American Race: A Toxic Construction

In his second inaugural address near the end of the deadliest war in America. Abraham Lincoln observed that both sides "read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other." While tempering judgement "with malice toward none," Lincoln wondered (as most of us would today) how anybody could pray to a just God to preserve slavery. 

Apologists for race-based slavery pointed to Biblical slavery (a very different institution) and described Africans as perpetual children in the economic family, blaming its cruelties on cruel masters, not a bad institution. But the brutality of American slavery was obvious to any who dared to look. Slaves could be whipped, starved, raped, and worked to death with impunity--protected only by a master's profit motive or benevolence. Although murder was llegal, white killers of slaves were seldom punished. Blacks, on the other hand, were lynched or legally executed merely for insults to whites--certainly for killing them, even in self defense. On the road at night, a slave could be shot by patrols. Even free blacks couldn't take whites to court and could be arrested on suspicion of being escapees and sold at auction if they didn't prove their freedom. They were chattel until proven otherwise. Black men were stereotyped as oversexed brutes, while white men raped black women legally with an owner's permission. Slave families were broken up at a slave-owner's whim.

Slavery was a betrayal of American religious and civic values--the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence--and yet was so embedded in the economic system of the South that patriotic Christians defended it, breaking ties with northern churches that condemned it. How did they manage such a double vision? Documents from the period express two important bases. First, they believed that the system of two "races" was divinely instituted rather than constructed by the slave trade and state law. Second, they insulated religion from social justice. In their view, Golden Rule mandated only religious education, not just and equitable economic structures.

The two-race classification that I grew up with in Alabama was an absurdity cobbled together between 1620 and 1780 to farm large plantations and persists zombie-like to this day. In the early 1600s, Irish, English, Scottish, African, and Indian servants were sold in the colonies as farm laborers, initially for limited terms of years during which they lived and worked together. Historians trace legal discrimination between European and African slave labor from the period of Bacon's Rebellion in 1675, a multiracial peasant's revolt. After that, colonial assemblies, representative of the planter class, passed a series of laws distinguishing persons of African descent, who were enslaved for life, from European indentured servants, who were enslaved for a term of years. The change created a privileged class that came to be known as known white.

The term white has changed in meaning throughout American history. Into the 20th century, Irish, Italians, Jews, Catholics, Turks, Poles, and Slavs were non-white--anyone who impressed Anglo-Saxons as foreign. Asians, Africans, and Indians were always non-white, with an odd exception in the Old South where I grew up in the mid-1900s. There, the obsession with two-race Apartheid was so strong that children of Asian and Indian descent were welcome in "white" public schools. One year there was a Polynesian girl. If you weren't black (and one of the n-words was more likely to be used), you were white. As late as 1990, I took my foster daughter, who is one-fourth English, one-fourth Inuit, and half Mexican Indian, to get an Alabama state ID, and the clerk marked her down as white without asking. That may still be the way in Alabama where, until recently, calling you non-white degraded you to a lower caste.

Through all of its permutations, including the absurdity of non-white Irish, American "whiteness" has been a mark of privilege, of purity protected through an elaborate set of re-definitions that manufactured the "race." First, of course, it's not about skin tone. Some Africans have skin-tones reasonably called black, but not most "black" Americans. Nearly all of us are on a spectrum from tan to chocolate. I've always been received as "white" but tan easily and am often the darkest "white" guy in a room. One summer, when I placed my arm alongside a "black" friend's, they looked identical. The absurdity was driven home today when a newsmaker apologized for "inaccurately" calling an accused criminal "another white man." Everyone seemed to accept that, as a Syrian Moslem, the accused wasn't "white," but the photograph accompanying the story showed a pale-skinned prisoner between two darkly tanned "white" guards, men noticeably less light-skinned than him. "White" is transparently about being culturally mainstreamed, members of the privileged American norm. It's about being not-Other, a status the prisoner would presumably enjoy if he were a Catholic named O'Brien (except back when Irish were Other). White is as much about language and ethnicity as it is about color.

The system defies logic. Any reasonable person would suppose that a blend of W and B is both W and B with an equal claim to W, certainly if the W-proportion exceeds 50 percent, but the slave economy defied logic.  A 1662 Virginia law reversed English common law to define any child of a slave woman as a slave, regardless of the father, and a 1667 law abolished traditional time-limits on enslaving Christians, but, of course, only if they were of part-African. These revisions, combined with the outlawing of sex between black men and white women, created a mixed-race underclass, a subjugated caste stigmatized by even small traces of African descent. 

This absurdity was served by the symbolism of the words white and black (or colored) and the fable of white purity. Of course, a tincture of black spoils white pigment's pure whiteness, but likewise a tincture of white spoils black pigment's pure blackness. Both create the same gray. Only a myth privileging European purity creates a distinction. Inverting it to privilege African purity would redefine most American "blacks" as white. But the myths of history manufacture their own truths, and centuries of discrimination created living ethnicities based on fictional distinctions and the shared traumas of slavery and Jim Crow. White as a racial term is a slaver's dream we need to wake up from, an artificial construct unknown before the mid-1600s and not written into Virginia law until 1691, a phantom that continues to haunt America.

Blackness was created by centuries of excluding anyone of African descent from the "melting pot," prohibiting or limiting education, professional careers, property ownership, civil rights, voting, and intermarriage. Notorious examples include 1830s laws that criminalized teaching blacks to read and the 1857 Dred Scott decision denying them citizenship. So successful was the exclusion of African ancestry from mainstream America that even abolitionists saw the othering of "negroes" as a fact of nature. In a 1858 debate, Abraham Lincoln said, "There is a physical difference between the White and Black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality." We know today that the distinction doesn't hinge on genetics--that Americans are often more similar genetically to a person of another "race" than to one of their own. Thomas Jefferson must have known that his daughters by his white wife and by Sally Hemings resembled each other more than strangers of either so-called "race." But the one-eighth-African half-sisters were, because of that eighth alone, relegated to a caste their own father called inferior "in the endowment both of body and mind."

Once the phantom of two races was believed in and discrimination enforced cultural difference, the slave-owning culture saw this difference as a fact of nature and jimmied religion accordingly. Charles C. Jones, a Georgia Presbyterian, praised for "arousing the whole church in this country to a new interest in the spiritual welfare of the Africans in our midst," may help us to understand. His 1842 book, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States, is concerned only with religious education. Acknowledging but accepting the fact that slaves couldn't legally be taught to read, Jones pays no attention to physical abuse of slaves, but blames slave-owners for not teaching Christianity orally. For Jones, it's all about saving souls, accomplished by teaching simple gospel stories and hymn singing to illiterate laborers. 

Slavery isn't bad in Jones' mind. Free blacks, he suggests, are worse off than their enslaved brothers and sisters because of "natural" inferiority. Blacks need supervision. He sees as morally neutral fact that free blacks are impoverished: "Their freedom consists mainly in deliverance from compulsory labor. The real estate owned by them, taking the whole population, is very trifling: their personal property is somewhat greater, but as a class they are poor." Jones accepts illiteracy and ghettoization as a fact of nature, not a consequence of social policy, and supposes that blacks live in cities because there they "have the means and opportunities of vicious indulgence more at hand, with less danger of detection" (p.120). It's just as well. "They can never rise above their caste" (p. 123). If Jones, who recommends religious education for making slaves more docile, is a friend to "the Africans in our midst," they don't need enemies.

Another Presbyterian writer of the period, J. H. Thornwell, has better credentials as a friend of blacks, at least in the context of ante-bellum Georgia. He promoted and dedicated the first all-black church in Charleston in 1850, against which "opposition was very naturally excited to the separation of masters and servants in the solemn offices of religion" (p. 6). Slave owners feared congregations of blacks might organize uprisings like Nat Turner's, but Thornwell, in the church's inaugural sermon claimed that it "will prove a stronger fortress against insubordination and rebellion than weapons of brass and iron" (p. 7). He opens the sermon with a blistering attack of "manstealers" who oppose slavery in an "insane fury of philanthropy . . . aimed at stirring up insurrection in our midst" (p. 8). 

Well read in contemporary social philosophy, Thornwell defends slavery in Manichaean terms evocative of today's Christian conservatives: "The parties in this conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders—they are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, jacobins, on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battleground—Christianity and Atheism the combatants and the progress of humanity the stake" (p. 14). God, working through centuries of custom, had created a natural order, and it was sinful for humans to imagine they can improve it. For Thornwell, "slavery was part of the social fabric and, therefore, unalterable" (Wilson, p. 130). Sure, injustices happened, but they were inevitable consequences of Original Sin. Nobody questions the right of an employer to demand labor from a free man who has signed a contract, and slavery, Thornwell claims, rests on a firmer basis: "the Providence of God, independently of the provisions of a contract" (Thornwell, p. 24). God created men unequal, some to command, others to obey.

           Thornwell dismisses the problem of slave abuse by noting that laws prohibit "want, cruelty, and unlawful domination," even as he admits that enforcement may be inadequate ("whether adequate or inadequate it useless to discuss" (p. 26)). A slave in the process of being raped, starved, overworked, or bullwhipped would not regard such discussion as useless.

There is something chilling about Thornwell's benign complacency, his scholarly defense of a brutality. In an earlier blog, I wondered how anyone accepting Matthew 7:12, the Golden Rule, could own slaves--unless maybe he took a cue from Count Leo Tolstoy and lived in a slave cabin himself--and Thornwell addresses this obvious question. Like any brief rule, the ethic of reciprocity has limits, as he establishes with a reductio ad absurdum by noting that literal application of the Golden Rule would prevent a judge from sentencing a criminal. The "correct" application of rule, he says, after equating slaves to children and criminals (p. 26), requires that a master treat a slave as he would expect to be treated if he were a slave--with decency in accordance with social custom (p. 42). This would, indeed, have gone a long way toward mitigating the evils of slavery if it had been consistently practiced, but all of this is again based on the conservative premise that basic social structures should not be reformed even if they are unjust. Thornwell quotes with approval a Bible commentator: "The Apostle does not interfere with any established relations, however, as in the case of slavery, morally and politically wrong." (p. 16). Given "the nature of man as sinful, and the nature of society as disordered," the best any of us can do is to perform our Christian duties in a system corrupted by Adam's fall (p. 31).

This Calvinist emphasis on individual duty in an irreparably damaged but predestined world allows Thornwell to excuse economic exploitation. Even if the master feasts in the big house, relaxes in his library, and travels to Boston, spending income from slaves sweating long days in the fields, he is no better off. All that ultimately matters is the immortal soul, and there the slave is superior to the master. In a flurry of equivocation, Thornwell declares that "slavery to sin" is the real slavery. "The monarch on his throne, with prostrate millions around him, may be little, mean, despicable in the sight of the holy and the good, while the poor slave, in his humble hovel, or on his pallet of straw, may possess a dignity and moral grandeur which assert his affinity with heaven" (p. 28-29). 

          With rhetorical sleight of hand, Thornwell describes the real "slave" to be the white corrupted by wealth, free but not "free," less fortunate than his slaves, who need only perform servile duties to be "free." "If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed" (p. 29). A slave who kowtows to his master earns "a shining star in the firmament of heaven" (p. 44). Of course, this is absurd. A master who really believed slaves had a shortcut to all that mattered would enslave himself--or, at least, pick cotton all day in abject poverty. Georgia planters saved millions in payroll by paying their workforce with heavenly stars rather than American dollars. 

Sources

Jones. Charles C. The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States. Thomas Purse, 1842. https://docsouth.unc.edu/church/jones/jones.html 

Norton, Quinn. "The White Problem: Part One of a Series on Whiteness. The Message. https://medium.com/message/whiteness-3ead03700322 

Norton, Quinn. "How White People Got Made: Part Two of a Series on Whiteness." The Message.  https://medium.com/message/how-white-people-got-made-6eeb076ade42#.7v5uq14ut 

Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. "Historical Foundations of Race."  https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/historical-foundations-race 

Thornwell, J. H. The Rights and Duties of Masters: A Sermon Preached at the Dedication of a Church Erected in Charleston, S.C., for the Benefit and Institution of the Colored Population. Walker and James, 1850. https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Rights_and_Duties_of_Masters/MqARAAAAIAAJ?hl=en  

Wilson, Jamie Diane. "Transatlantic Encounters and the Origins of James Henry Thornwell's Proslavery Ideology," Slavery and Abolition 37 (2016): 117-138.