, there are many, even in the US, who have had it far worse. And certainly many, of all races, who were more fortunate. I do not mention these events to bemoan my fate, but only to point out that privileges and disadvantages come in many forms, and are not simply aligned in accord with the color of one’s skin, however significant that certainly is in many contexts.
For example, is an unskilled white worker born and raised in an economically devastated former coal mining town in West Virginia, living amid the ruins of abandoned hills of coal slag, suffering the “deaths of despair” ravaging his community, privileged in comparison with an educated middle class black professional living in New York City? Does it make sense and is it humanely sensitive and personally respectful to claim that he benefits from “white privilege”? Of course, in most circumstances, all things being equal, even less qualified whites are likely to be treated better than more qualified blacks. That has certainly been true, even to this day, for example, in purchasing a house, in encountering the police, in dealing with the criminal justice system, in applying for a job – except perhaps in those few situations in which affirmative action requirements are at work. And all such examples of systemic racism must be brought to light and effectively remedied. But such wide spread and indefensible injustices do not exhaust, or simply define, American society. There are important counter movements, multi-racial and multi-ethnic, committed to rectify these injustices, and many social situations and groups in which all people are treated with respect and dignity.
Let me offer a simple – and possibly trivial – thought experiment on privilege in America, if only to suggest the diversity of its manifestations. Who is more privileged, a black Christian or a white Atheist? Of course, it may depend where in America you live, and who your neighbors are. But, can you imagine the Supreme Court upholding the right of Atheists to deny service to a religious Christian? Or, can you imagine America electing a white atheist as President? Or even a black Christian? But wait a minute, didn’t they just do that? What should we make of that? Who even thought a few years ago that that might be possible?
As for the more recent views of White Fragility, they are still more dubious, making completely unsubstantiated claims about what all “white people believe.” The author claims “White people, … derive enormous material and psychological advantages from this racist organization of society—whether they believe they do or not.” I’ll leave you to apply this claim to the unemployed ex-coal miner possibly suffering from black lung disease, that I have described above. But the author further claims that “White beliefs in objectivity are closely related to the myth of individualism. Because white people believe that they are unique individuals unshaped by history or society, they also come to believe that their views of the world are entirely objective.” That claim is not only an example of that simplistic racialized thinking of which I have spoken, but actually reveals remarkable ignorance of some of the most obvious facts of American intellectual history. To quite briefly explain: 1) By all accounts, the premier philosophical movement in America is Pragmatism, and the foremost exponents of that movement, particularly C.S.Peirce, John Dewey and G.H.Mead, directed the brunt of their critical analyses against that very doctrine of Individualism. More to the current point, in a book I published more than a decade ago, I devoted an entire chapter to a critique of Individualism. No, all white people are not devotees to Individualism. 2) Concerning her claim that “objectivity” is the ideology of white “individualists,” we can observe that numerous complex and subtle inquiries have been undertaken over the last several hundred years to understand the possibilities and limitations of the intellectual ideal or goal of scientific objectivity. Increasingly, more and more thinkers (regardless of race) have come to understand the perspectival limitations built into every inquiry, while valuing objectivity as an ideal to pursue in the service of truth. Does the author of White Fragility, when she claims that objectivity is simply a white man’s ideal, not mean us to understand that what she is saying is objectively true because it describes the real situation of white people, or should we see it as simply her partisan perspective and personal racial stigmatization? Thus, 3) To claim that she knows what all “White People” believe, and that they have to believe what she says they do because they are “White People,” is to attribute to each and every “White Person” a fixed nature and a label, regardless of what they say or do. How does that differ in principle from what the Nazis said about Jewish nature, or what Racists or Eugenicists said about Black nature? No, it is pure and simple racism, even if coming from the ‘other side” of the political debate, and meant to be sympathetic to the condition of oppressed minorities. And no less faulty, and socially reprehensible for that.
The incoherence of the Manichaean reasoning of White Fragility was nicely pointed out by Carlos Lozada, the Washington Post’s nonfiction book critic, who noted that with Robin DiAngelo’s circular reasoning “any alternative perspective or counterargument is defeated by the concept itself. Either white people admit their inherent and unending racism and vow to work on their white fragility, in which case DiAngelo was correct in her assessment, or they resist such categorizations or question the interpretation of a particular incident, in which case they are only proving her point.”
Then there’s the issue of “white supremacy.” Clearly there are racists who actively subscribe to that belief. And many who have joined in organized movements to promote their beliefs, and, if possible, to impose them on American society. But there are also many Americans, hopefully, including a significant majority of white people, who do not share those beliefs. Many of them are even deeply and personally offended by such beliefs, and have actively organized and mobilized in opposition to all forms of white supremacy. In fact, I personally know many individuals and organizations that are continuing to devote much time, effort, and emotion to this struggle. So it is both incorrect, even offensive, and certainly not politically effective, to claim that “white supremacy” defines American society. Further, it is wrong and self-destructive to say that white supremacy is in “the DNA” of America. DNA refers to the inherited nature of a person, or people. It would be racist to claim that that is the essential nature of all white Americans. But I think it is clear from what I have said, that such a description of an essential “white” human nature is false, and further, that we can, and many have been struggling for many years effectively to, change the prevailing patterns of race relations in America. The problem is not in our supposed DNA – where science has well established the essential biological unity of the human species – rather, the problem, and the possibilities for constructive change, are in our confrontation with our historic practice in the light of our historic ideals.
Turning, finally, to more practical political concerns. We have heard quite recently many claim that the 99% of Americans have been victimized by the 1%, that “Main Street” is being taken advantage of by “Wall Street.” That suggests a stark class divide in the US, in which a small quite wealthy few individuals and corporations have been “calling the shots” at the expense of the vast majority. That majority is quite diverse, racially, ethnically, religiously, even regionally and culturally. Clearly some are more privileged than others in many different ways. Yet all are seriously disadvantaged compared to the 1%, not to speak of the 1/10th of 1%. If the 99% are to effectively correct this situation, it will require the effective unification and mobilization of a significant majority of the 99%, not their racial division.
There is no question that as a nation we have serious and often systematic injustices that have lasted far too long, and it is well past time for sustained efforts to rectify them. They must be recognized, publicly acknowledged, and wide public support generated on behalf of movements for systemic change. But we must, at the same time, not unnecessarily alienate and offend the broad public whose support is vital if our efforts are to succeed. We should appreciate and treasure those hard fought historic accomplishments and noble ideals that have made possible the profound enhancements of human living that have also been the result of European, and particularly of American, civilization. If we are to build that movement for deep and sustained progressive social change, we need to avoid all forms of racist, Manichaean, black and white thinking, and the denigration of people of any race, so many of whom can be, if they are not already, actually committed to working on behalf of the equitable enhancement of human living for everyone.
