American Holocaust

by David E. Stannardx

  To some, understandably, this may seem an academic question, in the worst sense of that term. After all, to the American native woman having her breasts cut off by sadistically gleeful Spanish conquistadors, or watching her infant thrown to a pack of dogs—or to the native man about to be impaled on a sword of European manufacture, or watching his village and his family being burned to cinders by Puritans who boasted that “our Mouth [was] filled with Laughter, and our Tongues with Singing” while they attempted to exterminate an entire people from the earth—it no doubt mattered little whether the genocidal racism of their tormentors had preceded or followed from the first meetings of their societies.1 If such questions concern us now, for reasons other than academic curiosity, they do so in order that we may better understand how such horrors could have been perpetrated and how—perhaps—they may be anticipated and avoided in the future. Moreover, like many other matters of ivory tower pedigree, this one carries with it an inner element of real world political contentiousness. This is why, for many years, addressing it has caused such scholarly disagreement. That the answer to this question matters can best be seen by reviewing the ways historians have approached the issue first as it pertains to African Americans and then to Indians.

  Until well into the twentieth century most white American historians spent little time arguing over the chronological priority of racism or slavery in the historical mistreatment of Africans in America. This was so for a reason that by itself is revealing: it was not a subject that lent itself to disagreement because those historians’ own low regard for blacks was so second nature to them that they simply assumed it to be a natural, justified, and nearly universal attitude, and one that thereby must have long predated the formal enslavement of Africans. And the formal enslavement of blacks in America, they assumed, certainly began immediately upon the involuntary arrival in the colonies of the first Africans in 1619.

  Although there were some earlier historians who raised questions that had bearing on this matter, it was not until the 1950s that they began to propose, in numbers and with some vigor, the thesis that slavery had preceded racism in America.2 Working within a social climate to which they could not have been immune, a climate that was registering a rising chorus of insistent claims by African Americans for equal access to the social and political benefits of American life, these historians contended that slavery emerged gradually as an institution, following the first arrivals of blacks in North America, and that racism emerged still later, in part as a rationale for the maintenance of what by then had become a racially defined slave society.3 Although this was an argument not without some documentary support, it also was an argument suited to the politics of academic liberals who then were coming to agree with historian Kenneth Stampp that “innately Negroes are, after all, only white men with black skins, nothing more, nothing less.”4

  From this political and ethical perspective—in the midst of a civil rights movement that was attempting to make such integrationist ideals conform with reality—the liberal historian’s notion that racism was, in Winthrop Jordan’s words, “scarcely more than an appurtenance of slavery. . . . squared nicely with the hopes of those even more directly concerned with the problem of contemporary race relations. . . . For if prejudice was natural there would be little one could do to wipe it out. Prejudice must have followed enslavement, not vice versa, else any liberal program of action would be badly compromised.”5

  There was, of course, another benefit not mentioned by Jordan that was gained from such a reading of the historical record. The moral core of Western culture in general, and American culture in particular, appeared far more favorable in the light of an interpretation that found racism to be an aberration, rather than a constant, in Western history. Thus, not only did the slavery-begot-racism scenario encourage a more optimistic belief in the possibility of curtailing racism in the present, it also gave support to a relatively cheerful interpretation of the American and European cultural past.

  Not everyone was convinced, however. In 1959 Carl N. Degler published an article, “Slavery and the Genesis of American Race Prejudice,” strongly arguing that slavery took root very early in American colonial society and that it did so in large part because of the white colonists’ preexisting racist attitudes—attitudes visible, among other places, in Elizabethan literature, including Shakespeare’s Othello and Titus Andronicus, but also evident in the relative prices of black and white servants, discriminatory court decisions, and more.6 The ensuing flurry of debate on the issue had a number of internal problems, not the least of which was a tendency to assume that the general attitudes and behaviors of the white colonists were very nearly monolithic. Thus, whenever one partisan found an exception to the other’s body of data he or she was likely to hold it up as a refutation of the other’s entire thesis. Some writers, for example, pointed to a 1640 law prohibiting blacks in Virginia from bearing arms, and cited this as evidence of racially based discrimination, while critics of this interpretation noted the presence in Virginia during this same time of a black former slave who had gained his freedom and purchased a slave himself, and they used this as evidence that blacks were not treated with special unfairness. Within a few years, however, Degler’s general contention was given an able assist by Winthrop Jordan, first in an article of his own, then in 1968 with his massive and justly celebrated study, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812.7

  Examining materials ranging from biblical passages to sixteenth-century poetry, travelers’ tales, and more, Jordan concluded in White Over Black that European antipathy for Africans had long pre-dated the enslavement of blacks in America, or for that matter, the arrival of Europeans to the Western Hemisphere. “From the first,” he wrote, “Englishmen tended to set Negroes over against themselves, to stress what they conceived to be radically contrasting qualities of color, religion, and style of life, as well as animality and a peculiarly potent sexuality.”8 In short, virtually all the elements that would go into the full blown eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ideology of anti-black racism were present in European thought long before the arrival of the first blacks in Virginia in 1619.

  But although racial antipathy preceded enslavement, Jordan cautioned against too simplistic a cause-and-effect model. A predisposition to invidious racial distinctions was not in itself sufficient to explain the wholesale enslavement and the horrendously systematic degradation of Africans that emerged in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North America. Rather, Jordan suggested that “both slavery and prejudice [were] species of a general debasement of the Negro,” each of them—once they were joined—“constantly reacting upon each other” in a dynamic “cycle of degradation” that created a unique “engine of oppression.”9 (It will be recalled that I quoted these phrases in my text and adopted the same ideological-institutional dynamic in pursuit of an explanation for genocide against the Americas’ native peoples.)

  In this conclusion Jordan actually was delivering heavily documented support to an insight first expressed by Alexis de Tocqueville more than a century earlier. Since the age of the ancients, Tocqueville had said, a scornful attitude toward the enslaved had followed upon their enforced servitude, a scornful attitude that remained for a time after the abolition of slavery, but one that eventually dissipated. However, in America, he wrote, “the insubstantial and ephemeral fact of servitude is most fatally combined with the physical and permanent fact of difference in race. Memories of slavery disgrace the race, and race perpetuates memories of slavery.” Added to this, Tocqueville noted, was the fact that for whites in general, including himself:

  This man born in degradation, this stranger brought by slavery into our midst, is hardly recognized as sharing the common features of humanity. His face appears to us hideous, his intelligence limited, and his tastes low; we almost take him for some being intermediate between beast and man. . . . To induce the whites to abandon the opinion they have conceived of the intellectual and moral inferiority of their fo
rmer slaves, the Negroes must change, but they cannot change so long as this opinion persists.10

  In sum, as Jordan later picked up the argument, while the roots of a racist antipathy among whites toward blacks did indeed clearly precede the rise of the institution of slavery in America, this is a less important independent phenomenon than some may have thought, since once the attitude and the institution became fused—and they did so at a very early date—they reinforced one another, strengthening and deepening the white commitment to both of them. The idea of racism as deeply imbedded in Western consciousness was still a very troubling notion to many, however, and resistance to it remained strong among historians, despite Jordan’s rich documentation and subtlety of analysis. The form this resistance subsequently would take was established by George M. Fredrickson in a highly influential article that appeared only three years after White Over Black was published.

  It is necessary, Fredrickson contended, to distinguish between what he called “ideological” racism and “societal” racism. Ideological racism is “the explicit and rationalized racism that can be discerned in nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought and ideology” while societal racism can be observed in “one racial group [acting] as if another were inherently inferior . . . despite the fact that such a group may not have developed or preserved a conscious and consistent rationale for its behavior.” This “dual definition of racism,” Fredrickson claimed, made it possible to identify the differences between “genuinely racist societies and other inegalitarian societies where there may be manifestations of racial prejudice and discrimination but which nevertheless cannot be described as racist in their basic character.” In a given society, according to this logic, as long as some reason other than race can be found to justify and rationalize the degradation—and, presumably, even the enslavement and mass murder—of people who are of a different race from that of their oppressors, that society “is not racist in the full sense of the word,” Fredrickson claimed. Moreover,

  if the discrimination for reasons of color is not consistently and universally applied to individual members of what is, in a statistical sense, the socially inferior group [and] if some members of this group can, despite their physical characteristics, achieve high status because of such attributes as wealth, education, and aristocratic culture, there is evidence of the overriding importance of nonracial status criteria. In such a situation, race becomes only one factor in determining status, an attribute which can be outweighed or neutralized by other factors.11

  By joining this definitional statement with the same sort of historical data produced by those historians who, twenty years earlier, had argued that American racism was essentially a product of slavery—for example, that along with slaves there were free blacks in seventeenth-century Virginia, some of whom enjoyed legal and economic rights—Fredrickson concluded that “America . . . was not born racist; it became so gradually as the result of a series of crimes against black humanity that stemmed primarily from selfishness, greed and the pursuit of privilege.”12 This judgment served to undergird Fredrickson’s subsequent work and clearly influenced most of the other prominent discussions of the subject that would appear in the later 1970s and 1980s.13

  There are, however, some problems with Fredrickson’s analysis. The first of these is his use of the word “ideological” when “biological” would have been more precise in describing the nature of the formal structures of racist thought that emerged in the nineteenth century. Prior to the rise of the biological and zoological pseudosciences that served as the underpinnings for what Fredrickson calls “ideological” racism, and after the decline of those pseudosciences in the twentieth century, there existed and continues to exist in America a widespread, systematic, and ideologically justified degradation of entire categories of people who are readily identifiable by characteristics that commonly are associated with race.14 The fact that in pre-pseudoscience days the categorical justifications drew heavily (though, as we saw in the text, not exclusively) on religious and philosophical structures of thought, while in post-pseudoscience days most justifications tend to draw on historical and environmental principles—such as the “culture of poverty” or the black American family’s alleged “tangle of pathology”—does not make these systems of discrimination any less “ideological” (or any less racist) than those biological fictions that dominated racist thinking in the nineteenth century and part of the twentieth. Biology certainly can become ideological—but ideology is not necessarily based on biology.

  As for the idea that racism proper did not and could not emerge until the rise of an “explicit and rationalized” pseudoscientific ideology regarding the term “race” itself, as Richard Drinnon has remarked, this “is roughly equivalent to saying—though the parallel is more benign—that the practice of birth control waited upon Margaret Sanger to coin the term.”15 In addition, since traditional pseudoscientific racism is no longer in vogue—and, indeed, since the very idea of “race” has long been scientifically discredited as a valid way of categorizing humans—by Fredrickson’s definition, racism “in the full sense of the word” does not and can not exist today.16 That will be news to its victims.

  If these difficulties with Fredrickson’s (and many other recent historians’) definition of racism necessarily result in the dubious conclusion that, to use Fredrickson’s terms, “genuine” or “explicit” racism was a momentary aberration in human history, arising in the early nineteenth century and dying out around the middle of the twentieth century, an additional problem with his definition is that one logical consequence of it leads to the remarkable discovery that true racism has, in fact, never existed, at least in America. For Fredrickson and most other historians writing on the topic continue to assert that for racism proper to exist—to quote again the passage in Fredrickson cited above—it must be “universally applied to individual members of what is, in a statistical sense, the socially inferior group.” Should any exceptions to such categorical “discrimination for reasons of color” exist in an otherwise seemingly racist time and place, the exceptions serve as “evidence of the overriding importance of nonracial status criteria” and as sufficient documentation to establish that such a society cannot correctly be labeled racist.

  It is by appealing to this definition that Fredrickson and others continue to assert that the existence of free blacks in seventeenth-century Virginia—and particularly of someone like Anthony Johnson, who arrived in Virginia as a slave from Africa and somehow became a freeman, a land owner, and the owner of a slave—proves that seventeenth-century Virginia was not a racist society, that racism only emerged in later years.17 Again, not only can this criterion be used to argue that racism is not a serious and tenacious problem today (since some blacks and other people of color, in theory at least, may escape its tentacles), but in addition it speciously serves to establish that even the deep South in the middle of the nineteenth century was not ideologically or “explicitly” racist. For if Anthony Johnson, with his small plot of land and single slave is a sufficient example to show that seventeenth century Virginia was not racist, what are we to make of William Ellison, a black former slave who lived in South Carolina from the 1790s until the outbreak of the Civil War, acquiring in that time a 900-acre plantation, more than sixty slaves, and more wealth than 95 percent of the South’s white men? And at least half a dozen other southern blacks at this time—among the more than 3600 African Americans who then possessed over 12,000 slaves—were wealthier and owned more slaves than Ellison.18

  If ever a region in America could properly be described as racist, it was the deep South in the decades immediately preceding the Civil War. Thus, we are left with a choice between one of two conclusions: either the existence of Ellison and other wealthy, slave-owning southern blacks at this time proves that the deep South was not then a truly racist society, in which case, no locale in America, at any time, can ever have been categorically and “explicitly” racist; or the criteria used by Fredrickson and other
s are inappropriate and ineffective for use in locating and defining a racist society. It should not be necessary to point out that only the latter choice makes any sense at all.

  It might also be noted that the same criteria used to demonstrate that the seventeenth-century slave-holding colonies were not “genuinely” racist can be used with equal veracity (which is to say none) to show that the German Nazi Party in the 1930s was not “genuinely” anti-Semitic, since a large proportion of its membership, when surveyed, expressed no anti-Semitic attitudes.19 None of this should be taken to mean, however, that a formalized and widely believed pseudoscientific theory of racial inequality is not different from lower-level and more diffuse racist thinking. They are different, but they both are thoroughly racist.

  There is a certain paradoxical quality to the fact that while the rest of informed society has come to recognize the existence of subtler and more complex forms of racism—such as “institutional” racism (or Joel Kovel’s more psychologically grounded “metaracism”) as forms of oppression that clearly are racist but do not depend for their existence on an openly articulated and formal racial theory—many of the historians who have in recent years devoted their professional lives to studying the phenomenon have seemed determined to define racism almost out of existence.20 Indeed, confusion on racism as a historical phenomenon has grown to the point that Jane Tompkins, the author of an article in a journal of avant-garde scholarly repute, has gone so far as to make the fanciful assertion—directly contra Fredrickson, but equally illogical—that racism could not have existed in early American colonial society because white people at that time were unanimous in their racist opinions! In short, according to Tompkins (who, like Fredrickson, is not alone in her conviction), unanimity of opinion is indication of a cultural norm, of people simply “look[ing] at other cultures in the way their own culture had taught them to see one another.”21 Thus, on the one hand we have Fredrickson arguing that only if every member of an oppressed racial group in a society is oppressed for explicitly racial reasons can that society be characterized as racist—and on the other hand there is Tompkins contending that if there is unanimity of racist opinion among the oppressor group in a society, that society, by definition, is non-racist.