c4 - English
After completing all the modules (that is, after doing the course readings and engaging in discussion forums), I want you to address the following questions in your last report:
What did you learn in these modules (not a list of facts, but what can you take away from the lesson or what has value to you)?
How do you connect what you learned in this course with your personal experience or with what you already know?
How would/could you apply this new knowledge to issues that are close to your heart?
I am interested in your ability to make connections between readings or the ability to synthesize and then apply this knowledge in a manner that makes connection with the real world.
Criteria: Your journal entry should be a minimum of 800 words.I am concerned with the amount of thought and logic put into your report as well as the explicit connections (i.e. correct direct citation and paraphrasing of course materials) you make with course materials. Making explicit connections means citing course materials that support or elaborate your argument. If there are other things that you have read that are relevant, mention them. Your journal is your opinion; however, as always, your opinion needs to be backed up with credible support.
Howard Zinn – A people’s history of the United States
Chapter 1: COLUMBUS, THE INDIANS, AND HUMAN PROGRESS
Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto
the islands beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus
and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them,
brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:
They ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things,
which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks bells. They willingly traded
everything they owned... . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome
features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a
sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no
iron. Their spears are made of cane... . They would make fine servants.... With fifty
men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.
These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were
remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in
sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by
the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western
civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.
Columbus wrote:
As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of
the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of
whatever there is in these parts.
The information that Columbus wanted most was: Where is the gold? He had persuaded the king
and queen of Spain to finance an expedition to the lands, the wealth, he expected would be on the
other side of the Atlantic-the Indies and Asia, gold and spices. For, like other informed people of
his time, he knew the world was round and he could sail west in order to get to the Far East.
Spain was recently unified, one of the new modern nation-states, like France, England, and
Portugal. Its population, mostly poor peasants, worked for the nobility, who were 2 percent of
the population and owned 95 percent of the land. Spain had tied itself to the Catholic Church,
expelled all the Jews, driven out the Moors. Like other states of the modern world, Spain sought
gold, which was becoming the new mark of wealth, more useful than land because it could buy
anything.
There was gold in Asia, it was thought, and certainly silks and spices, for Marco Polo and
others had brought back marvelous things from their overland expeditions centuries before. Now
that the Turks had conquered Constantinople and the eastern Mediterranean, and controlled the
land routes to Asia, a sea route was needed. Portuguese sailors were working their way around
the southern tip of Africa. Spain decided to gamble on a long sail across an unknown ocean.
In return for bringing back gold and spices, they promised Columbus 10 percent of the profits,
governorship over new-found lands, and the fame that would go with a new title: Admiral of the
Ocean Sea. He was a merchants clerk from the Italian city of Genoa, part-time weaver (the son
of a skilled weaver), and expert sailor. He set out with three sailing ships, the largest of which
was the Santa Maria, perhaps 100 feet long, and thirty-nine crew members.
Columbus would never have made it to Asia, which was thousands of miles farther away than
he had calculated, imagining a smaller world. He would have been doomed by that great expanse
of sea. But he was lucky. One-fourth of the way there he came upon an unknown, uncharted land
that lay between Europe and Asia-the Americas. It was early October 1492, and thirty-three days
since he and his crew had left the Canary Islands, off the Atlantic coast of Africa. Now they saw
branches and sticks floating in the water. They saw flocks of birds.
These were signs of land. Then, on October 12, a sailor called Rodrigo saw the early morning
moon shining on white sands, and cried out. It was an island in the Bahamas, the Caribbean sea.
The first man to sight land was supposed to get a yearly pension of 10,000 maravedis for life, but
Rodrigo never got it. Columbus claimed he had seen a light the evening before. He got the
reward.
So, approaching land, they were met by the Arawak Indians, who swam out to greet them.
The Arawaks lived in village communes, had a developed agriculture of corn, yams, cassava.
They could spin and weave, but they had no horses or work animals. They had no iron, but they
wore tiny gold ornaments in their ears.
This was to have enormous consequences: it led Columbus to take some of them aboard ship
as prisoners because he insisted that they guide him to the source of the gold. He then sailed to
what is now Cuba, then to Hispaniola (the island which today consists of Haiti and the
Dominican Republic). There, bits of visible gold in the rivers, and a gold mask presented to
Columbus by a local Indian chief, led to wild visions of gold fields.
On Hispaniola, out of timbers from the Santa Maria, which had run aground, Columbus built
a fort, the first European military base in the Western Hemisphere. He called it Navidad
(Christmas) and left thirty-nine crewmembers there, with instructions to find and store the gold.
He took more Indian prisoners and put them aboard his two remaining ships. At one part of the
island he got into a fight with Indians who refused to trade as many bows and arrows as he and
his men wanted. Two were run through with swords and bled to death. Then the Nina and
the Pinta set sail for the Azores and Spain. When the weather turned cold, the Indian prisoners
began to die.
Columbuss report to the Court in Madrid was extravagant. He insisted he had reached Asia (it
was Cuba) and an island off the coast of China (Hispaniola). His descriptions were part fact, part
fiction:
Hispaniola is a miracle. Mountains and hills, plains and pastures, are both fertile
and beautiful ... the harbors are unbelievably good and there are many wide rivers
of which the majority contain gold. . . . There are many spices, and great mines of
gold and other metals....
The Indians, Columbus reported, are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one
who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never
say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone.... He concluded his report by asking for
a little help from their Majesties, and in return he would bring them from his next voyage as
much gold as they need ... and as many slaves as they ask. He was full of religious talk: Thus
the eternal God, our Lord, gives victory to those who follow His way over apparent
impossibilities.
Because of Columbuss exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given
seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. They
went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. But as word spread of the
Europeans intent they found more and more empty villages. On Haiti, they found that the sailors
left behind at Fort Navidad had been killed in a battle with the Indians, after they had roamed the
island in gangs looking for gold, taking women and children as slaves for sex and labor.
Now, from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior.
They found no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of
dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak
men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five
hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route.
The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who
reported that, although the slaves were naked as the day they were born, they showed no more
embarrassment than animals. Columbus later wrote: Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go
on sending all the slaves that can be sold.
But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back
dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In
the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they
ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three
months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians
found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.
The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust
garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.
Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks faced Spaniards who had armor,
muskets, swords, horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned them to
death. Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants were killed to
save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the
250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.
When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on
huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by
the thousands. By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there
were five hundred. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their
descendants left on the island.
The chief source-and, on many matters the only source-of information about what happened
on the islands after Columbus came is Bartolome de las Casas, who, as a young priest,
participated in the conquest of Cuba. For a time he owned a plantation on which Indian slaves
worked, but he gave that up and became a vehement critic of Spanish cruelty. Las Casas
transcribed Columbuss journal and, in his fifties, began a multivolume History of the Indies. In
it, he describes the Indians. They are agile, he says, and can swim long distances, especially the
women. They are not completely peaceful, because they do battle from time to time with other
tribes, but their casualties seem small, and they fight when they are individually moved to do so
because of some grievance, not on the orders of captains or kings.
Women in Indian society were treated so well as to startle the Spaniards. Las Casas describes
sex relations:
Marriage laws are non-existent men and women alike choose their mates and leave them
as they please, without offense, jealousy or anger. They multiply in great abundance;
pregnant women work to the last minute and give birth almost painlessly; up the next
day, they bathe in the river and are as clean and healthy as before giving birth. If they
tire of their men, they give themselves abortions with herbs that force stillbirths,
covering their shameful parts with leaves or cotton cloth; although on the whole, Indian
men and women look upon total nakedness with as much casualness as we look upon a
mans head or at his hands.
The Indians, Las Casas says, have no religion, at least no temples. They live in
large communal bell-shaped buildings, housing up to 600 people at one time ... made
of very strong wood and roofed with palm leaves.... They prize bird feathers of
various colors, beads made of fishbones, and green and white stones with which they
adorn their ears and lips, but they put no value on gold and other precious things.
They lack all manner of commerce, neither buying nor selling, and rely exclusively
on their natural environment for maintenance. They are extremely generous with
their possessions and by the same token covet the possessions of their friends and
expect the same degree of liberality. ...
In Book Two of his History of the Indies, Las Casas (who at first urged replacing Indians by
black slaves, thinking they were stronger and would survive, but later relented when he saw the
effects on blacks) tells about the treatment of the Indians by the Spaniards. It is a unique account
and deserves to be quoted at length:
Endless testimonies . .. prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives.... But
our work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy; small wonder, then, if
they tried to kill one of us now and then.... The admiral, it is true, was blind as those
who came after him, and he was so anxious to please the King that he committed
irreparable crimes against the Indians....
Las Casas tells how the Spaniards grew more conceited every day and after a while refused to
walk any distance. They rode the backs of Indians if they were in a hurry or were carried on
hammocks by Indians running in relays. In this case they also had Indians carry large leaves to
shade them from the sun and others to fan them with goose wings.
Total control led to total cruelty. The Spaniards thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens
and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades. Las Casas tells
how two of these so-called Christians met two Indian boys one day, each carrying a parrot; they
took the parrots and for fun beheaded the boys.
The Indians attempts to defend themselves failed. And when they ran off into the hills they
were found and killed. So, Las Casas reports, they suffered and died in the mines and other
labors in desperate silence, knowing not a soul in the world to whom they could turn for help.
He describes their work in the mines:
... mountains are stripped from top to bottom and bottom to top a thousand times;
they dig, split rocks, move stones, and carry dirt on their backs to wash it in the
rivers, while those who wash gold stay in the water all the time with their backs bent
so constantly it breaks them; and when water invades the mines, the most arduous
task of all is to dry the mines by scooping up pansful of water and throwing it up
outside....
After each six or eight months work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew to
dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died.
While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil,
forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants.
Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and
when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides ... they ceased to
procreate. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked
and famished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba,
7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from
sheer desperation.... in this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work,
and children died from lack of milk . .. and in a short time this land which was so
great, so powerful and fertile ... was depopulated. ... My eyes have seen these acts so
foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write. ...
When he arrived on Hispaniola in 1508, Las Casas says, there were 60,000 people living on this
island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished
from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it
as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it....
Thus began the history, five hundred years ago, of the European invasion of the Indian
settlements in the Americas. That beginning, when you read Las Casas-even if his figures are
exaggerations (were there 3 million Indians to begin with, as he says, or less than a million, as
some historians have calculated, or 8 million as others now believe?)-is conquest, slavery, death.
When we read the history books given to children in the United States, it all starts with heroic
adventure-there is no bloodshed-and Columbus Day is a celebration.
Past the elementary and high schools, there are only occasional hints of something else.
Samuel Eliot Morison, the Harvard historian, was the most distinguished writer on Columbus,
the author of a multivolume biography, and was himself a sailor who retraced Columbuss route
across the Atlantic. In his popular book Christopher Columbus, Mariner, written in 1954, he tells
about the enslavement and the killing: The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by
his successors resulted in complete genocide.
That is on one page, buried halfway into the telling of a grand romance. In the books last
paragraph, Morison sums up his view of Columbus:
He had his faults and his defects, but they were largely the defects of the qualities
that made him great-his indomitable will, his superb faith in God and in his own
mission as the Christ-bearer to lands beyond the seas, his stubborn persistence
despite neglect, poverty and discouragement. But there was no flaw, no dark side to
the most outstanding and essential of all his qualities-his seamanship.
One can lie outright about the past. Or one can omit facts which might lead to unacceptable
conclusions. Morison does neither. He refuses to lie about Columbus. He does not omit the story
of mass murder; indeed he describes it with the harshest word one can use: genocide.
But he does something else-he mentions the truth quickly and goes on to other things more
important to him. Outright lying or quiet omission takes the risk of discovery which, when made,
might arouse the reader to rebel against the writer. To state the facts, however, and then to bury
them in a mass of other information is to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes,
mass murder took place, but its not that important-it should weigh very little in our final
judgments; it should affect very little what we do in the world.
It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others. This is as
natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical
purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering
mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular
map.
My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable for
both cartographers and historians. But the map-makers distortion is a technical necessity for a
common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historians distortion is more than
technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen
emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether
economic or political or racial or national or sexual.
Furthermore, this ideological interest is not openly expressed in the way a mapmakers
technical interest is obvious (This is a Mercator projection for long-range navigation-for short-
range, youd better use a different projection). No, it is presented as if all readers of history had
a common interest which historians serve to the best of their ability. This is not intentional
deception; the historian has been trained in a society in which education and knowledge are put
forward as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, races,
nations.
To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and
to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves-
unwittingly-to justify what was done. My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse,
judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly
exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to
pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary,
to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)-that is still with us. One reason these
atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as
radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the
same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of
classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent
objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press
conferences. It is therefore more deadly.
The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks)-the quiet acceptance of
conquest and murder in the name of progress-is only one aspect of a certain approach to history,
in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders.
It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they-the Founding Fathers,
Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous
Justices of the Supreme Court-represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is
such a thing as the United States, subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but
fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a national
interest represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress,
the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass
media.
History is the memory of states, wrote Henry Kissinger in his first book, A World Restored,
in which he proceeded to tell the history of nineteenth-century Europe from the viewpoint of the
leaders of Austria and England, ignoring the millions who suffered from those statesmens
policies. From his standpoint, the peace that Europe had before the French Revolution was
restored by the diplomacy of a few national leaders. But for factory workers in England,
farmers in France, colored people in Asia and Africa, women and children everywhere except in
the upper classes, it was a world of conquest, violence, hunger, exploitation-a world not restored
but disintegrated.
My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept
the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been, The history
of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest
(sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and
slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world
of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus
suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.
Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I
prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of
the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees,
of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting
soldiers of Scotts army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell
textile mills, of the Spanish-American war as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines
as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World
War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by
blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America. And so on,
to the limited extent that any one person, however he or she strains, can see history from the
standpoint of others.
My point is not to grieve for the victims and denounce the executioners. Those tears, that
anger, cast into the past, deplete our moral energy for the present. And the lines are not always
clear. In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run (and so far, human history
has consisted only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture
that oppresses them, turn on other victims.
Still, understanding the complexities, this book will be skeptical of governments and their
attempts, through politics and culture, to ensnare ordinary people in a giant web of nationhood
pretending to a common interest. I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one
another as they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I dont want to romanticize
them. But I do remember (in rough paraphrase) a statement I once read: The cry of the poor is
not always just, but if you dont listen to it, you will never know what justice is.
I dont want to invent victories for peoples movements. But to think that history-writing must
aim simply to recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators
in an endless cycle of defeat. If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without
denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden
episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join
together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be
found in the pasts fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.
That, being as blunt as I can, is my approach to the history of the United States. The reader
may as well know that before going on.
What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortes did to the Aztecs of Mexico,
Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the
Powhatans and the Pequots.
The Aztec civilization of Mexico came out of the heritage of Mayan, Zapotec, and Toltec
cultures. It built enormous constructions from stone tools and human labor, developed a writing
system and a priesthood. It also engaged in (let us not overlook this) the ritual killing of
thousands of people as sacrifices to the gods. The cruelty of the Aztecs, however, did not erase a
certain innocence, and when a Spanish armada appeared at Vera Cruz, and a bearded white man
came ashore, with strange beasts (horses), clad in iron, it was thought that he was the legendary
Aztec man-god who had died three hundred years before, with the promise to return-the
mysterious Quetzalcoatl. And so they welcomed him, with munificent hospitality.
That was Hernando Cortes, come from Spain with an expedition financed by merchants and
landowners and blessed by the deputies of God, with one obsessive goal: to find gold. In the
mind of Montezuma, the king of the Aztecs, there must have been a certain doubt about whether
Cortes was indeed Quetzalcoatl, because he sent a hundred runners to Cortes, bearing enormous
treasures, gold and silver wrought into objects of fantastic beauty, but at the same time begging
him to go back. (The painter Durer a few years later described what he saw just arrived in Spain
from that expedition-a sun of gold, a moon of silver, worth a fortune.)
Cortes then began his march of death from town to town, using deception, turning Aztec
against Aztec, killing with the kind of deliberateness that accompanies a strategy-to paralyze the
will of the population by a sudden frightful deed. And so, in Cholulu, he invited the headmen of
the Cholula nation to the square. And when they came, with thousands of unarmed retainers,
Cortess small army of Spaniards, posted around the square with cannon, armed with crossbows,
mounted on horses, massacred them, down to the last man. Then they looted the city and moved
on. When their cavalcade of murder was over they were in Mexico City, Montezuma was dead,
and the Aztec civilization, shattered, was in the hands of the Spaniards.
All this is told in the Spaniards own accounts.
In Peru, that other Spanish conquistador Pizarro, used the same tactics, and for the same
reasons- the frenzy in the early capitalist states of Europe for gold, for slaves, for products of the
soil, to pay the bondholders and stockholders of the expeditions, to finance the monarchical
bureaucracies rising in Western Europe, to spur the growth of the new money economy rising out
of feudalism, to participate in what Karl Marx would later call the primitive accumulation of
capital. These were the violent beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business,
politics, and culture that would dominate the world for the next five centuries.
In the North American English colonies, the pattern was set early, as Columbus had set it in
the islands of the Bahamas. In 1585, before there was any permanent English settlement in
Virginia, …
Chapter 2: DRAWING THE COLOR LINE
A black American writer, J. Saunders Redding, describes the arrival of a ship in North
America in the year 1619:
Sails furled, flag drooping at her rounded stern, she rode the tide in from the sea.
She was a strange ship, indeed, by all accounts, a frightening ship, a ship of mystery.
Whether she was trader, privateer, or man-of-war no one knows. Through her
bulwarks black-mouthed cannon yawned. The flag she flew was Dutch; her crew a
motley. Her port of call, an English settlement, Jamestown, in the colony of Virginia.
She came, she traded, and shortly afterwards was gone. Probably no ship in modern
history has carried a more portentous freight. Her cargo? Twenty slaves.
There is not a country in world history in which racism has been more important, for so long a
time, as the United States. And the problem of the color line, as W. E. B. Du Bois put it, is still
with us. So it is more than a purely historical question to ask: How does it start?—and an even
more urgent question: How might it end? Or, to put it differently: Is it possible for whites and
blacks to live together without hatred?
If history can help answer these questions, then the beginnings of slavery in North America—
a continent where we can trace the coming of the first whites and the first blacks—might supply
at least a few clues.
Some historians think those first blacks in Virginia were considered as servants, like the white
indentured servants brought from Europe. But the strong probability is that, even if they were
listed as servants (a more familiar category to the English), they were viewed as being different
from white servants, were treated differently, and in fact were slaves. In any case, slavery
developed quickly into a regular institution, into the normal labor relation of blacks to whites in
the New World. With it developed that special racial feeling—whether hatred, or contempt, or
pity, or patronization—that accompanied the inferior position of blacks in America for the next
350 years —that combination of inferior status and derogatory thought we call racism.
Everything in the experience of the first white settlers acted as a pressure for the enslavement
of blacks.
The Virginians of 1619 were desperate for labor, to grow enough food to stay alive. Among
them were survivors from the winter of 1609-1610, the starving time, when, crazed for want of
food, they roamed the woods for nuts and berries, dug up graves to eat the corpses, and died in
batches until five hundred colonists were reduced to sixty.
In the Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia is a document of 1619 which tells of
the first twelve years of the Jamestown colony. The first settlement had a hundred persons, who
had one small ladle of barley per meal. When more people arrived, there was even less food.
Many of the people lived in cavelike holes dug into the ground, and in the winter of 1609-1610,
they were
...driven through insufferable hunger to eat those things which nature most
abhorred, the flesh and excrements of man as well of our own nation as of an
Indian, digged by some out of his grave after he had laid buried there days and
wholly devoured him; others, envying the better state of body of any whom hunger
has not yet so much wasted as their own, lay wait and threatened to kill and eat
them; one among them slew his wife as she slept in his bosom, cut her in pieces,
salted her and fed upon her till he had clean devoured all parts saving her head...
A petition by thirty colonists to the House of Burgesses, complaining against the twelve-year
governorship of Sir Thomas Smith, said:
In those 12 years of Sir Thomas Smith, his government, we aver that the colony for
the most part remained in great want and misery under most severe and cruel
laws... The allowance in those times for a man was only eight ounces of meale and
half a pint of peas for a day... mouldy, rotten, full of cobwebs and maggots,
loathsome to man and not fit for beasts, which forced many to flee for relief to the
savage enemy, who being taken again were put to sundry deaths as by hanging,
shooting and breaking upon the wheel... of whom one for stealing two or three pints
of oatmeal had a bodkin thrust through his tongue and was tied with a chain to a
tree until he starved...
The Virginians needed labor, to grow corn for subsistence, to grow tobacco for export. They
had just figured out how to grow tobacco, and in 1617 they sent off the first cargo to England.
Finding that, like all pleasureable drugs tainted with moral disapproval, it brought a high price,
the planters, despite their high religious talk, were not going to ask questions about something so
profitable.
They couldnt force the Indians to work for them, as Columbus had done. They were
outnumbered, and while, with superior firearms, they could massacre Indians, they would face
massacre in return. They could not capture them and keep them enslaved; the Indians were
tough, resourceful, defiant, and at home in these woods, as the transplanted Englishmen were
not.
White servants had not yet been brought over in sufficient quantity. Besides, they did not
come out of slavery, and did not have to do more than contract their labor for a few years to get
their passage and a start in the New World. As for the free white settlers, many of them were
skilled craftsmen, or even men of leisure back in England, who were so little inclined to work the
land that John Smith, in those early years, had to declare a kind of martial law, organize them
into work gangs, and force them into the fields for survival.
There may have been a kind of frustrated rage at their own ineptitude, at the Indian
superiority at taking care of themselves, that made the Virginians especially ready to become the
masters of slaves. Edmund Morgan imagines their mood as he writes in his book American
Slavery, American Freedom:
If you were a colonist, you knew that your technology was superior to the Indians.
You knew that you were civilized, and they were savages... But your superior
technology had proved insufficient to extract anything. The Indians, keeping to
themselves, laughed at your superior methods and lived from the land more
abundantly and with less labor than you did... And when your own people started
deserting in order to live with them, it was too much... So you killed the Indians,
tortured them, burned their villages, burned their cornfields. It proved your
superiority, in spite of your failures. And you gave similar treatment to any of your
own people who succumbed to their savage ways of life. But you still did not grow
much corn...
Black slaves were the answer. And it was natural to consider imported blacks as slaves, even
if the institution of slavery would not be regularized and legalized for several decades. Because,
by 1619, a million blacks had already been brought from Africa to South America and the
Caribbean, to the Portuguese and Spanish colonies, to work as slaves. Fifty years before
Columbus, the Portuguese took ten African blacks to Lisbon—this was the start of a regular trade
in slaves. African blacks had been stamped as slave labor for a hundred years. So it would have
been strange if those twenty blacks, forcibly transported to Jamestown, and sold as objects to
settlers anxious for a steadfast source of labor, were considered as anything but slaves.
Their helplessness made enslavement easier. The Indians were on their own land. The whites
were in their own European culture. The blacks had been torn from their land and culture, forced
into a situation where the heritage of language, dress, custom, family relations, was bit by bit
obliterated except for remnants that blacks could hold on to by sheer, extraordinary persistence.
Was their culture inferior—and so subject to easy destruction? Inferior in military capability,
yes —vulnerable to whites with guns and ships. But in no other way—except that cultures that
are different are often taken as inferior, especially when such a judgment is practical and
profitable. Even militarily, while the Westerners could secure forts on the African coast, they
were unable to subdue the interior and had to come to terms with its chiefs.
The African civilization was as advanced in its own way as that of Europe. In certain ways, it
was more admirable; but it also included cruelties, hierarchical privilege, and the readiness to
sacrifice human lives for religion or profit. It was a civilization of 100 million people, using iron
implements and skilled in farming. It had large urban centers and remarkable achievements in
weaving, ceramics, sculpture.
European travelers in the sixteenth century were impressed with the African kingdoms of
Timbuktu and Mali, already stable and organized at a time when European states were just
beginning to develop into the modern nation. In 1563, Ramusio, secretary to the rulers in Venice,
wrote to the Italian merchants: Let them go and do business with the King of Timbuktu and
Mali and there is no doubt that they will be well-received there with their ships and their goods
and treated well, and granted the favours that they ask...
A Dutch report, around 1602, on the West African kingdom of Benin, said: The Towne
seemeth to be very great, when you enter it. You go into a great broad street, not paved, which
seemeth to be seven or eight times broader than the Warmoes Street in Amsterdam. ...The
Houses in this Towne stand in good order, one close and even with the other, as the Houses in
Holland stand.
The inhabitants of the Guinea Coast were described by one traveler around 1680 as very
civil and good-natured people, easy to be dealt with, condescending to what Europeans require of
them in a civil way, and very ready to return double the presents we make them.
Africa had a kind of feudalism, like Europe based on agriculture, and with hierarchies of lords
and vassals. But African feudalism did not come, as did Europes, out of the slave societies of
Greece and Rome, which had destroyed ancient tribal life. In Africa, tribal life was still
powerful, and some of its better features—a communal spirit, more kindness in law and
punishment—still existed. And because the lords did not have the weapons that European lords
had, they could not command obedience as easily.
In his book The African Slave Trade, Basil Davidson contrasts law in the Congo in the early
sixteenth century with law in Portugal and England. In those European countries, where the idea
of private property was becoming powerful, theft was punished brutally. In England, even as late
as 1740, a child could be hanged for stealing a rag of cotton. But in the Congo, communal life
persisted, the idea of private property was a strange one, and thefts were punished with fines or
various degrees of servitude. A Congolese leader, told of the Portuguese legal codes, asked a
Portuguese once, teasingly: What is the penalty in Portugal for anyone who puts his feet on the
ground?
Slavery existed in the African states, and it was sometimes used by Europeans to justify their
own slave trade. But, as Davidson points out, the slaves of Africa were more like the serfs of
Europe —in other words, like most of the population of Europe. It was a harsh servitude, but
they had rights which slaves brought to America did not have, and they were altogether
different from the human cattle of the slave ships and the American plantations. In the Ashanti
Kingdom of West Africa, one observer noted that a slave might marry; own property; himself
own a slave; swear an oath; be a competent witness and ultimately become heir to his master...
An Ashanti slave, nine cases out of ten, possibly became an adopted member of the family, and
in time his descendants so merged and intermarried with the owners kinsmen that only a few
would know their origin.
One slave trader, John Newton (who later became an antislavery leader), wrote about the
people of what is now Sierra Leone:
The state of slavery, among these wild barbarous people, as we esteem them, is
much milder than in our colonies. For as, on the one hand, they have no land in high
cultivation, like our West India plantations, and therefore no call for that excessive,
unintermitted labour, which exhausts our slaves: so, on the other hand, no man is
permitted to draw blood even from a slave.
African slavery is hardly to be praised. But it was far different from plantation or mining
slavery in the Americas, which was lifelong, morally crippling, destructive of family ties,
without hope of any future. African slavery lacked two elements that made American slavery the
most cruel form of slavery in history: the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic
agriculture; the reduction of the slave to less than human status by the use of racial hatred, with
that relentless clarity based on color, where white was master, black was slave.
In fact, it was because they came from a settled culture, of tribal customs and family ties, of
communal life and traditional ritual, that African blacks found themselves especially helpless
when removed from this. They were captured in the interior (frequently by blacks caught up in
the slave trade themselves), sold on the coast, then shoved into pens with blacks of other tribes,
often speaking different languages.
The conditions of capture and sale were crushing affirmations to the black African of his
helplessness in the face of superior force. The marches to the coast, sometimes for 1,000 miles,
with people shackled around the neck, under whip and gun, were death marches, in which two of
every five blacks died. On the coast, they were kept in cages until they were picked and sold.
One John Barbot, at the end of the seventeenth century, described these cages on the Gold Coast:
As the slaves come down to Fida from the inland country, they are put into a booth
or prison... near the beach, and when the Europeans are to receive them, they are
brought out onto a large plain, where the ships surgeons examine every part of
everyone of them, to the smallest member, men and women being stark naked...
Such as are allowed good and sound are set on one side... marked on the breast with
a red- hot iron, imprinting the mark of the French, English or Dutch companies...
The branded slaves after this are returned to their former booths where they await
shipment, sometimes 10-15 days...
Then they were packed aboard the slave ships, in spaces not much bigger than coffins,
chained together in the dark, wet slime of the ships bottom, choking in the stench of their own
excrement. Documents of the time describe the conditions:
The height, sometimes, between decks, was only eighteen inches; so that the
unfortunate human beings could not turn around, or even on their sides, the
elevation being less than the breadth of their shoulders; and here they are usually
chained to the decks by the neck and legs. In such a place the sense of misery and
suffocation is so great, that the Negroes... are driven to frenzy.
On one occasion, hearing a great noise from belowdecks where the blacks were chained
together, the sailors opened the hatches and found the slaves in different stages of suffocation,
many dead, some having killed others in desperate attempts to breathe. Slaves often jumped
overboard to drown rather than continue their suffering. To one observer a slave-deck was so
covered with blood and mucus that it resembled a slaughter house.
Under these conditions, perhaps one of every three blacks transported overseas died, but the
huge profits (often double the investment on one trip) made it worthwhile for the slave trader,
and so the blacks were packed into the holds like fish.
First the Dutch, then the English, dominated the slave trade. (By 1795 Liverpool had more
than a hundred ships carrying slaves and accounted for half of all the European slave trade.)
Some Americans in New England entered the business, and in 1637 the first American slave
ship, the Desire, sailed from Marblehead. Its holds were partitioned into racks, 2 feet by 6 feet,
with leg irons and bars.
By 1800, 10 to 15 million blacks had been transported as slaves to the Americas, representing
perhaps one-third of those originally seized in Africa. It is roughly estimated that Africa lost 50
million human beings to death and slavery in those centuries we call the beginnings of modern
Western civilization, at the hands of slave traders and plantation owners in Western Europe and
America, the countries deemed the most advanced in the world.
In the year 1610, a Catholic priest in the Americas named Father Sandoval wrote back to a
church functionary in Europe to ask if the capture, transport, and enslavement of African blacks
was legal by church doctrine. A letter dated March 12, 1610, from Brother Luis Brandaon to
Father Sandoval gives the answer:
Your Reverence writes me that you would like to know whether the Negroes who
are sent to your parts have been legally captured. To this I reply that I think your
Reverence should have no scruples on this point, because this is a matter which has
been questioned by the Board of Conscience in Lisbon, and all its members are
learned and conscientious men. Nor did the bishops who were in SaoThome, Cape
Verde, and here in Loando—all learned and virtuous men—find fault with it. We
have been here ourselves for forty years and there have been among us very learned
Fathers... never did they consider the trade as illicit. Therefore we and the Fathers
of Brazil buy these slaves for our service without any scruple...
With all of this—the desperation of the Jamestown settlers for labor, the impossibility of
using Indians and the difficulty of using whites, the availability of blacks offered in greater and
greater numbers by profit-seeking dealers in human flesh, and with such blacks possible to
control because they had just gone through an ordeal which if it did not kill them must have left
them in a state of psychic and physical helplessness—is it any wonder that such blacks were ripe
for enslavement?
And under these conditions, even if some blacks might have been considered servants, would
blacks be treated the same as white servants?
The evidence, from the court records of colonial Virginia, shows that in 1630 a white man
named Hugh Davis was ordered to be soundly whipt... for abusing himself... by defiling his
body in lying with a Negro. Ten years later, six servants and a negro of Mr. Reynolds started
to run away. While the whites received lighter sentences, Emanuel the Negro to receive thirty
stripes and to be burnt in the cheek with the letter R, and to work in shackle one year or more as
his master shall see cause.
Although slavery was not yet regularized or legalized in those first years, the lists of servants
show blacks listed separately. A law passed in 1639 decreed that all persons except Negroes
were to get arms and ammunition—probably to fight off Indians. When in 1640 three servants
tried to run away, the two whites were punished with a lengthening of their service. But, as the
court put it, the third being a negro named John Punch shall serve his master or his assigns for
the time of his natural life. Also in 1640, we have the case of a Negro woman servant who begot
a child by Robert Sweat, a white man. The court ruled that the said negro woman shall be whipt
at the whipping post and the said Sweat shall tomorrow in the forenoon do public penance for his
offense at James citychurch...
This unequal treatment, this developing combination of contempt and oppression, feeling and
action, which we call racism—was this the result of a natural antipathy of white against
black? The question is important, not just as a matter of historical accuracy, but because any
emphasis on natural racism lightens the responsibility of the social system. If racism cant be
shown to be natural, then it is the result of certain conditions, and we are impelled to eliminate
those conditions.
We have no way of testing the behavior of whites and blacks toward one another under
favorable conditions—with no history of subordination, no money incentive for exploitation and
enslavement, no desperation for survival requiring forced labor. All the conditions for black and
white in seventeenth-century America were the opposite of that, all powerfully directed toward
antagonism and mistreatment. Under such conditions even the slightest display of humanity
between the races might be considered evidence of a basic human drive toward community.
Sometimes it is noted that, even before 1600, when the slave trade had just begun, before
Africans were stamped by it—literally and symbolically—the color black was distasteful. In
England, before 1600, it meant, according to the Oxford English Dictionary: Deeply stained
with dirt; soiled, dirty, foul. Having dark or deadly purposes, malignant; pertaining to or
involving death, deadly; baneful, disastrous, sinister. Foul, iniquitous, atrocious, horribly wicked.
Indicating disgrace, censure, liability to punishment, etc. And Elizabethan poetry often used the
color white in connection with beauty.
It may be that, in the absence of any other overriding factor, darkness and blackness,
associated with night and unknown, would take on those meanings. But the presence of another
human being is a powerful fact, and the conditions of that presence are crucial in determining
whether an initial prejudice, against a mere color, divorced from humankind, is turned into
brutality and hatred.
In spite of such preconceptions about blackness, in spite of special subordination of blacks in
the Americas in the seventeenth century, there is evidence that where whites and blacks found
themselves with common problems, common work, common enemy in their master, they
behaved toward one another as equals. As one scholar of slavery, Kenneth Stampp, has put it,
Negro and white servants of the seventeenth century were remarkably unconcerned about the
visible physical differences.
Black and white worked together, fraternized together. The very fact that laws had to be
passed after a while to forbid such relations indicates the strength of that tendency. In 1661 a law
was passed in Virginia that in case any English servant shall run away in company of any
Negroes he would have to give special service for extra years to the master of the runaway
Negro. In 1691, Virginia provided for the banishment of any white man or woman being free
who shall intermarry with a negro, mulatoo, or Indian man or woman bond or free.
There is an enormous difference between a feeling of racial strangeness, perhaps fear, and the
mass enslavement of millions of black people that took place in the Americas. The transition
from one to the other cannot be explained easily by natural tendencies. It is not hard to
understand as the outcome of historical conditions.
Slavery grew as the plantation system grew. The reason is easily traceable to something other
than natural racial repugnance: the number of arriving whites, whether free or indentured
servants (under four to seven years contract), was not enough to meet the need of the plantations.
By 1700, in Virginia, there were 6,000 slaves, one-twelfth of the population. By 1763, there were
170,000 slaves, about half the population.
Blacks were easier to enslave than whites or Indians. But they were still not easy to enslave.
From the beginning, the imported black men and women resisted their enslavement. Ultimately
their resistance was controlled, and slavery was established for 3 million blacks in the South.
Still, under the most difficult conditions, under pain of mutilation and death, throughout their
two hundred years of enslavement in North America, these Afro-Americans continued to rebel.
Only occasionally was there an organized insurrection. More often they showed their refusal to
submit by running away. Even more often, they engaged in sabotage, slowdowns, and subtle
forms of resistance which asserted, if only to themselves and their brothers and sisters, their
dignity as human beings.
The refusal began in Africa. One slave trader reported that Negroes were so wilful and loth
to leave their own country, that they have often leapd out of the canoes, boat and ship into the
sea, and kept under water til they were drowned.
When the very first black slaves were brought into Hispaniola in 1503, the Spanish governor
of Hispaniola complained to the Spanish court that fugitive Negro slaves were teaching
disobedience to the Indians. In the 1520s and 1530s, there were slave revolts in Hispaniola,
Puerto Rico, Santa Marta, and what is now Panama. Shortly after those rebellions, the Spanish
established a special police for chasing fugitive slaves.
A Virginia statute of 1669 referred to the obstinacy of many of them, and in 1680 the
Assembly took note of slave meetings under the pretense of feasts and brawls which they
considered of dangerous consequence. In 1687, in the colonys Northern Neck, a plot was
discovered in which slaves planned to kill all the whites in the area and escape during a mass
funeral.
Gerald Mullin, who studied slave resistance in eighteenth-century Virginia in his work Flight
and Rebellion, reports:
The available sources on slavery in 18th-century Virginia—plantation and county
records, the newspaper advertisements for runaways—describe rebellious slaves
and few others. The slaves described were lazy and thieving; they feigned illnesses,
destroyed crops, stores, tools, and sometimes attacked or killed overseers. They
operated blackmarkets in stolen goods. Runaways were defined as various types,
they were truants (who usually returned voluntarily), outlaws... and slaves who
were actually fugitives: men who visited relatives, went to town to pass as free, or
tried to escape slavery completely, either by boarding ships and leaving the colony,
or banding together in cooperative efforts to establish villages or hide-outs in the
frontier. The commitment of another type of rebellious slave was total; these men
became killers, arsonists, and insurrectionists.
Slaves recently from Africa, still holding on to the heritage of their communal society, would
run away in groups and try to establish villages of runaways out in the wilderness, on the
frontier. Slaves born in America, on the other hand, were more likely to run off alone, and, with
the skills they had learned on the plantation, try to pass as free men.
In the colonial papers of England, a 1729 report from the lieutenant governor of Virginia to
the British Board of Trade tells how a number of Negroes, about fifteen... formed a design to
withdraw from their Master and to fix themselves in the fastnesses of the neighboring
Mountains. They had found means to get into their possession some Arms and Ammunition, and
they took along with them some Provisions, their Cloths, bedding and working Tools... Tho this
attempt has happily been defeated, it ought nevertheless to awaken us into some effectual
measures...
Slavery was immensely profitable to some masters. James Madison told a British visitor
shortly after the American Revolution that he could make $257 on every Negro in a year, and
spend only $12 or $13 on his keep. Another viewpoint was of slaveowner Landon Carter, writing
about fifty years earlier, complaining that his slaves so neglected their work and were so
uncooperative (either cannot or will not work) that he began to wonder if keeping them was
worthwhile.
Some historians have painted a picture—based on the infrequency of organized rebellions and
the ability of the South to maintain slavery for two hundred years—of a slave population made
submissive by their condition; with their African heritage destroyed, they were, as Stanley Elkins
said, made into Sambos, a society of helpless dependents. Or as another historian, Ulrich
Phillips, said, by racial quality submissive. But looking at the totality of slave behavior, at the
resistance of everyday life, from quiet noncooperation in work to running away, the picture
becomes different.
In 1710, warning the Virginia Assembly, Governor Alexander Spotswood said:
...freedom wears a cap which can without a tongue, call together all those who long
to shake off the fetters of slavery and as such an Insurrection would surely be
attended with most dreadful consequences so I we cannot be too early in providing
against it, both by putting our selves in a better posture of defence and by making a
law to prevent the consultations of those Negroes.
Indeed, considering the harshness of …
Chapter 6: THE INTIMATELY OPPRESSED
Chapter 6: THE INTIMATELY OPPRESSED
It is possible, reading standard histories, to forget half the population of the country. The
explorers were men, the landholders and merchants men, the political leaders men, the
military figures men. The very invisibility of women, the overlooking of women, is a sign of
their submerged status.
In this invisibility they were something like black slaves (and thus slave women faced a
double oppression). The biological uniqueness of women, like skin color and facial
characteristics for Negroes, became a basis for treating them as inferiors. True, with women,
there was something more practically important in their biology than skin color-their position
as childbearers-but this was not enough to account for the general push backward for all of
them in society, even those who did not bear children, or those too young or too old for that. It
seems that their physical characteristics became a convenience for men, who could use,
exploit, and cherish someone who was at the same time servant, sex mate, companion, and
bearer-teacher-warden of his children.
Societies based on private property and competition, in which monogamous families
became practical units for work and socialization, found it especially useful to establish this
special status of women, something akin to a house slave in the matter of intimacy and
oppression, and yet requiring, because of that intimacy, and long-term connection with
children, a special patronization, which on occasion, especially in the face of a show of
strength, could slip over into treatment as an equal. An oppression so private would turn out
hard to uproot.
Earlier societies-in America and elsewhere-in which property was held in common and
families were extensive and complicated, with aunts and uncles and grandmothers and
grandfathers all living together, seemed to treat women more as equals than did the white
societies that later overran them, bringing civilization and private property.
In the Zuni tribes of the Southwest, for instance, extended families- large clans-were based
on the woman, whose husband came to live with her family. It was assumed that women
owned the houses, and the fields belonged to the clans, and the women had equal rights to
what was produced. A woman was more secure, because she was with her own family, and
she could divorce the man when she wanted to, keeping their property.
Women in the Plains Indian tribes of the Midwest did not have farming duties but had a
very important place in the tribe as healers, herbalists, and sometimes holy people who gave
advice. When bands lost their male leaders, women would become chieftains. Women learned
to shoot small bows, and they carried knives, because among the Sioux a woman was
supposed to be able to defend herself against attack.
The puberty ceremony of the Sioux was such as to give pride to a young Sioux maiden:
Walk the good road, my daughter, and the buffalo herds wide and dark as cloud
shadows moving over the prairie will follow you... . Be dutiful, respectful, gentle and
modest, my daughter. And proud walking. If the pride and the virtue of the women are
lost, the spring will come but the buffalo trails will turn to grass. Be strong, with the
warm, strong heart of the earth. No people goes down until their women are weak and
dishonored. . ..
It would be an exaggeration to say that women were treated equally with men; but they
were treated with respect, and the communal nature of the society gave them a more important
place.
The conditions under which white settlers came to America created various situations for
women. Where the first settlements consisted almost entirely of men, women were imported
as sex slaves, childbearers, companions. In 1619, the year that the first black slaves came to
Virginia, ninety women arrived at Jamestown on one ship: Agreeable persons, young and
incorrupt... sold with their own consent to settlers as wives, the price to be the cost of their
own transportation.
Many women came in those early years as indentured servants- often teenaged girls-and
lived lives not much different from slaves, except that the term of service had an end. They
were to be obedient to masters and mistresses. The authors of Americans Working Women
(Baxandall, Gordon, and Reverby) describe the situation:
They were poorly paid and often treated rudely and harshly, deprived of good food
and privacy. Of course these terrible conditions provoked resistance. Living in separate
families without much contact with others in their position, indentured servants had one
primary path of resistance open to them: passive resistance, trying to do as little work as
possible and to create difficulties for their masters and mistresses. Of course the masters
and mistresses did not interpret it that way, but saw the difficult behavior of their
servants as sullenness, laziness, malevolence and stupidity.
For instance, the General Court of Connecticut in 1645 ordered that a certain Susan C.,
for her rebellious carriage toward her mistress, to be sent to the house of correction and be
kept to hard labor and coarse diet, to be brought forth the next lecture day to be publicly
corrected, and so to be corrected weekly, until order be given to the contrary.
Sexual abuse of masters against servant girls became commonplace. The court records of
Virginia and other colonies show masters brought into court for this, so we can assume that
these were especially flagrant cases; there must have been many more instances never brought
to public light.
In 1756, Elizabeth Sprigs wrote to her father about her servitude:
What we unfortunate English People suffer here is beyond the probability of you in
England to Conceive, let it suffice that I one of the unhappy Number, am toiling almost
Day and Night, and very often in the Horses druggery, with only this comfort that you
Bitch you do not halfe enough, and then tied up and whippd to that Degree that youd
not serve an Animal, scarce any thing but Indian Corn and Salt to eat and that even
begrudged nay many Negroes are better used, almost naked no shoes nor stockings to
wear ... what rest we can get is to rap ourselves up in a Blanket and ly upon the Ground.
...
Whatever horrors can be imagined in the transport of black slaves to America must be
multiplied for black women, who were often one-third of the cargo. Slave traders reported:
I saw pregnant women give birth to babies while chained to corpses which our
drunken overseers had not removed... . packed spoon-fashion they often gave birth to
children in the scalding perspiration from the human cargo. ... On board the ship was a
young negro woman chained to the deck, who had lost her senses soon after she was
purchased and taken on board.
A woman named Linda Brent who escaped from slavery told of another burden:
But I now entered on my fifteenth year-a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My
master began to whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain
ignorant of their import. . .. My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I
belonged to him, and swearing by heaven and earth that he would compel me to submit
to him. If I went out for a breath of fresh air, after a day of unwearied toil, his footsteps
dogged me. If I knelt by my mothers grave, his dark shadow fell on me even there. The
light heart which nature had given me became heavy with sad forebodings. .. .
Even free white women, not brought as servants or slaves but as wives of the early settlers,
faced special hardships. Eighteen married women came over on the Mayflower. Three were
pregnant, and one of them gave birth to a dead child before they landed. Childbirth and
sickness plagued the women; by the spring, only four of those eighteen women were still
alive.
Those who lived, sharing the work of building a life in the wilderness with their men, were
often given a special respect because they were so badly needed. And when men died, women
often took up the mens work as well. All through the first century and more, women on the
American frontier seemed close to equality with their men.
But all women were burdened with ideas carried over from England with the colonists,
influenced by Christian teachings. English law was summarized in a document of 1632
entitled The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights:
In this consolidation which we call wedlock is a locking together. It is true, that man
and wife arc one person, but understand in what manner. When a small brooke or little
river incorporateth with Rhodanus, Humber, or the Thames, the poor rivulet looseth her
name.... A woman as soon as she is married is called covert ... that is, veiled; as it were,
clouded and overshadowed; she hath lost her surname. I may more truly, farre away,
say to a married woman, Her new self is her superior; her companion, her master. . ..
Julia Spruill describes the womans legal situation in the colonial period: The husbands
control over the wifes person extended to the right of giving her chastisement. . .. But he was
not entitled to inflict permanent injury or death on his wife. . . .
As for property: Besides absolute possession of his wifes personal property and a life
estate in her lands, the husband took any other income that might be hers. He collected wages
earned by her labor. . . . Naturally it followed that the proceeds of the joint labor of husband
and wife belonged to the husband.
For a woman to have a child out of wedlock was a crime, and colonial court records are
full of cases of women being arraigned for bastardy-the father of the child untouched by the
law and on the loose. A colonial periodical of 1747 reproduced a speech of Miss Polly Baker
before a Court of Judicature, at Connecticut near Boston in New England; where she was
prosecuted the fifth time for having a Bastard Child. (The speech was Benjamin Franklins
ironic invention.)
May it please the honourable bench to indulge me in a few words: I am a poor,
unhappy woman, who have no money to fee lawyers to plead for me.. .. This is the fifth
time, gentlemen, that I have been draggd before your court on the same account; twice I
have paid heavy fines, and twice have been brought to publick punishment, for want of
money to pay those fines. This may have been agreeable to the laws, and I dont dispute
it; but since laws are sometimes unreasonable in themselves, and therefore repealed; and
others bear too hard on the subject in particular circumstances ... I take the liberty to
say, that I think this law, by which I am punished, both unreasonable in itself, and
particularly severe with regard to me... . Abstracted from the law, I cannot conceive ...
what the nature of my offense is. Ihave brought five fine children into the world, at the
risque of my life; I have maintained them well by my own industry, without burdening
the township, and would have done it better, if it had not been for the heavy charges and
fines I have paid.. . . nor has anyone the least cause of complaint against me, unless,
perhaps, the ministers of justice, because Ihave had children without being married, by
which they missed a wedding fee. But can this be a fault of mine? .. .
What must poor young women do, whom customs and nature forbid to solicit the
men, and who cannot force themselves upon husbands, when the laws take no care to
provide them any, and yet severely punish them if they do their duty without them; the
duty of the first and great command of nature and natures God, increase and multiply;
a duty from the steady performance of which nothing has been able to deter me, but for
its sake I have hazarded the loss of the publick esteem, and have frequently endured
pub-lick disgrace and punishment; and therefore ought, in my humble opinion, instead
of a whipping, to have a statue erected to my memory.
The fathers position in the family was expressed in The Spectator, an influential periodical
in America and England: Nothing is more gratifying to the mind of man than power or
dominion; and ... as I am the father of a family ... I am perpetually taken up in giving out
orders, in prescribing duties, in hearing parties, in administering justice, and in distributing
rewards and punishments.... In short, sir, I look upon my family as a patriarchal sovereignty in
which I am myself both king and priest.
No wonder that Puritan New England carried over this subjection of women. At a trial of a
woman for daring to complain about the work a carpenter had done for her, one of the
powerful church fathers of Boston, the Reverend John Cotton, said: . . . that the husband
should obey his wife, and not the wife the husband, that is a false principle. For God hath put
another law upon women: wives, be subject to your husbands in all things.
A best-selling pocket book, published in London, was widely read in the American
colonies in the 1700s. It was called Advice to a Daughter:
You must first lay it down for a Foundation in general, That there is Inequality in
Sexes, and that for the better Economy of the World; the Men, who were to be the
Law-givers, had the larger share of Reason bestowd upon them; by which means your
Sex is the better prepard for the Compliance that is necessary for the performance of
those Dudes which seemd to be most properly assignd to it.... Your Sex wanteth our
Reason for your Conduct, and our Strength for your Protection: Ours wanteth your
Gendeness to soften, and to entertain us. ...
Against this powerful education, it is remarkable that women nevertheless rebelled.
Women rebels have always faced special disabilities: they live under the daily eye of their
master; and they are isolated one from the other in households, thus missing the daily
camaraderie which has given heart to rebels of other oppressed groups.
Anne Hutchinson was a religious woman, mother of thirteen children, and knowledgeable
about healing with herbs. She defied the church fathers in the early years of the Massachusetts
Bay Colony by insisting that she, and other ordinary people, could interpret the Bible for
themselves. A good speaker, she held meetings to which more and more women came (and
even a few men), and soon groups of sixty or more were gathering at her home in Boston to
listen to her criticisms of local ministers. John Winthrop, the governor, described her as a
woman of a haughty and fierce carriage, of a nimble wit and active spirit, and a very voluble
tongue, more bold than a man, though in understanding and judgement, inferior to many
women.
Anne Hutchinson was put on trial twice: by the church for heresy, and by the government
for challenging their authority. At her civil trial she was pregnant and ill, but they did not
allow her to sit down until she was close to collapse. At her religious trial she was interrogated
for weeks, and again she was sick, but challenged her questioners with expert knowledge of
the Bible and remarkable eloquence. When finally she repented in writing, they were not
satisfied. They said: Her repentance is not in her countenance.
She was banished from the colony, and when she left for Rhode Island in 1638, thirty-five
families followed her. Then she went to the shores of Long Island, where Indians who had
been defrauded of their land thought she was one of their enemies; they killed her and her
family. Twenty years later, the one person back in Massachusetts Bay who had spoken up for
her during her trial, Mary Dyer, was hanged by the government of the colony, along with two
other Quakers, for rebellion, sedition, and presumptuous obtruding themselves.
It remained rare for women to participate openly in public affairs, although on the southern
and western frontiers conditions made this occasionally possible. Julia Spruill found in
Georgias early records the story of Mary Musgrove Mathews, daughter of an Indian mother
and an English father, who could speak the Creek language and became an adviser on Indian
affairs to Governor James Oglethorpe of Georgia. Spruill finds that as the communities
became more settled, women were thrust back farther from public life and seemed to behave
more timorously than before. One petition: It is not the province of our sex to reason deeply
upon the policy of the order.
During the Revolution, however, Spruill reports, the necessities of war brought women out
into public affairs. Women formed patriotic groups, carried out anti-British actions, wrote
articles for independence. They were active in the campaign against the British tea tax, which
made tea prices intolerably high. They organized Daughters of Liberty groups, boycotting
British goods, urging women to make their own clothes and buy only American-made things.
In 1777 there was a womens counterpart to the Boston lea Party-a coffee party, described
by Abigail Adams in a letter to her husband John:
One eminent, wealthy, stingy merchant (who is a bachelor) had a hogshead of coffee
in his store, which he refused to sell the committee under six shillings per pound. A
number of females, some say a hundred, some say more, assembled with a cart and
trunks, marched down to the warehouse, and demanded the keys, which he refused to
deliver. Upon which one of them seized him by his neck and tossed him into the cart.
Upon his finding no quarter, he delivered the keys when they tipped up the cart and
discharged him; then opened the warehouse, hoisted out the coffee themselves, put it into
the trunks and drove off. ... A large concourse of men stood amazed, silent spectators of
the whole transaction.
It has been pointed out by women historians recently that the contributions of
working-class women in the American Revolution have been mostly ignored, unlike the
genteel wives of the leaders (Dolly Madison, Martha Washington, Abigail Adams). Margaret
Corbin, called Dirty Kate, Deborah Sampson Garnet, and Molly Pitcher were rough,
lower-class women, prettified into ladies by historians. While poor women, in the last years of
the fighting, went to army encampments, helped, and fought, they were represented later as
prostitutes, whereas Martha Washington was given a special place in history books for visiting
her husband at Valley Forge.
When feminist impulses are recorded, they are, almost always, the writings of privileged
women who had some status from which to speak freely, more opportunity to write and have
their writings recorded. Abigail Adams, even before the Declaration of Independence, in
March of 1776, wrote to her husband:
... in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I
desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous to them than your
ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power in the hands of husbands. Remember, all
men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention are not paid to the
ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound to
obey the laws in which we have no voice of representation.
Nevertheless, Jefferson underscored his phrase all men are created equal by his statement
that American women would be too wise to wrinkle their foreheads with politics. And after
the Revolution, none of the new state constitutions granted women the right to vote, except for
New Jersey, and that state rescinded the right in 1807. New Yorks constitution specifically
disfranchised women by using the word male.
While perhaps 90 percent of the white male population were literate around 1750, only 40
percent of the women were. Working-class women had little means of communicating, and no
means of recording whatever sentiments of rebelliousness they may have felt at their
subordination. Not only were they bearing children in great numbers, under great hardships,
but they were working in the home. Around the time of the Declaration of Independence, four
thousand women and children in Philadelphia were spinning at home for local plants under the
putting out system. Women also were shopkeepers and innkeepers and engaged in many
trades. They were bakers, tinworkers, brewers, tanners, ropemakers, lumberjacks, printers,
morticians, woodworkers, stay-makers, and more.
Ideas of female equality were in the air during and after the Revolution, Tom Paine spoke
out for the equal rights of women. And the pioneering book of Mary Wollstonecraft in
England, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, was reprinted in the United States shortly
after the Revolutionary War. Wollstonecraft was responding to the English conservative and
opponent of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke, who had written in his Reflections on the
Revolution in France that a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order.
She wrote:
I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body,
and to convince them that soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and
refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those
beings who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love . .. will soon become objects
of contempt.. . .
I wish to show that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a
human being, regardless of the distinction of sex.
Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, so many elements of American
society were changing-the growth of population, the movement westward, the development of
the factory system, expansion of political rights for white men, educational growth to match
the new economic needs-that changes were bound to take place in the situation of women. In
preindustrial America, the practical need for women in a frontier society had produced some
measure of equality; women worked at important jobs-publishing newspapers, managing
tanneries, keeping taverns, engaging in skilled work. In certain professions, like midwifery,
they had a monopoly. Nancy Cott tells of a grandmother, Martha Moore Ballard, on a farm in
Maine in 1795, who baked and brewed, pickled and preserved, spun and sewed, made soap
and dipped candles and who, in twenty-five years as a midwife, delivered more than a
thousand babies. Since education took place inside the family, women had a special role there.
There was complex movement in different directions. Now, women were being pulled out
of the house and into industrial life, while at the same time there was pressure for women to
stay home where they were more easily controlled. The outside world, breaking into the solid
cubicle of the home, created fears and tensions in the dominant male world, and brought forth
ideological controls to replace the loosening family controls: the idea of the womans place,
promulgated by men, was accepted by many women.
As the economy developed, men dominated as mechanics and tradesmen, and
aggressiveness became more and more defined as a male trait. Women, perhaps precisely
because more of them were moving into the dangerous world outside, were told to be passive.
Clothing styles developed- for the rich and middle class of course, but, as always, there was
the intimidation of style even for the poor-in which the weight of womens clothes, corsets and
petticoats, emphasized female separation from the world of activity.
It became important to develop a set of ideas, taught in church, in school, and in the
family, to keep women in their place even as that place became more and more unsettled.
Barbara Welter (Dimity Convictions) has shown how powerful was the cult of true
womanhood in the years after 1820. The woman was expected to be pious. A man writing in
The Ladies Repository: Religion is exactly what a woman needs, for it gives her that dignity
that bests suits her dependence. Mrs. John Sandford, in her book Woman, in Her Social and
Domestic Character, said: Religion is just what woman needs. Without it she is ever restless
or unhappy.
Sexual purity was to be the special virtue of a woman. It was assumed that men, as a
matter of biological nature, would sin, but woman must not surrender. As one male author
said: If you do, you will be left in silent sadness to bewail your credulity, imbecility,
duplicity, and premature prostitution. A woman wrote that females would get into trouble if
they were high spirited not prudent.
The role began early, with adolescence. Obedience prepared the girl for submission to the
first proper mate. Barbara Welter describes this:
The assumption is twofold: the American female was supposed to be so infinitely
lovable and provocative that a healthy male could barely control himself when in the
same room with her, and the same girl, as she conies out of the cocoon of her familys
protectiveness, is so palpitating with undirected affection, so filled to the brim with
tender feelings, that she fixes her love on the first person she sees. She awakes from the
midsummer nights dream of adolescence, and it is the responsibility of her family and
society to see that her eyes fall on a suitable match and not some clown with the head of
an ass. They do their part by such restrictive measures as segregated (by sex and/or
class) schools, dancing classes, travel, and other external controls. She is required to
exert the inner control of obedience. The combination forms a kind of societal chastity
belt which is not unlocked until the marriage partner has arrived, and adolescence is
formally over.
When Amelia Bloomer in 1851 suggested in her feminist publication that women wear a
kind of short skirt and pants, to free themselves from the encumbrances of traditional dress,
this was attacked in the popular womens literature. One story has a girl admiring the
bloomer costume, but her professor admonishes her that they are only one of the many
manifestations of that wild spirit of socialism and agrarian radicalism which is at present so
rife in our land.
In The Young Ladys Book of 1830: ,.. in whatever situation of life a woman is placed
from her cradle to her grave, a spirit of obedience and submission, pliability of temper, and
humility of mind, are required from her. And one woman wrote, in 1850, in the book
Greenwood Leaves: True feminine genius is ever timid, doubtful, and clingingly dependent; a
perpetual childhood. Another book, Recollections of a Southern Matron: If any habit of his
annoyed me, I spoke of it once or twice, calmly, then bore it quietly. Giving women Rules
for Conjugal and Domestic Happiness, one book ended with: Do not expect too much.
The womans job was to keep the home cheerful, maintain religion, he nurse, cook,
cleaner, seamstress, flower arranger. A woman shouldnt read too much, and certain books
should be avoided. When Harriet Martineau, a reformer of the 1830s, wrote Society in
America, one reviewer suggested it he kept away from women: Such reading will unsettle
them for their true station and pursuits, and they will throw the world back again into
confusion.
A sermon preached in 1808 in New York:
How interesting and important are the duties devolved on females as wives . .. the
counsellor and friend of the husband; who makes it her daily study to lighten his cares,
to soothe his sorrows, and to augment his joys; who, like a guardian angel, watches over
his interests, warns him against dangers, comforts him under trials; and by her pious,
assiduous, and attractive deportment, constantly endeavors to render him more
virtuous, more useful, more honourable, and more happy.
Women were also urged, especially since they had the job of educating children, to he
patriotic. One womens magazine offered a prize to the woman who wrote the best essay on
How May an American Woman Best Show Her Patriotism.
It was in the 1820s and 1830s, Nancy Cott tells us (The Bonds of Womanhood), that there
was an outpouring of novels, poems, essays, sermons, and manuals on the family, children,
and womens role. The world outside was becoming harder, more commercial, more
demanding. In a sense, the home carried a longing for some Utopian past, some refuge from
immediacy.
Perhaps it made acceptance of the new economy easier to be able to see it as only part of
life, with the home a haven. In 1819, one pious wife wrote: . . . the air of the world is
poisonous. You must carry an antidote with you, or the infection will prove fetal. All this was
not, as Cott points out, to challenge the world of commerce, industry, competition, capitalism,
but to make it more palatable.
The cult of domesticity for the woman was a way of pacifying her with a doctrine of
separate but equal-giving her work equally as important as the mans, but separate and
different. Inside that equality there was …
Concerning Violence – FRANTZ FANON (Excerpted from The Wretched Of The Earth)
National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people,
commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced,
decolonization is always a violent phenomenon. At whatever level we study it— relationships
between individuals, new names for sports clubs, the human admixture at cocktail parties, in the
police, on the directing boards of national or private banks— decolonization is quite simply the
replacing of a certain “species” of men by another “species” of men. Without any period of
transition, there is a total, complete, and absolute substitution. It is true that we could equally
well stress the rise of a new nation, the setting up of a new state, its diplomatic relations, and its
economic and political trends. But we have precisely chosen to speak of that kind of tabula rasa
which characterizes at the outset all decolonization. Its unusual importance is that it constitutes,
from the very first day, the minimum demands of the colonized. To tell the truth, the proof of
success lies in a whole social structure being changed from the bottom up. The extraordinary
importance of this change is that it is willed, called for, demanded. The need for this change
exists in its crude state, impetuous and compelling, in the consciousness and in the lives of the
men and women who are colonized. But the possibility of this change is equally experienced in
the form of a terrifying future in the consciousness of another “species” of men and women: the
colonizers. Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a
program of complete disorder. But it cannot come as a result of magical practices, nor of a
natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding. Decolonization, as we know, is a historical
process: that is to say that it cannot be understood, it cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself
except in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and
content. Decolonization is the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature,
which in fact owe their originality to that sort of substantification which results from and is
nourished by the situation in the colonies. Their first encounter was marked by violence and their
existence together— that is to say the exploitation of the native by the settler— was carried on
by dint of a great array of bayonets and cannons. The settler and the native are old acquaintances.
In fact, the settler is right when he speaks of knowing “them” well. For it is the settler who has
brought the native into existence and who perpetuates his existence. The settler owes the fact of
his very existence, that is to say, his property, to the colonial system. Decolonization never takes
place unnoticed, for it influences individuals and modifies them fundamentally. It transforms
spectators crushed with their inessentiality into privileged actors, with the grandiose glare of
history’s floodlights upon them. It brings a natural rhythm into existence, introduced by new
men, and with it a new language and new humanity. Decolonization is the veritable creation of
new men. But this creation owes nothing of its legitimacy to any supernatural power; the “thing”
which has been colonized becomes man during the same process by which it frees itself. In
decolonization, there is therefore the need of a complete calling in question of the colonial
situation. If we wish to describe it precisely, we might find it in the well-known words: “The last
shall be first and the first last.” Decolonization is the putting into practice of this sentence. That
is why, if we try to describe it, all decolonization is successful. The naked truth of decolonization
evokes for us the searing bullets and bloodstained knives which emanate from it. For if the last
shall be first, this will only come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two
protagonists. That affirmed intention to place the last at the head of things, and to make them
climb at a pace (too quickly, some say) the well-known steps which characterize an organized
society, can only triumph if we use all means to turn the scale, including, of course, that of
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violence. You do not turn any society, however primitive it may be, upside down with such a
program if you have not decided from the very beginning, that is to say from the actual
formulation of that program, to overcome all the obstacles that you will come across in so doing.
The native who decides to put the program into practice, and to become its moving force, is
ready for violence at all times. From birth it is clear to him that this narrow world, strewn with
prohibitions, can only be called in question by absolute violence. The colonial world is a world
divided into compartments. It is probably unnecessary to recall the existence of native quarters
and European quarters, of schools for natives and schools for Europeans; in the same way we
need not recall apartheid in South Africa. Yet, if we examine closely this system of
compartments, we will at least be able to reveal the lines of force it implies. This approach to the
colonial world, its ordering, and its geographical layout will allow us to mark out the lines on
which a decolonized society will be reorganized. The colonial world is a world cut in two. The
dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations. In the colonies it is the
policeman and the soldier who are the official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesmen of the
settler and his rule of oppression. In capitalist societies the educational system, whether lay or
clerical, the structure of moral reflexes handed down from father to son, the exemplary honesty
of workers who are given a medal after fifty years of good and loyal service, and the affection
which springs from harmonious relations and good behavior— all these aesthetic expressions of
respect for the established order serve to create around the exploited person an atmosphere of
submission and of inhibition which lightens the task of policing considerably. In the capitalist
countries a multitude of moral teachers, counselors, and “be-wilderers” separate the exploited
from those in power. In the colonial countries, on the contrary, the policeman and the soldier, by
their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native
and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents
of government speak the language of pure force. The intermediary does not lighten the
oppression, nor seek to hide the domination; he shows them up and puts them into practice with
the clear conscience of an upholder of the peace; yet he is the bringer of violence into the home
and into the mind of the native. The zone where the natives live is not complementary to the
zone inhabited by the settlers. The two zones are opposed, but not in the service of a higher
unity. Obedient to the rules of pure Aristotelian logic, they both follow the principle of reciprocal
exclusivity. No conciliation is possible, for of the two terms, one is superfluous. The settlers’
town is a strongly built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly lit town; the streets are
covered with asphalt, and the garbage cans swallow all the leavings, unseen, unknown, and
hardly thought about. The settler’s feet are never visible, except perhaps in the sea; but there
you’re never close enough to see them. His feet are protected by strong shoes although the streets
of his town are clean and even, with no holes or stones. The settler’s town is a well-fed town, an
easygoing town; its belly is always full of good things. The settlers’ town is a town of white
people, of foreigners. The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, the
Negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute.
They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how.
It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other, and their huts are built
one on top of the other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of
coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing in
the mire. It is a town of niggers and dirty Arabs. The look that the native turns on the settler’s
town is a look of lust, a look of envy; it expresses his dreams of possession— all manner of
possession: to sit at the settler’s table, to sleep in the settler’s bed, with his wife if possible. The
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colonized man is an envious man. And this the settler knows very well; when their glances meet
he ascertains bitterly, always on the defensive, “They want to take our place.” It is true, for there
is no native who does not dream at least once a day of setting himself up in the settler’s place.
This world divided into compartments, this world cut in two is inhabited by two different
species. The originality of the colonial context is that economic reality, inequality, and the
immense difference of ways of life never come to mask the human realities. When you examine
at close quarters the colonial context, it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with
the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given species. In the colonies the
economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich
because you are white, you are white because you are rich. This is why Marxist analysis should
always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem.
Everything up to and including the very nature of pre-capitalist society, so well explained
by Marx, must here be thought out again. The serf is in essence different from the knight, but a
reference to divine right is necessary to legitimize this statutory difference. In the colonies, the
foreigner coming from another country imposed his rule by means of guns and machines. In
defiance of his successful transplantation, in spite of his appropriation, the settler still remains a
foreigner. It is neither the act of owning factories, nor estates, nor a bank balance which
distinguishes the governing classes. The governing race is first and foremost those who come
from elsewhere, those who are unlike the original inhabitants, “the others.” The violence which
has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world, which has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for
the destruction of native social forms and broken up without reserve the systems of reference of
the economy, the customs of dress and external life, that same violence will be claimed and taken
over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges
into the forbidden quarters. To wreck the colonial world is henceforward a mental picture of
action which is very clear, very easy to understand, and which may be assumed by each one of
the individuals which constitute the colonized people. To break up the colonial world does not
mean that after the frontiers have been abolished lines of communication will be set up between
the two zones. The destruction of the colonial world is no more and no less that the abolition of
one zone, its burial in the depths of the earth or its expulsion from the country.
. . . . .
The problem of truth ought also to be considered. In every age, among the people, truth is the
property of the national cause. No absolute verity, no discourse on the purity of the soul, can
shake this position. The native replies to the living lie of the colonial situation by an equal
falsehood. His dealings with his fellow-nationals are open; they are strained and
incomprehensible with regard to the settlers. Truth is that which hurries on the break-up of the
colonialist regime; it is that which promotes the emergence of the nation; it is all that protects the
natives, and ruins the foreigners. In this colonialist context there is no truthful behavior, and the
good is quite simply that which is evil for “them.” Thus we see that the primary Manicheanism
which governed colonial society is preserved intact during the period of decolonization; that is to
say that the settler never ceases to be the enemy, the opponent, the foe that must be overthrown.
The oppressor, in his own sphere, starts the process, a process of domination, of exploitation, and
of pillage, and in the other sphere, the coiled plundered creature which is the native provides
fodder for the process as best he can, the process which moves uninterruptedly from the banks of
the colonial territory to the palaces and the docks of the mother country. In this becalmed zone
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the sea has a smooth surface, the palm tree stirs gently in the breeze, the waves lap against the
pebbles, and raw materials are ceaselessly transported, justifying the presence of the settler: and
all the while the native, bent double, more dead than alive, exists interminably in an unchanging
dream. The settler makes history; his life is an epoch, an Odyssey. He is the absolute beginning:
“This land was created by us”; he is the unceasing cause: “If we leave, all is lost, and the country
will go back to the Middle Ages.” Over against him torpid creatures, wasted by fevers, obsessed
by ancestral customs, form an almost inorganic background for the innovating dynamism
of colonial mercantilism. The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because
he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is
the extension of that mother country. Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the
country which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all that she skims off, all
that she violates and starves. The immobility to which the native is condemned can only be
called in question if the native decides to put an end to the history of colonization— the history
of pillage— and to bring into existence the history of the nation— the history of decolonization.
A world divided into compartments, a motionless, Manichean world, a world of statues: the
statue of the general who carried out the conquest, the statue of the engineer who built the
bridge: a world which is sure of itself, which crushes with its stones the backs flayed by whips;
this is the colonial world. The native is a being hemmed in; apartheid is simply one form of the
division into compartments of the colonial world. The first thing which the native learns is to
stay in his place, and not to go beyond certain limits. This is why the dreams of the native are
always of muscular prowess; his dreams are of action and of aggression. I dream I am jumping,
swimming, running, climbing; I dream that I burst out laughing, that I span a river in one stride,
or that I am followed by a flood of motorcars which never catch up with me. During the period
of colonization, the native never stops achieving his freedom from nine in the evening until six in
the morning. The colonized man will first manifest this aggressiveness which has been deposited
in his bones against his own people. This is the period when the niggers beat each other up, and
the police and magistrates do not know which way to turn when faced with the astonishing
waves of crime in North Africa. We shall see later how this phenomenon should be judged.
When the native is confronted with the colonial order of things, he finds he is in a state of
permanent tension. The settler’s world is a hostile world, which spurns the native, but at the
same time it is a world of which he is envious. We have seen that the native never ceases to
dream of putting himself in the place of the settler— not of becoming the settler but of
substituting himself for the settler. This hostile world, ponderous and aggressive because it fends
off the colonized masses with all the harshness it is capable of, represents not merely a hell from
which the swiftest flight possible is desirable, but also a paradise close at hand which is guarded
by terrible watchdogs.
. . . . .
The peasantry is systematically disregarded for the most part by the propaganda put out by the
nationalist parties. And is clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary,
for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class
system, is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no
compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonization and decolonization are simply a question
of relative strength. The exploited man sees that his liberation implies the use of all means, and
that of force first and foremost. When in 1956, after the capitulation of Monsieur Guy Mollet to
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the settlers in Algeria, the Front de Liberation Nationale, in a famous leaflet, stated that
colonialism only loosens its hold when the knife is at its throat, no Algerian really found these
terms too violent. The leaflet only expressed what every Algerian felt at heart: colonialism is not
a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural
state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence. At the decisive moment, the
colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It
introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-
violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of
the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they and that it is therefore
urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence is an attempt to
settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been
performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed. But if the masses,
without waiting for the chairs to be arranged around the baize table, listen to their own voice and
begin committing outrages and setting fire to buildings, the elite and the nationalist bourgeois
parties will be seen rushing to the colonialists to exclaim, “This is very serious! We do not know
how it will end; we must find a solution— some sort of compromise.” This idea of compromise
is very important in the phenomenon of decolonization, for it is very far from being a simple one.
Compromise involves the colonial system and the young nationalist bourgeoisie at one and the
same time. The partisans of the colonial system discover that the masses may destroy everything.
Blown-up bridges, ravaged farms, repressions, and fighting harshly disrupt the economy.
Compromise is equally attractive to the nationalist bourgeoisie, who since they are not clearly
aware of the possible consequences of the rising storm, are genuinely afraid of being swept away
by this huge hurricane and never stop saying to the settlers: “We are still capable of stopping the
slaughter; the masses still have confidence in us; act quickly if you do not want to put everything
in jeopardy.” One step more, and the leader of the nationalist party keeps his distance with regard
to that violence. He loudly proclaims that he has nothing to do with these Mau-Mau, these
terrorists, these throat-slitters. At best, he shuts himself off in a no man’s land between the
terrorists and the settlers and willingly offers his services as go-between; that is to say, that as the
settlers cannot discuss terms with these Mau-Mau, he himself will be quite willing to begin
negotiations. Thus it is that the rear guard of the national struggle, that very party of people who
have never ceased to be on the other side in the fight, find themselves somersaulted into the can
of negotiations and compromise— precisely because that party has taken very good care never to
break contact with colonialism. Before negotiations have been set afoot, the majority of
nationalist parties confine themselves for the most part to explaining and excusing this
“savagery.” They do not assert that the people have to use physical force, and it sometimes even
happens that they go so far as to condemn, in private, the spectacular deeds which are declared to
be hateful by the press and public opinion in the mother country. The legitimate excuse for this
ultra-conservative policy is the desire to see things in an objective light; but this traditional
attitude of the native intellectual and of the leaders of the nationalist parties is not, in reality, in
the least objective. For in fact they are not at all convinced that this impatient violence of the
masses is the most efficient means of defending their own interests. Moreover, there are some
individuals who are convinced of the ineffectiveness of violence methods; for them, there is no
doubt about it, every attempt to break colonial oppression by force is a hopeless effort, an
attempt at suicide, because in the innermost recesses of their brains the settler’s tanks and
airplanes occupy a huge place. When they are told “Action must be taken,” they see bombs
raining down on them, armored cars coming at them on every path, machine-gunning and police
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action … and they sit quiet. They are beaten from the start. There is no need to demonstrate their
incapacity to triumph by violent methods; they take it for granted in their everyday life and in
their political maneuvers. They have remained in the same childish position as Engels took up in
his famous polemic with that monument of puerility, Monsieur Dühring:
In the same way that Robinson [Crusoe] was able to obtain a sword, we can just as well suppose
that [Man] Friday might appear one fine morning with a loaded revolver in his hand, and from
then on the whole relationship of violence is reversed: Man Friday gives the orders and Crusoe
is obliged to work Thus, the revolver triumphs over the sword, and even the most childish
believer in axioms will doubtless form the conclusion that violence is not a simple act of will, but
needs for its realization certain very concrete preliminary conditions, and in particular the
implements of violence; and the more highly developed of those implements will carry the day
against primitive ones. Moreover, the very fact of the ability to produce such weapons signifies
that the producer of highly developed weapons, in every day speech, the arms manufacturer,
triumphs over the producer of primitive weapons. To put it briefly, the triumph of violence
depends upon the production of armaments, and this in its turn depends on production in
general, and thus … on economic strength, on the economy of the State, and in the last resort on
the material means which that violence commands.
In fact, the leaders of reform have nothing else to say than: “With what are you going to fight the
settlers? With your knives? Your shotguns?” It is true that weapons are important when violence
comes into play, since all finally depends on the distribution of these implements. But it so
happens that the liberation of colonial countries throws new light on the subject. For example,
we have seen that during the Spanish campaign, which was a very genuine colonial war,
Napoleon, in spite of an army which reached in the offensives of the spring of 1810 the huge
figure of 400,000 men, was forced to retreat. Yet the French army made the whole of Europe
tremble by its weapons of war, by the bravery of its soldiers, and by the military genius of its
leaders. Face to face with the enormous potentials of the Napoleonic troops, the Spaniards,
inspired by an unshakeable national ardor, rediscovered the famous methods of guerilla war-fare
which, twenty-five years before, the American militia had tried out on the English forces. But the
native’s guerilla warfare would be of no value as opposed to other means of violence if it did not
form a new element in the worldwide process of competition between trusts and monopolies. In
the early days of colonization, a single column could occupy immense stretches of country: the
Congo, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, and so on. Today, however, the colonized countries’ national
struggle crops up in a completely new international situation. Capitalism, in its early days, saw in
the colonies a source of raw materials which, once turned into manufactured goods, could be
distributed on the European market. After a phase of accumulation of capital, capitalism has
today come to modify its conception of the profit-earning capacity of a commercial enterprise.
The colonies have become a market. The colonial population is a customer who is ready to buy
goods; consequently, if the garrison has to be perpetually reinforced, if buying and selling
slackens off, that is to say if manufactured and finished goods can no longer be exported, there is
clear proof that the solution of military force must be set aside. A blind domination founded on
slavery is not economically speaking worthwhile for the bourgeoisie of the mother country. The
monopolistic group within this bourgeoisie does not support a government whose policy is solely
that of the sword. What the factory-owners and finance magnates of the mother country expect
from their government is not that it should decimate the colonial peoples, but that it should
santhoshchandrashekar
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safeguard with the help of economic conventions their own “legitimate interests.” Thus there
exists a sort of detached complicity between capitalism and the violent forces which blaze up in
colonial territory. What is more, the native is not alone against the oppressor, for indeed there is
also the political and diplomatic support of progressive countries and peoples. But above all
there is competition, that pitiless war which financial groups wage upon each other. A Berlin
Conference was able to tear Africa into shreds and divide her up between three or four imperial
flags. At the moment, the important thing is not whether such-and-such a region in Africa is
under French or Belgian sovereignty, but rather that the economic zones are respected. Today,
wars of repression are no longer waged against rebel sultans; everything is more elegant, less
bloodthirsty; the liquidation of the Castro regime will be quite peaceful. They do all they can to
strangle Guinea and they eliminate Mosaddeq. Thus the nationalist leader who is frightened of
violence is wrong if he imagines that colonialism is going to “massacre all of us.” The military
will of course go on playing with tin soldiers which date from the time of the conquest, but
higher finance will soon bring the truth home to them.
. . . . .
Let us return to considering the single combat between native and settler. We have seen that it
takes the form of an armed and open struggle. There is no lack of historical examples: Indo-
China, Indonesia, and of course North Africa. But what we must not lose sight of is that this
struggle could have broken out anywhere, in Guinea as well as Somaliland, and moreover today
it could break out in every place where colonialism means to stay on, in Angola, for example.
The existence of an armed struggle shows that the people are decided to trust to violent methods
only. He of whom they have never stopped saying that the only language he understands is that
of force, decides to give utterance by force. In fact, as always, the settler has shown him the way
he should take if he is to become free. The argument the native chooses has been furnished by
the settler, and by an ironic turning of the tables it is the native who now affirms that the
colonialist understands nothing but force. The colonial regime owes its legitimacy to force and at
no time tried to hide this aspect of things. Every statue, whether of Faidherbe or of Lyautey, of
Bugeaud or of Sergeant Blandan— all these conquistadors perched on colonial soil do not cease
from proclaiming one and the same …
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1981
The Uses of Anger The Uses of Anger
Audre Lorde
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KEYNOTE ADDRESS: THE NWSA CONVENTION
The Uses of Anger
Audre Larde
Racism. The belief in the inherent superiority of one race over
all others and thereby the right to dominance, manifest and
implied.
Women respond to racism. My response to racism is anger. I
have lived with that anger, on that anger, beneath that anger, on
top of that anger, ignoring that anger, feeding upon that anger,
learning to use that anger before it laid my visions to waste, for
most ofmy life. Once I did it in silence , afraid of the weight of that
anger. My fear of that anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that
anger will teach you nothing, also.
Women responding to racism means women responding to
anger, the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial
distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, mis-
naming, betrayal, and coopting.
My anger is a response to racist attitudes, to the actions and
presumptions that arise out of those attitudes. If in your dealings
with other women your actions have reflected those attitudes ,
then my anger and your attendant fears, perhaps, are spotlights
that can be used for your growth in the same way I have had to use
learning to express anger for my growth. But for corrective
surgery, not guilt . Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall
against which we will all perish, for they serve none of our futures.
Because I do not want this to become a theoretical discussion, I
am going to give a few examples of interchanges between women
that I hope will illustrate the points I am trying to make. In the
interest of time, I am going to cut them short. I want you to know
that there were many more.
For example:
• I speak out of a direct and particular anger at a particular
academic conference , and a white woman comes up and says,
Tell me how you feel but dont say it too harshly or I cannot hear
you . But is it my manner that keeps her from hearing, or the
message that her life may change?
• The Womens Studies Program of a southern university
invites a Black woman to read following a week-long forum on
Black and white women . What has this week given to you? I ask .
The most vocal white woman says, I think Ive gotten a lot. I feel
Black women really understand me a lot better now ; they have a
better idea of where Im coming from. As if understanding her lay
at the core of the racist problem. These are the bricks that go into
the walls against which we will bash our consciousness , unless we
recognize that they can be taken apart.
• After fifteen years of a womens movement which professes to
address the life concerns and possible futures of all women, I still
hear, on campus after campus , How can we address the issues of
racism? No women of Color attended . Or, the other side of that
statement, We have no one in our department equipped to teach
Audre Lorde.
their work . In other words , racism is a Black womens problem , a
problem of women of Color, and only we can discuss it.
• After I have read from my work entitled Poems for Women
in Rage a white woman asks me, Are you going to do anything
with how we can deal directly with our anger? I feel its so impor-
tant. I ask, How do you use your rage? And then I have tot urn
away from the blank look in her eyes , before she can invite me to
participate in her own annihilation. Because I do not exist to feel
her anger for her.
• White women are beginning to examine their relationships to
Black women, yet often I hear you wanting only to deal with the
little colored children across the roads of childhood, the beloved nurse-
maid, the occasional second-grade classmate ; those tender memo-
ries of what was once mysterious and intriguing or neutral. You
avoid the childhood assumptions formed by _the raucous laughter
at Rastus and Oatmeal, the acute message of your mommys
handkerchief spread upon the park bench because I had just been
sitting there, the indelible and dehumanizing portraits of Amos
and Andy and your Daddys humorous bedtime stories.
I wheel my two-year-old daughter in a shopping cart through
a supermarket in Eastchester in 1967 and a little white girl riding
past in her mothers cart calls out excitedly , Oh look, Mommy, a
baby maid! And your mother shushes you, but she does not
correct you. And so , fifteen years later, at a conference on racism,
you can still find that story humorous. But I hear your laughter is
full of terror and dis-ease.
Womens Studies Quarterly 9:3 (Fall 1981) 7
• At an international cultural gathering of women, a well-
known white American woman poet interrupts the reading of the
work of women of Color to read her own poem, and then dashes
off to an important panel.
• Do women in the academy truly want a dialogue about
racism? It will require recognizing the needs and the living con-
texts of other women. When an academic woman says, for
instance, I cant afford it, she may mean she is making a choice
about how to spend her available money. But when a woman on
welfare says, I cant afford it, she means she is surviving on an
amount of money that was barely subsistence in 1972, and she
often does not have enough to eat. Yet the National Womens
Studies Association here in I 981 holds a Convention in which it
commits itself to responding to racism, yet refuses to waive the
registration fee for poor women and women of Color who wished
to present and conduct workshops. This has made it impossible
for many women of Color-for instance, Wilmette Brown, of
Black Women for Wages for Housework-to participate in this
Convention. And so I ask again: Is this to be merely another
situation of the academy discussing life within the closed circuits
of the academy?
To all the white women here who recognize these attitudes as
familiar, but most of all, to all my sisters of Color who live and
survive thousands of such encounters-to my sisters of Color who
like me still tremble their rage under harness, or who sometimes
question the expression of our rage as useless and disruptive (the
two most popular accusations), I want to speak about anger, my
anger, and what I have learned from my travels through its
dominions.
Everything can be used. except 11·hat is wasteful. You 11·ill need
to ·remember this. when you are accused o.ldestruction.
Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially
useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional,
which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can
become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.
And when I speak of change . I do not mean a simple switch of
positions or a temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to
smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration
in all those assumptions underlining our lives.
I have seen situations where whit e women hear a racist remark,
resent what has been said. become filled with fury. and remain
silent, because they are afraid. That unexpressed anger lies within
them like an undetonated device, usually to be hurled at the first
woman of Color who talks about racism.
But anger expressed and translated into action in the service of
our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of
clarification , for it is in the painful process of this translation that
we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differenc-
es, and who are our genuine enemies .
Anger is loaded with information and energy . When I speak of
women of Color, I do not only mean Black women. We are also
Asian American , Caribbean , Chicana, Latina, Hispanic, Native
Americ a n , and we have a right to each of our nam es. The woman
of Color who charges me with rendering her invisible by assuming
that her struggles with racism are identical with my own has
something to tell me that I had better learn from, lest we both
8 Wom e ns Studi es Quart erly 9:3 (Fall 1981)
waste ourselves fighting the truths between us. If I participate,
knowingly or otherwise, in my sisters oppression and she calls me
on it, to answer her anger with my own only blankets the sub-
stance of our exchange with reaction. It wastes energy I need to
join with her. And yes, it is very difficult to stand still and to listen
to another womans voice delineate an agony I do not share, or
even one in which I myself may have participated.
We speak in this place removed from the more blatant remind-
ers of our em battlement as women. This need not blind us to the
size and complexities of the forces mounting against us and all
that is most human within our environment. We are not here as
women examining racism in a political and social vacuum. We
operate in the teeth of a system for whom racism and sexism are
primary, established, and necessary props of profit. Women
responding to racism is a topic so dangerous that when the local
media attempt to discredit this Convention they choose to focus
upon the provision of Lesbian housing as a diversionary de-
vice-as if the Hartford Courant dare not mention the topic chosen
for discussion here, racism, lest it become apparent that women
are in fact attempting to examine and to alter all the repressive
conditions of our lives.
Mainstream communication does not want women, particu-
larly white women, responding to racism. It wants racism to be
accepted as an immutable given in the fabric of existence, like
evening time or the common cold.
So we are working in a context of opposition and threat, the
cause of which is certainly not the angers which lie between us, but
rather that virulent hatred leveled against all women, people of
Color, Lesbians and gay men, poor people-against all of us who
are seeking to examine the particulars of our lives as we resist our
oppressions, moving toward coalition and effective action.
Any discussion among women about racism must include the
recognition and the use of anger. It must be direct and creative,
because it is crucial. We cannot allow our fear of anger to deflect
us nor to seduce us into settling for anything less than the hard
work of excavating honesty; we must be quite serious about the
choice of this topic and the angers entwined within it, because, rest
assured, our opponents are quite serious about their hatred of us
and of what we are trying to do here.
And while we scrutinize the often painful face of each others
anger, please remember that it is not our anger which makes me
caution you to lock your doors at night, and not to wander the
streets of Hartford alone. It is the hatred which lurks in those
streets, that urge to destroy us all if we truly work for change
rather than merely indulge in our academic rhetoric.
This hatred and our anger are very different. Hatred is the fury
of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and
destruction. Anger is the grief of distortions between peers, and its
object is change. But our time is getting shorter. We have been
raised to view any difference other than sex as a reason for
destruction , and for Black women and white women to face each
others angers without denial or immobilization or silence or guilt
is in itself a heretical and generative idea . It implies peers meetin g
upon a common basis to examine difference, and to alter those
distortions which history has created around difference . For it is
those distortions which separate us. And we must ask ourselves:
Who profits from all this?
Women of Color in America have grown up within a symphony
of anguish at being silenced, at being unchosen, at knowing that
when we survive, it is in spite of a whole world out there that takes
for granted our lack of humanness, that hates our very existence,
outside of its service. And I say symphony rather than cacoph-
ony because we have had to learn to orchestrate those furies so
that they do not tear us apart. We have had to learn to move
through them and use them for strength and force and insight
within our daily lives. Those of us who did not learn this difficult
lesson did not survive. And part of my anger is always libation for
my fallen sisters.
Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes , as is fury
when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change. To
those women here who fear the anger of women of Color more
than their own unscrutinized racist attitudes , I ask: Is our anger
more threatening than the woman-hatred that tinges all the
aspects of our lives?
It is not the anger of other women that will destroy us, but our
refusals to stand still , to listen to its rhythms , to learn within it, to
move beyond the manner of presentation to the substance, to tap
that anger as an important source of empowerment.
I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings , nor
answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts.
Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to ones own
actions or lack of action. I fit leads to change then it can be useful,
since it becomes no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge .
Yet all too often , guilt is just another name for impotence, for
defensiveness destructive of communication ; it becomes a device
to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they
are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.
Most women have not developed tools for facing anger con-
structively . CR groups in the past , largely white, dealt with how to
express anger, usually at the world of men . And these groups were
made up of white women who shared the terms of their oppres-
sions . There was usually little attempt to articulate the genuine
differences between women , such as those of race, color, class, and
sexual identity. There was no apparent need at that tim e to exam -
ine the contradictions of self , woman, as oppressor. There was
work on expressing anger , but very little on anger directed against
each other. No tools were developed to deal with other womens
anger except to avoid it, deflect it, or flee from it under a blanket
of guilt.
I have no creative use for guilt , yours or my own. Guilt is only
another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of
the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching
storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees. If I speak to
you in anger , at least I have spoken to you ; I have not put a gun to
your head and shot you down in the street; I have not looked at
your bleeding sisters body and asked, What did she do to deserve
it? This was the reaction of two white women to Mary Church
Terrells telling of the lynching of a pregnant Black woman whose
baby was then torn from her body. That was in 1921, and Alice
Paul had just refused to publicly endorse the enforcement of the
Nineteenth Amendment for all women -excluding the women of
Color who had worked to help bring about that amendment.
The angers between women will not kill us if we can articulate
them with precision, if we listen to the content of what is said with
at least as much intensity as we defend ourselves from the manner
of saying. Anger is a source of empowerment we must not fear to
tap for energy rather than guilt. When we turn from anger we turn
from insight, saying we will accept only the designs already
known , those deadly and safely familiar. I have tried to learn my
angers usefulness to me, as well as its limitations.
For women raised to fear, too often anger threatens annihilation.
In the male construct of brute force, we were taught that our lives
depended upon the good will of patriarchal power. The anger of
others was to be avoided at all costs, because there was nothing to
be learned from it but pain, a judgment that we had been bad girls,
come up lacking, not done what we were supposed to do. And ifwe
accept our powerlessness , then of course any anger can destroy us.
But the strength of women lies in recognizing differences
between us as creative, and in standing to those distortions which
we inherited without blame but which are now ours to alter. The
angers of women can transform differences through insight into
power. For anger between peers births change, not destruction,
and the discomfort and sense of loss it often causes is not fatal, but
a sign of growth.
My response to racism is anger. That anger has eaten clefts into
my living only when it remained unspoken, useless to anyone. It
has also served me in classrooms without light or learning, where
the work and history of Black women was less than a vapor. It has
served me as fire in the ice zone of uncomprehending eyes of white
women who see in my experience and the experience ofmy people
only new reasons for fear or guilt. And my anger is no excuse for
not dealing with your blindness, no reason to withdraw from the
results of your own actions.
When women of Color speak out of the anger that laces so many
of our contacts with white women, we are often told that we are
creating a mood of hopelessness, preventing white women
from getting past guilt, or standing in the way of trusting com-
munication and action. All these quotes come directly from
letters to me from members of this organi zation within the last two
years . One woman wrote, B ecause you are Black and Lesbian,
you seem to speak with the moral authority of suffering . Yes, I
am Black and Lesbian , and what you hear in my voice is fury , not
suffering. Anger, not moral authority . There is a difference.
To turn aside from the anger of Black women with excuses or
the pretexts of intimidation, is to award no one power-it is
merely another way of preserving racial blindness, the power of
unaddressed privilege, unbreached, intact. For guilt is only yet
another form of objectification. Oppressed peoples are always
being asked to stretch a little more, to bridge the gap between
blindness and humanity . Black women are expected to use our
anger only in the service of other peoples salvation, other peoples
learning. But that time is over . My anger has meant pain to me but
it has also meant survival, and before I give it up Im going to be
sure that there is something at least as powerful to replace it on the
road to clarity.
What woman here is so enamoured of her own oppression. her
own oppressed status, that she cannot see her heelprint upon
another womans face? What womans terms of oppression have
Womens Studies Quarterly 9:3 (Fall 1981) 9
become precious and necessary as a ticket into the fold of the
righteous, away from the cold winds of self-scrutiny?
1 am a Lesbian woman of Color whose children eat regularly
because I work in a university. If their full bellies make me fail to
recognize my commonality with a woman of Color whose children
do not eat because she cannot find work, or who has no children
because her insides are rotted from home abortions and steriliza-
tion ; if I fail to recognize the Lesbian who chooses not to have
children, the woman who remains closeted because her homo-
phobic community is her only life support, the woman who
chooses silence instead of another death, the woman who is terri-
fied lest my anger trigger the explosion of hers; if I fail to recognize
them as other faces of myself, then I am contributing not only to
each of their oppressions but also to my own, and the anger which
stands between us then must be used for clarity and mutual
empowerment , not for evasion by guilt or for further separation. I
am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are
very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one
person of Color remains chained. Nor is any one of you.
I speak here as a woman of Color who is not bent upon destruc-
tion, but upon survival. No woman is responsible for altering the
psyche of her oppressor, even when that psyche is embodied in
another woman. I have suckled the wolfs lip of anger and I have
used it for illumination, laughter, protection, fire in places where
there was no light, no food, no sisters, no quarter. We are not
goddesses or matriarc hs or edifices of divine forgiveness; we are
not fiery fingers of judgment or instruments of flage llation; we are
women always forced back upon our womans power. We have
learned to use anger as we have learned to use the dead flesh of
animals; and bruised , battered, and changing, we have survived
and grown and, in Angela Wilsons words, we are moving on .
With or without uncolored women. We use whatever strengths we
have fought for, including anger, to help define and fashion a
world where all our sisters can grow, where our children can love,
and where the power of touching and meeting another womans
difference and wonder will eventually transcend the need for
destruction .
For it is not the anger of Black women which is dripping down
over this globe like a diseased liquid. It is not my anger that
launches rockets, spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on
missiles and other agents of war and death, pushes opera singers
off rooftops, slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and
chemical bombs, sodomizes our daughters and our earth. It is not
the anger of Black women which corrodes into blind, dehumaniz -
ing power, bent upon the annihilation of us all unless we meet it
with what we have, our power to examine and to redefine the
terms upon which we will live and work ; our power to envision
and to reconstruct, anger by painful anger, stone upon heavy
stone, a future of pollinating difference and the earth to support
our choices.
We welcome all women who can meet us, face to face, beyond
objectification and beyond guilt.
Copyright © 1981 by Audre Lorde
Audre Lo rdes Chosen Poems and her bio-myth-ography en-
titled Ive Been Standing on This Street Corner a Hell of a Long
Time will be out in 1982.
AN OVERVIEW OF THE THIRD ANNUAL NSWA CONVENTION
A Time for Confrontation
Deborah S. Rosenfelt
If exhilaration characterized the first annual NWSA Convention
in Lawrence , Kansas, and consolidation the second in Blooming-
ton, this third Convention on Women Respond to Racismwas a
time for confrontation. That word , of course, can imply either a
squar ing-off-against or a facing-together -with. Both processes
were enacted at the Convention, perhaps inevitably , given a theme
that acknowledged and permitted a certain kind of political strug-
gle. The tone was set in opening addresses by Adrienne Rich and
Audre Lorde, which prepared us for the necessary, painful , yet
productive expression of anger. Some were disheartened by the
speeches, feeling that in these days of the primacy oft he New Right
and the Moral Majority , anger among women who are essentially
allies is a luxury we can littl e afford. Others saw the speeches as
essential renderings of th e complexity of relations between women
of color and white women, something that has to be acknowledged
before and during the larger undertakings on which we work
together.
The Convention program included more than 200 workshops,
10 Womens Studies Quarterly 9:3 (Fall 1981)
panels, and roundtables on topics ranging from theory about the
intersections of sex, race, class, and affectional preference in
society and culture, to strategies for institutional change; from the
history and literature of women of color and that of their relation-
ship with white women , to discussions of the issues now faced by
women trying to work together in multiethnic programs and pro -
jects; from developin g multicultural curricula in various educa -
tional contexts, to analyzing the roles of women in Third World
countries. These international panels, by all accounts, were some
of the better-attended and more exciting of the sessions. One Con-
vention-goer, by careful timing, managed to hear John etta Cole and
Sonia Alvarez speaR on Sex, Race, and Socialist Transforma-
tion in Cuba and Nicara gua ; catch Stephanie Urdang in another
session on Women and Anti -Colonial Struggles; and take in a
bit of a panel on International Women Respond to Racism ,
moderated by Aziza al-Hibri , before participating in her own
session on The Role of Women in National Development and
Revolution in the Third World. The Convention program alone
The Uses of Anger
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Original Article
To Protect and Serve Whiteness
By Orisanmi Burton
Introduction
Critics of policing often utter the phrase, “To Protect and Serve,” in order to point out the gap
between discourses of ethical policing and practices of punitive policing in black communities. This
refrain, deployed at some moments with irony and at others with supplication, reveals a widespread
comprehension that black communities are not the subjects of police protection, but the objects of police
coercion and that individuals belonging to the category of black — whether by virtue of phenotype,
family history, economic status, or geographic location — are not citizens for whom the public good is
extended.1 As the title of this article makes clear, I suggest this tagline is woefully incomplete and that
a more appropriate representation of the policing function is “To Protect and Serve whiteness.”
The present moment has presented an opening for appraisals and critiques of policing and its
relationship to race. During the summer of 2014, police killings of Eric Garner and Michael
Brown — both unarmed black men — stimulated widespread protests and political organization.
These mobilizations were informed and inflected by the long durée of resistance against antiblack
police violence (Williams 2015). Since the 1990s, the application of “order–maintenance,” a pervasive
policing philosophy that prioritizes low-level “quality of life” violations over violent crimes has been
subjected to sustained criticism for the harm it has inflicted on black communities (Giroux 2003;
Harcourt 2001; Herbert 2001; Howell 2009; Wacquant 2009b). 2 Touted by law enforcement enthusiasts
as a proven method for enhancing public safety (Bratton and Knobler 2009), critics argue that order–
maintenance functions as a “social cleansing strategy” for eliminating undesirable populations (Smith
2001).
This analysis shifts the locus of critique away from the problems of “racially discriminatory” policing
practices and “excessive” police force. Although it is critically important for scholars and activists to
uncover, critique, and interrupt these forms of structural and direct state violence, the conceptual
differentiation between mundane and excessive acts of police abuse betrays a general incapacity to
think about extrajudicial antiblack violence as imbricated in policing itself. As Martinot and Sexton
(2003:172) argue, policing is a “regime of violence that operates in two registers, terror and the
seduction into the fraudulent ethics of social order; a double economy of terror, structured by a ritual
of incessant performance.” A black person is killed by a police officer, security guard, or vigilante every
28 h (MXGM 2013), while past and present order–maintenance regimes inflict an incalculable number
of non-lethal, civil, and human rights abuses against black people every day (CCR 2012). Thus on the
one hand, extrajudicial violence occurs so often that it has become a banal fact of American life. While
on the other hand, the aggregate effect of order–maintenance policing is nothing short of extraordinary.
1It is instructive that in 1950s, when the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) adopted this phrase as its official motto, LAPD Police Chief
William Parker at the same time wielded the organization as a weapon in his racial crusade against “interracial vice,” public housing, and
a drug epidemic that was conveniently localized in black South Central and Latino East Los Angeles (Davis 2006).
2Order–maintenance has also had devastating impacts on LGBTQ people, homeless people, youth, non-citizens, Muslim communities, and
South Asian communities.
North American Dialogue 18.2, pp. 38–50, ISSN 1556-4819. © 2015 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/nad.12032
bs_bs_banner
38 North American Dialogue
The problematization of “police brutality” tacitly naturalizes the forms of psychic violence, dehuman-
ization, and dispossession inflicted in routine and professional encounters between police and black
people.
This article opens with an account of a mundane instance of racialized police violence; an encounter
I observed in which the officers involved performed their duties with the utmost professionalism, yet
still enacted antiblack violence. Next I assert that policing in the United States is always already
racialized policing. It is an enterprise centrally concerned with the protection of whiteness and the
regulation of black life. I then present a genealogy of the order–maintenance approach, and of policing
more broadly, through an examination of slave patrols in the US south. I argue that not only is policing
an instrument of law enforcement, but that it also shapes and maintains racial meanings. I close by
demonstrating that the extrajudicial killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, which sparked wide-
spread unrest, occurred within a milieu of pervasive structural violence and that the intensification of
political mobilization around policing, although sparked by direct acts of police violence, are in fact a
generalized rejection of policing itself.
A Mundane Account of Racialized Police Violence
On a Thursday afternoon in April of 2015, my wife J and I took our 3-year-old son to play in
Community Center Park, an idyllic outdoor space in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The park features a
vast expanse of open space, play equipment for children, a rose garden, a jogging path, basketball
courts, a stream, hiking trails, and picnic tables situated beneath oak trees. The community center
stands adjacent to the parking lot and features public restrooms, indoor basketball courts, and a
swimming pool.
On this particular day, the park was not heavily attended. I saw a man sipping from a Starbucks cup
as he tracked his child on the jungle gym; a woman thumbing away on her phone while playing catch
with three children; but I soon became transfixed with a teenager who was playing outside by himself.
I watched as this black boy, about 16 years of age, repeatedly ran and then tumbled into summersaults.
He leapt to his feet, thrusting his hands into the air. He climbed and then jumped off boulders. With
each jump he executed an air kick or air punch. Upon landing these moves he confidently proclaimed,
“I am the greatest,” or “I’m the best in the world.” I noticed that others were also looking at the boy.
Their faces revealed a range of expressions — from amused to annoyed, yet the boy was undaunted. I
smiled to myself, thinking about how nice it would feel to be so uninhibited. I looked down to find that
my son was also staring at the boy, but on his face was a look of awe. He was clearly impressed by the
boy’s athleticism.
My family began to leave about 30 min later, but before heading to our car we walked over to meet
the boy. He greeted us politely, introducing himself as TK. Now that we were close, I saw that TK was
wearing a World Wrestling Federation belt, the kind with a giant golden crest in the center. Suddenly,
his behavior made sense. TK was an aspiring wrestler who was using the park to practice his form and
showmanship. He bent over and gently shook my son’s little hand. Smiling, TK took off his wrestling
belt and let my son hold it. Before we left, he told us that he would be the best wrestler in the world one
day.
Moments later, as we made our way to the parking lot, a man emerged from the community center,
dashing toward us. “I’m sorry to bother you,” he said, “but did that man threaten you?”
“What?” I blurted, startled and confused by the question.
“Did he threaten you?” the man asked again. “We received a complaint that he is threatening
people.”
To Protect and Serve Whiteness 39
“No,” J said. “We were just talking to him. He is very sweet. He is having fun and pretending to be
a wrestler. Our son wanted to meet him so we brought him over to talk.”
“Oh, well we had several complaints,” the man said. “But sorry to bother you,” he added, walking
away.
J and I looked at each other and shook our heads, wordlessly acknowledging the racial subtext to this
exchange. I was about to get in the car, but she thought to go back to TK in order to contact a guardian.
After about 5 min of waiting by the car with our son I spotted a police car pulling into the parking lot.
Knowing, without having to be told, that they had arrived for TK, I picked up my son and walked over
to where he and J were standing. She was leaving a voicemail for someone. I told TK that the police
were coming to talk to him and asked if it was okay if we could stand next to him. He nodded silently.
Moments later, two uniformed officers crossed the parking lot, walking directly to TK. When they
asked his name, TK with his head slightly bowed, responded with his full first and last name. This
simple gesture of disclosing his given name as opposed to his nickname spoke volumes. It signaled that
TK knew the drill so to speak. He knew the proper way to engage with state authority. Perhaps he had
been coached, as I once was. The officers also appraised us, but before they could ask we told them we
were his friends. Satisfied, they turned back to TK, verbally assuring him that he was not in trouble.
They asked him where he lived. TK told them his street address, which was just minutes from the park.
“Is your mother at home?” an officer asked. J again interjected, telling the two officers that she left
a voicemail on his mother’s phone.
“Do you come out here a lot?” the officer asked TK.
“Yes sir,” TK said.
The officers then asked permission to walk him home. He verbally agreed. And so TK left the park,
escorted by two officers, one at each side. I did not follow them. Instead, I watched as they walked
away. I felt a profound mixture of anger and sadness, unable to wrap my mind around how it was
possible that I could feel compelled to introduce my son to this young man, to shake his hand and speak
to him, while someone else could interpret him as a threat. Once TK was beyond my view, I saw that
the other park guests had been watching us. One of them, a white man, was sitting on a picnic table,
smoking a cigarette, an unambiguous violation of both park rules and a city ordinance.
Protecting Whiteness/Policing Blackness
The police did not threaten, or brutalize, or kill TK. But what he experienced was racialized police
violence. His play was perceived as a threat, and for that he was questioned and expelled from a public
space by state agents authorized to use lethal force. The insistent question of whether or not the officers
involved acted out of conscious or unconscious antiblack bias is irrelevant because in their role as police
officers they are structurally placed in opposition to blackness.
In using the terms “blackness” and “whiteness” I am not attempting to reify historically contingent
categories of human difference. Nor am I seeking to reduce the actual range of racial and ethnic
identities, identifications and experiences into an uncomplicated binary. Rather, I seek to enunciate two
of the paradigmatic locations on the socio-historical hierarchy that structure the modern world (Fanon
1967; Reyes 2009; Smith 2012; Wilderson III 2010).3 Drawing on scholarship in Critical Whiteness
3This article is concerned with how policing shapes relations between whiteness and blackness, but as Smith (2012), Wilderson (2010),
and many others have argued, the category of native also constitutes a paradigmatic racial category.
40 North American Dialogue
Studies (Frankenberg 1997; Harris 1993; Lipsitz 2006; Roediger 1994), I conceptualize whiteness as a
structural position atop the racial order and blackness as that which must always be policed. Whiteness
extols capital accumulation over all other objectives and it afflicts its proprietors with a twin condition
of blindness and aphasia, inhibiting their capacity to recognize the discriminatory public policies, or
name the forms of genocidal violence that make whiteness possible. And because it requires public
recognition and acceptance of its norms and values, whiteness places a premium on social homogeni-
zation. Whiteness is simultaneously produced by and productive of the hegemonic structure of white
supremacy — a racially ordered regime of dominance.
As a mode of social life, whiteness is not exclusively tied to white bodies. To the contrary, whiteness
is all-too-often desired, pursued, and even inhabited (albeit tenuously) by phenotypically non-white
people. In other words, white supremacy is a multicultural project (Rodríguez 2011; Smith 2012). But
whiteness always stands on tenuous ground. It requires constant maintenance amidst the unbroken
tradition of black resistance and recursive political–economic crises. These disruptions produce
moments like the current one, moments in which whiteness threatens to become visible as a problem.
Blackness too is constituted by particular affective, ethical and political ways of inhabiting the world
(Lipsitz 2011; Vargas 2006; Vargas 2010). However, the present analysis is specifically concerned with
the ways in people who inhabit black bodies become floating signifiers for threat that require policing.
Judith Butler, responding to an earlier moment in which policing came under scrutiny, draws upon
Fanon (1967) to theorize the fear induced by the gendered black body:
The black body is circumscribed as dangerous, prior to any gesture, any raising of the hand, and the infantilized white
reader is positioned in the scene as one who is helpless in relation to that black body, as one definitely in need of
protection by his/her mother or, perhaps, the police. The fear is that some physical distance will be crossed, and the
virgin sanctity of whiteness will be endangered by that proximity. The police are thus structurally placed to protect
whiteness against violence, where violence is the imminent action of that black male body. (Butler 1993:18)
Thinking through TK’s encounter using Butler’s conceptualization, we see that TK did not need to
intentionally threaten anyone. His very being was a threat. His black body became a “phobogenic
object” (Fanon 1967:151) that disrupted white public space.
Although Butler provides us with an indispensible conceptualization of the black male body as
immanently threatening, black women and gender non-conforming people are also interpellated as
objects of policing. Under New York’s Stop and Frisk program, black women and black men are
stopped by police at comparable rates (Crenshaw et al. 2015). Not only are black women routinely
subjected to physical brutality and killed during police encounters, they also experience forms of
physiological and psychological punishment that are distinct from those typically enacted against
black men. These forms of patriarchal police violence include sexual threats and intimidation,
groping and/or bodily penetration under the guise of “performing a thorough search,” rapes and
sexual assaults, failure to protect black women who are being assaulted, failure to attend to injuries
or illnesses leading to further injury or death, and arresting or otherwise punishing black women
who seek the protection of the police from an abusive intimate partner (Crenshaw et al. 2015; Law
2014; Richie 2012).
Research into the brain’s limbic system has yielded a preponderance of empirical evidence showing
that black bodies are seen to represent physical danger and are thus experienced as threats (Chekroud
et al. 2014; Phelps et al. 2000). Additionally, the legal archive provides extensive testimonial material to
this effect. Take, for example, the Grand Jury testimony of Darren Wilson, the officer with the Ferguson
Police Department (FPD) who shot unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, to death, sparking an
initial wave of unrest that suddenly rendered the violence of policing and the problem of whiteness
visible. Wilson’s justification for killing Brown evinces what Waytz et al. (2014) call
To Protect and Serve Whiteness 41
“superhumanization bias” — the attribution of supernatural, extrasensory, and/or magical capacities
to phenotypically black people. Wilson narrated his fear for his life in language that imbued Brown
with the capacity to expand his body mass and run through bullets:
I shoot another round of shots ... At this point it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots, like
it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him. And the face that he had was looking [sic] straight through me, like
I wasn’t even there, I wasn’t even anything in his way (N.A. 2014:228).
Furthermore, Wilson’s discursive juxtaposition of Brown’s inviolable black body with his own
defenseless, almost phantasmal whiteness typifies the dialectics of the racial myth: white virtue
requires black threat. As Fine and Ruglis (2009:21) note, “the strategic production of whiteness as
security, innocence, and merit teeters dangerously and precariously upon the exclusion and contain-
ment of black and Brown bodies.” In Wilson’s account, Brown was not unarmed. His body was a lethal
object. It was driving the action, shaping the terms of the encounter, and compelling the inevitability of
its own annihilation. Wilson was merely reacting to the situation:
He had started to lean forward ... like he was going to just tackle me, just go right through me ... I saw the last [bullet]
go into him. And then when it went into him, the demeanor on his face went blank, the aggression was gone, it was
gone, I mean, I knew he stopped, the threat was stopped” (N.A. 2014:229).
A Genealogy of “Order–Maintenance” Policing in North America
During the past 30 years, “order–maintenance policing,” alternatively known as “broken windows
policing,” has imparted the veneer of scientific legitimacy to the antiblack policing function by couch-
ing the social liquidation of undesirable populations in the vernacular of public safety. First concep-
tualized in 1982 by conservative intellectuals James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, the order–
maintenance approach asserts that public disorder and violent crime are “inextricably linked, in a kind
of developmental sequence” (Wilson and Kelling 1982:3). Wilson and Kelling argue that policing
undesirable acts such as public urination, public drunkenness, and vagrancy, as well as the undesirable
people who perpetrate these acts, will deter “serious crime.”4 Although both of these foundational
premises have been thoroughly disputed (Harcourt 2001; Rosenfeld 2002; Taylor 2001), order–
maintenance policing has ascended to the level of law enforcement common sense (Wacquant 2009a).
Order–maintenance policing is nothing new. Indeed in their elaboration of the concept, Wilson and
Kelling pine for a return to the style of policing prevalent “during the earliest days of the nation” in
which night watchmen “[maintained] order against the chief threats to order — fire, wild animals, and
disreputable behavior” (Wilson and Kelling 1982:2). But here the duo neglects to unambiguously
reference another chief threat to order: the nation’s enslaved black population. Following Bass (2001),
Hadden (2001), Reichel (1988), and Williams (2007), I argue that in order to understand policing and the
order–maintenance imperative as foundationally antiblack, we must account for the evolution of
modern policing through southern slave patrols. As we will see, policing and the order–maintenance
imperative developed in the slave holding states out of the need to curtail black mobility, punish minor
affronts to white supremacy, and guard against the ever-present threat of black insurrection.
In the early 1700s, planters in South Carolina found themselves outnumbered by a ballooning slave
population and vulnerable to organized slave revolt. Inspired by the Barbados Slave Act of 1661, which
4I have placed this term in scare quotes because normative criminological discourse employs a very narrow state-sanctioned definition of
what constitutes a crime. For a thorough critique see Christie (2004).
42 North American Dialogue
established the legal basis for classifying slaves as chattel property, Carolina planters passed a 1704 law
creating the first slave patrol (Hadden 2001). These patrols were organized groups of armed white men
who roamed the territory, policing and surveilling the black population — enslaved and free alike.
According to the law, patrolling was intended “to prevent such insurrections and mischief as from the
great number of slaves we have reason to suspect may happen when the greater part of the inhabitants
are drawn together” (Henry 1914:31). As they searched homes, checked “papers,” dispersed gather-
ings, apprehended fugitives, and meted out corporal punishment for non-compliance, patrollers
sought to occlude the possibility of black private space and black resistance. Black spaces and black
bodies were to remain visible, yet isolated and exploitable by a white policing public:
The duties of this patrol were to visit each plantation in its beat at least once per month, chastising any slave found
absenting himself from home without a pass, administering twenty lashes as a maximum; to search the negro
dwellings, confiscating any firearms that might be in the home or any goods that they might have good reason to
believe have been stolen; to enter any tippling house or any other house whatever, where any one of them might have
seen a slave enter. Any fowls or provisions found in the hands of any negro who is away from home without a ticket
might be appropriated to the patrolman’s own use (Henry 1914:33).
The policing powers of slave patrols developed gradually, through an accretion of laws that
responded to shifting social, political and economic conditions and an unbroken tradition of black
resistance (Genovese 1992). Following the lead of South Carolina, patrols formed in North Carolina,
Georgia, Virginia, and throughout the southern colonies. A law passed in Virginia in 1705 granted
citizens of the commonwealth the right to “kill or destroy” runaway slaves without fear of legal
reprisal (Reichel 1988:57). The Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 empowered slave owners to “seize and
arrest” fugitive slaves from across states lines, expanding the geography of policing powers in North
America.
Initially, free white men, mostly of meager social standing, were conscripted from militias and
legally compelled to participate in the patrol system, but by 1734 slave patrols were populated by a
broad range of southern white society. They also began receiving remuneration for patrolling, an
important step in the long durée of police professionalization (Hadden 2001). The policing of slaves
was a powerful symbolic force in the constitution of racial meanings. It signaled to whites that,
whether or not they profited directly from slavery, the defense of white supremacy and the regula-
tion of black mobility was their civic obligation. Whiteness, and white masculinity in particular,
became tied to the capacity to control and enact violence upon black bodies. The Fugitive Slave Act
of 1850 helped to formalize this relation by penalizing whites that failed to capture and return
escaped slaves.
Following the conclusion of the Civil War, the passage of the 13th amendment abolished de jure
chattel slavery but legally preserved the master/slave relationship under a new logic of racial criminal-
ization (James 2005). But even partial abolition, along with the passage of the 14th amendment, placed
the “intelligibility and collectivity of whiteness” in crisis (Omi and Winant 2014:76). The beleaguered
structure of white supremacy required new forms of antiblack violence in order to sustain itself. As
Hadden (2001) notes, the duty of meting out this violence shifted from slave patrollers to Klansmen and
policemen.
With the passage of the Black Codes during the post-reconstruction period, “crime” became a cipher
for blackness. In what was perhaps a precursor to modern order–maintenance policing, officers were
tasked with enforcing newly emerging laws against mundane acts of vagrancy, unemployment, loi-
tering, and public drunkenness. These laws were enforced almost exclusively against blacks (Davis
1998). Once ensnared in the criminal justice system, black prison–slaves were leased to individuals and
corporations. They were also exploited directly by state governments and once again forced to labor on
To Protect and Serve Whiteness 43
plantations, in mines, and on chain gangs (Blackmon 2009). As Du Bois (1999:698) notes, “in no part of
the modern world has there been so open and conscious a traffic in crime for deliberate social
degradation and private profit as in the South since slavery.” This legally codified system of racial
criminalization, which ensnared roughly 800 000 black men and women between 1865 and 1942
(Blackmon 2009), could not have functioned without hypervigilant, antiblack policing.
Antiblack policing was not solely a southern phenomenon. In the US north during the 19th century,
bars and clubs that were reputed to encourage race mixture became frequent sites of white riots and
mass (black) arrests (Roediger 1991:103). During the opening decades of the 20th century, police
violence often took the form of selective enforcement. Communities of European immigrants, many of
questionable whiteness, enacted organized violence against black migrants seeking to settle in northern
urban centers. Riots, bombings, murders, and intimidation were pervasive, in part because in many
cases, the police openly supported these acts and neglected to arrest the assailants (Massey 1993;
Sugrue 2014).
In his book The Condemnation of Blackness, Khalil Gibran Muhammad (2010:227) argues that early
20th century “vice districts” — spaces where drugs, alcohol, and prostitution were permit-
ted — formed in northern black ghettos with the “active support of politicians and police officers.”
Selective police enforcement helped to forge the enduring link between spaces of criminality and
immorality and black spaces. Muhammad also demonstrates that in the 1930s, the emergence of crime
statistics and the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports lent scientific credence to the already pervasive notion
that blacks were an innately criminal population. The circulation of this narrative as science was
enabled by crime “experts,” who presented this overrepresentation of blacks in the crime reporting
tables as empirical evidence of disproportionate criminality, foreclosing the possibility that the figures
reflected racially discriminatory policing.
As Dylan Rodríguez (2012:105) notes, “the diverse and complex practices of police violence are not
only inseparable from the institutional evolution of policing in the last half century, they are essential
to the very institutional integrity and identity of the U.S. police regime writ large.”5 History shows us
that policing in North America is always already racialized policing. Its historical development has
been inflected by white supremacy, here conceptualized not as a discreet historical moment, but as an
ongoing regime that requires constant reformulation and maintenance. Policing performs this mainte-
nance by monitoring and shoring up the fault lines between the deserving, innocent and presumed
white “us” and the ungovernable, guilty and irredeemably black “them.” In the following section, I
assert that contemporary policing continues to serve this function through both “excessive” acts of
violence and banal forms of daily regulation.
Linking the Excessive to the Mundane in Order–Maintenance Regimes
Beginning in 2014, widespread political unrest emerged around the issue of antiblack police violence
in the United States. These mobilizations — protests, riots, teach-ins, walk-outs, civil disobedience,
writing, art, and the formation of new organizations — were most immediately sparked by two widely
5Rodriguez also suggests that a robust genealogy of racialized policing in North America should account for colonial military outfits, Texas
Rangers, and white citizens militias, which targeted colonial subjects and native populations as objects of control. I would also add that
in addition to slave patrolling, the institution of policing was formalized through the regulation European immigrants, particularly the Irish,
in the urban US north. However, as these groups were gradually incorporated into whiteness their oppressive relationship to policing
changed.
44 North American Dialogue
publicized killings of unarmed black men by police. On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner, a 43-year-old,
unarmed black man was choked to death by the New York Police Department (NYPD) officer Daniel
Pantaleo. A bystander-recorded video of the homicide was uploaded to YouTube, showing four NYPD
officers pinning the non-resistant Garner to the ground as …
4
Are You Upholding White Supremacy?
Are you a racist? No? Great! Are you sure? Few people are willing to raise their hand to
provide an affirmative response to this question, but this presents a paradox: why is there
such a preponderance of evidence that racism exists, and yet we have so few racists? If you
are reading this book, chances are you’re not a card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan,
the National Alliance, or any other neofascist, anti-Black, anti-Semitic, white supremacist
organization. With that said, is it possible, even despite your best intentions, that you may
still be contributing to or enabling ongoing racial disparities?
It would be a hard pill to swallow if you had to respond “Yes” to this question. Indeed,
there are some who would reject the question out of hand. Some people argue that racism
doesn’t mean anything anymore because people use the word “too often.” It’s true that
describing something as racist has become a common, inaccurately deployed quip, a verbal
equivocation, or a default insult. But arguably the word is used frequently because there’s
plenty that can be accurately described as such. Maybe we should, in fact, be using the word
more often and for a wider array of social, political, and economic processes, phenomena,
and outcomes. But maybe we should also be more pointed and more specific about what we
mean when we say that someone or something is racist. Let’s ask the question another way,
and we’ll give you some nuanced ways to answer:
Do you live your day-to-day life in a way that may—intentionally or otherwise—uphold white supremacy?
a. Yes, because I’m an overt racist.
b. Yes, because I’m a structural racist.
c. Yes, because I’m a complicit racist.
d. No, I’m an antiracist.
Let’s think through these options one by one and perhaps use the process of elimination.
Most people have gotten pretty good at pointing out the overt racists in the world. He’s the
guy who drove a car into a group of counterprotestors at the Unite the Right rally in
Charlottesville, Virginia. She’s the family member at Thanksgiving dinner who makes
derogatory remarks about . . . (fill in name of an underrepresented racial group here). Their
behavior evinces racial animus, bigotry, and prejudice. Their violence and epithets are
interpersonal and, more importantly, individualistic.
The structural racists are the Supreme Court justices who have written or concurred with
Stay Woke : A Peoples Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, edited by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, and Candice Watts Smith, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/du/detail.action?docID=5839299.
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decisions to dismantle the Voting Rights Act or allow police to pull people over who “look
illegal.”1 They are the teachers, principals, and resource officers who discipline children of
color more harshly and more frequently than they do white children.2 They are the doctors
who are less likely to prescribe certain medicines to or do necessary surgery on Black
patients.3 And they are voters who support candidates who disparage whole groups of
vulnerable populations on a regular basis in order to garner and maintain the support of
people who are racially resentful.4 Their behavior affects others in a structural way, shaping
institutions and contributing to patterns of racial disparity. (Let’s also be clear that some
people are both overtly and structurally racist.)
The complicit racists are people who do absolutely nothing in their day-to-day lives to
prevent either overt or structural racists from further enmeshing racial inequality into our
society. This group of people may not intentionally work to perpetuate negative stereotypes,
support candidates whose policies exacerbate racial inequities, inundate people with
microaggressions, or whitesplain, but they are not antiracists either. By latching onto
hegemonic ideologies like colorblindness and respectability politics, however, many people
across all racial groups enable the perpetuation of white supremacy. They fail to recognize
that the lives of white people are more greatly valued by a variety of institutions and that
interpersonal racial hostility and prejudice alone cannot fully explain persistent racial
disparities.
Being a complicit racist is easy because it only calls for you to stay out of the way. Being a
complicit racist is easy because it’s business as usual, it’s normal, and almost everyone is
doing it. Being a complicit racist is easy because we all have a script in our hands, ready to
be recited when something looks suspicious but doesn’t completely raise up our red, that’s-
so-racist flags.
Staying woke, on the other hand, is a process of developing habits of antiracism, such as
vigilance, speaking out, stepping up, using one’s privilege to undermine racism, and
broadening your understanding of how racism works. Staying woke means honing your skills
to notice when the racial rules of the game are changing, becoming cognizant of the
underlying assumptions of dominant racial ideologies, and listening to the ways in which
racial grammar evolves so that you can combat new forms of oppression.
The purpose of this chapter is to highlight some of the scripts that many of us have learned
in order to be good, friendly complicit racists. These scripts are coded as ostensibly
progressive, but their purpose is to avert or diminish accusations of racism and to allow
people to maintain a humanist image of themselves and of US society. The everyday
repetition of these scripts sounds normal and innocuous, but they inadvertently uphold white
supremacy. In deconstructing common narratives that are rooted in colorblindness and
respectability politics, we hope to get you thinking about how you can intervene in the
socially acceptable reproduction of racial inequality.
—
“It Doesn’t Matter If You’re Black or White or Green or Blue!”
Stay Woke : A Peoples Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, edited by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, and Candice Watts Smith, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/du/detail.action?docID=5839299.
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Colorblindness has become the dominant racial ideology in the US (though not the only one),
putting us in what the anthropologist Lee Baker calls the “color-blind bind.”5 Sociologists
like Ruth Frankenberg explain that a colorblind ideology is a “mode of thinking about race
organized around an effort not to ‘see’ or at any rate not to acknowledge race differences,”
because this is perceived as the “‘polite’ language of race.”6 A colorblind narrative suggests
that we can get rid of the last, lingering vestiges of racial inequality by ignoring race
altogether. There are two assumptions here. First, the logic erroneously presumes that there is
only a “little bit” of racism left, and second, it suggests that ignoring the problem will solve
it. Taken together, these assumptions serve to perpetuate racial inequity because they lead us
to falter in addressing the issue for what it is: racial inequity.
Though it has become a common belief that being colorblind is best for everyone,
colorblindness is actually an evolved form of previous, harmful racial ideologies and
attitudes. This ability to transform and appropriate the values of contemporary (middle-class)
whites and to discard the parts that would make it irrelevant or too obviously transparent is
what makes some people call racism a “scavenger ideology.”7 We have to keep in mind that a
racial ideology is simply a story we tell ourselves to explain what we see in this world. So
during the “Jim Crow” racism era, people relied on a narrative that suggested that Black
folks’ subordinate social, political, and economic status resulted from their inherent
inferiority. After Jim Crow was dismantled through civil-rights-era policies—such as the
Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968—
many whites, arguing that the playing field was now leveled, became indignant over
additional race-conscious efforts, such as affirmative action, which sought to close the
racial disparities in opportunity. These racially resentful people asserted that if any trace of
the racial inequities that were developed during the previous four hundred years still existed,
it was because Black people did not live up to their newly presented opportunities to succeed.
Today, colorblindness leads people to rely on logic that claims that since race shouldn’t
matter, it doesn’t matter; in fact, some believe we would be better off if we just didn’t “see”
race altogether.
The claim to “not see race” does us all a disservice because race does shape the lives of
every living person in the United States. Relatedly, many people on the left claim that
“identity politics” is the opposite of colorblindness and thus is harmful because white
nationalists use the same identity-based “rationale” as people of color to demand redress for
their perceived loss of racial privilege. This logic and argument are lazy and careless. As is
often said, when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. If we shift
our perspective from a position of privilege to that of the most marginalized, then we can
more easily understand that identity politics is not “just about who you [are], it [is] also about
what you could do to confront the oppression you [are] facing.” The women who founded the
Combahee River Collective, a Black feminist organization in the late 1970s, used the term
“identity politics” to highlight the fact that “Black women’s social positions made them
disproportionately susceptible to the ravages of capitalism, including poverty, illness,
violence, sexual assault, and inadequate healthcare and housing, to name only the most
obvious.”8 Though identity politics is yet another concept co-opted and abused to maintain
white supremacy, its originators conceived of it as a means not only to bring attention to
Stay Woke : A Peoples Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, edited by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, and Candice Watts Smith, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/du/detail.action?docID=5839299.
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interlocking sets of oppression but also to respond to them politically and radically.
In order to buck the colorblind trend, you need not make essentialist assumptions about a
person on the basis of the person’s race. It is fine to notice people’s race (along with other
aspects of their identity, such as gender), if you plan to use that recognition for good—for
compassion, empathy, or consideration of how a person might have to navigate a particular
space or situation differently or to remedy the effects of racism. Besides, it’s annoying,
hurtful, and psychologically taxing to hear people say, “I didn’t even notice you were Black.”
Ironically, straight-up overt racists admit to seeing race, but they just do so to actively pursue
injustice or violence or to respond apathetically to injustice or violence. But those who stay
woke know that simply saying nothing and doing nothing effectively makes you part of the
problem, rather than part of the solution.
—
“I Voted for Obama”
The 2008 and 2012 elections of Barack Obama were objectively historic: Obama was the
first self-identified Black person elected to the United States presidency. The first time
around, the New York Times’ front page declared, “Racial Barrier Falls in Heavy Turnout.”
Another headline suggested, “Change Has Come.” A below-the-fold article in the
Washington Post claimed, “America’s History Gives Way to Its Future.” People were excited.
Jessie Jackson was crying. Tehama was crying—this guy was her professor for goodness
sake! Everyone was crying! People were excited to divulge what had typically been taboo—
publicly announcing the way one filled out one’s secret ballot: “I voted for Obama.” For
many people, “I voted for Obama” denoted that they helped to usher in what many believed
would be a postracial reality. But “I voted / campaigned / donated to / knocked on doors for
Obama” has also become currency that can be cashed in when accusations of racism arise. “I
voted for Obama” is the twenty-first-century version of “I marched with Dr. King” or “My
friend/neighbor/cousin-in-law is Black.” Here’s the thing: none of these things means that
you are antiracist.
Voting for a political party or candidate that explicitly aims to reduce inequality is a step in
the right direction, but it is not sufficient to dismantle an embedded system of racism. You
know who else voted for Obama? Jason Kessler, the guy who organized the Unite the Right
protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, which not only gathered modern-day Nazis, white
nationalists, and racist internet trolls but also led to the murder of Heather Heyer and the
injuries of nineteen other people and provided the forty-fifth president the opportunity to
double down on the bullshit idea that there was “blame on both sides.” All said, your vote is
a blunt instrument to translate your preferences into political action.
What people loved (or hated) about Obama was that he was a symbol of racial progress.
Here’s the thing about Obama. He was the safest Black candidate the Democratic Party could
add to an otherwise-curated lineup of primary candidates. He’s a Black man with a biracial
heritage and an Ivy League background; he was a third-culture kid9 who can code switch, a
skill that he often used to speak in front of Black audiences with an authentically Black tone
Stay Woke : A Peoples Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, edited by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, and Candice Watts Smith, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/du/detail.action?docID=5839299.
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of voice but with messages of respectability politics. He has light-skinned privilege in a
society where colorism is rampant. In experiments, researchers show that darker-skinned
versions of Obama received much less support from white Americans.10 Though he did not
just stroll into the White House, he did have middle-class privilege and the cultural currency
of his white family, which he cashed in regularly on the campaign trail. He never made any
promises on the campaign trail to address structural racism; he didn’t even mention racism
until he was forced to.11 While Obama did take steps to change policies and create initiatives
aimed to help people of color and sometimes spoke eloquently on racial issues, racial wealth
inequality actually increased under his presidency, and his words of racial uplift were often
laced with messages of Black blame.12
We have to be careful how we talk about racism and also racial progress because the
words, rationales, and concepts that political liberals and racial progressives use often get co-
opted by racial conservatives. Case in point: while many white liberals proxy “I voted for
Obama” to mean “I cannot be racist,” racial conservatives have co-opted the election of
Obama to argue that we live in a postracial society. If Obama, a Black man who was raised in
a female-headed household, could become president, neoconservative logic leads us to the
notion that it’s quite obvious that structural racism is not what prevents Blacks and other
people of color from earning the same life chances and enjoying the same opportunities as
whites.
Stay Woke : A Peoples Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, edited by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, and Candice Watts Smith, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/du/detail.action?docID=5839299.
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In the run-up to the 2008 election, the artist Ray Noland was commissioned by Obama for America to
create posters for the presidential campaign. Noland says, “After numerous talks with Director of New
Media, Scott Goodstein, I realized the campaign had an issue with the way I presented Barack Obama’s
image. From their comments, I felt they thought I made [Obama] look ‘too black.’” After parting ways with
the official campaign, Noland continued to create artwork supporting Obama’s run. In creating this
poster, Noland presents Obama as “unapologetically brown and at times jet black, to stress the point” of
his racial identity. (Designed by Ray Noland; first-edition printing, 2006, by Steve Walters, Screwball
Press, Chicago; second-edition printing, 2007, at Crosshair, Chicago; quotations from email
correspondence, September 2, 2018)
Stay Woke : A Peoples Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, edited by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, and Candice Watts Smith, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/du/detail.action?docID=5839299.
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While many people understood Barack Obama’s election as being made possible by a legacy of struggle
for freedom and equality, as depicted in this cartoon, it was by no means the culmination of their efforts.
We must continue to build on their victories. (Cartoon by Matt Wuerker)
Antiracists have to resist not one but three sets of logic that uphold a society marked by a
racial hierarchy: that of well-meaning complicit racists, that of structural racists, and that of
overtly racist conservatives—all of whom rely on Obama’s election either to suggest that
individuals should be absolved from the fact that they enjoy white privilege or to assert that
large-scale policies to eradicate racial disparities need not be developed because the United
States in toto became postracial on November 9, 2008. An antiracist is aware of the misuse
and abuse of political symbols and works instead to produce tangible outcomes that produce
racial equity.
—
“I Did Not Vote for Trump”
There are plenty of people who honestly believe that their choice to support a candidate who
Stay Woke : A Peoples Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, edited by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, and Candice Watts Smith, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/du/detail.action?docID=5839299.
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claimed that he could shoot a person in public and not lose any votes, declared that most
Mexican immigrants are rapists who bring drugs into the United States, mocked people with
disabilities, asserted that if time travel were possible, he would still intern Japanese citizens,
argued that Muslims should be banned from the United States, promised to appoint Supreme
Court justices who would overturn marriage equality and rights to access abortion services,
believes that Black people have “nothing to lose,” and admitted that he likes to grab women
“by the pussy” was not in and of itself a choice to support the oppression of whole groups of
people. A number of these people will even say they voted for him begrudgingly;
embarrassed by his crude immorality, they clung to something redemptive they saw in his
brash speech, his late-in-life cozying up to the religious right, his eight-year utter revulsion of
Barack Obama, or the fact that he wasn’t Hillary Clinton. Then there are the hardcore Trump
voters with no reservations, no qualms, no disclaimers—this was their guy, the man they’ve
been waiting for their entire lives, MAGA all the way. Are these two groups of people
exactly the same? No. Did they cast their one and only ballot for the same man? Absolutely.
The Women’s March, the largest single day of protest in US history, was organized by a cadre of
seasoned activists. Galvanized to speak on issues of political, social, and economic inequity, millions of
people across all seven continents protested on January 21, 2017, the day after Trump’s inauguration.
But it will require persistent activism and the regular exercise of the franchise to upend the structural
problems that participants sought to highlight. (Photo by Candis Watts Smith)
Meanwhile, there are also plenty of liberals who in their efforts to distance themselves
from the so-called Basket of Deplorables13 pridefully note that they did not vote for Trump
but in the very next breath suggest that during the next time around (e.g., 2018 midterm
elections and later in 2020), Americans, generally speaking, and the candidates of the
Democratic Party, more specifically, should focus more on the plight of poor and working-
class white people, whose primary concerns include job loss due to globalization, a sense of
vulnerability due to the increasing racial diversity of US demographics, and increased crime
Stay Woke : A Peoples Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, edited by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, and Candice Watts Smith, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/du/detail.action?docID=5839299.
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and drug addiction that comes from feelings of disenfranchisement. By endorsing a platform
that privileges the plight of certain white people, rather than one that exploits Americans’
anxiety over and animus toward immigrants, Muslims, and people of color, these liberals
fancy themselves morally superior to their Trump-voting counterparts.
But here’s the thing: the problems of poor white America are problems that arise because
the social safety net set up during the New Deal and Great Society has been weakened.
Public schools are not well funded, and teachers are undervalued. The national minimum
wage is a not a living wage. The Affordable Care Act (though imperfect) is being dismantled
one piece at a time. And only time will tell whether the opioid epidemic will be treated with
the crime-and-punishment tools of the crack epidemic, given that the forty-fifth president
was slow to deem a pandemic that kills almost one hundred people per day a national
emergency and appointed an attorney general who wanted to revive some of the worst
aspects of the failed War on Drugs.14 Much of this is happening because conservative political
elites have led racially resentful whites to believe that undeserving, lazy people of color will
benefit from evidence-based, dignity-sustaining public policy at the expense of whites.15 “Not
only do these attacks have consequences for ordinary Black people, but they are also a
‘Trojan Horse’ shielding a much broader attack against all working-class people, including
whites and Latino/as.”16 The effects of this combination of policies have been crushing Black
and Brown folks, including those in the middle class, for decades and now are more readily
eating away at the lives of ostensibly dispensable poor white Americans. Ignoring any of
these facts consigns anyone, even a liberal, to the Basket of Deplorables.
Okay, so you object to the “Basket of Deplorables” terminology? And you’re not too crazy
about the idea that Clinton-voting liberals might be deplorable too? Let’s think about this in
another way. We tend to associate racism with particular groups of people (e.g., whites) who
live in certain regions of the country (e.g., the South) or particular areas of our states (e.g.,
rural). We also tend to focus on interpersonal racial discrimination and overt bigotry to make
determinations of membership in the Basket of Deplorables. But staying woke means
recognizing that the dominant mode of racial ideology is colorblind, and racism, generally
speaking, is best understood as deeply embedded in our society—it’s structural, it’s almost
invisible, and it’s insidious.
You can use your vote as a blunt proxy for your principles, but electoral politics is only
one stop on an antiracist’s path to making change. In fact, your vote for candidates in either
major party may actually serve to exacerbate inequality. But there is no shortage of
organizations to join, to donate to, to canvass for, to use your skills to make change in your
community—ranging from the ACLU to local chapters of Black Lives Matter. You might
join in a collective protest, picket, or boycott. Or you may still decide to join the campaign of
a candidate who is explicit about the ways in which she or he wants to address vast racial
inequalities in our society. Or you may become that candidate yourself—for school board,
city council, or state representative. Doing something is better than nothing, but solely
relying on your vote for or against a candidate is just enough to uphold the status quo.
—
Stay Woke : A Peoples Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, edited by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, and Candice Watts Smith, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/du/detail.action?docID=5839299.
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“When Old People Die, We Will Finally Be Done with Racism”
Are you relying on the next generation to help us take a turn toward a postracial reality? We
sure hope not. First, the problem of racism is an urgent one. We cannot wait for small people
to grow up and become leaders and herd us to the promised land. Second and perhaps most
importantly, the next generation has not come to us as fully formed people who love
diversity and multiculturalism and support interracial marriage and have an insatiable desire
to stomp out systemic injustice. Children are raised by adults who teach them stuff or, in
academic parlance, socialize them. And herein lies the problem: grownups are not necessarily
providing children with the proper tools to dismantle racism.17
Colorblindness characterizes the environment in which young whites have been
socialized. Research shows that white parents, in particular, are teaching their children that
they should love everyone regardless of their color, which is great. But it’s what adults are
not teaching children that is messing them up. Folks are teaching their children this love-
everyone business through the logic of colorblindness. For instance, you know that game
where you have a bunch of faces, and the person on the other side has to guess which of the
characters is your favorite: Guess Who? Kids are failing to do well at this game because they
don’t want to ask, “Is your person Black?”! The social psychologist Evan Apfelbaum and his
colleagues show that whites adopt what they call “strategic colorblindness,” or an effort to
completely avoid mentioning race even in a task for which pointing out someone’s skin color
is actually helpful.18 This group of scholars found that by the age of ten, white kids have been
fully socialized to avoid mentioning people’s race altogether even if describing someone’s
race can help them successfully complete a task.
Stay Woke : A Peoples Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, edited by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, and Candice Watts Smith, New …
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ions
Identify a specific consumer product that you or your family have used for quite some time. This might be a branded smartphone (if you have used several versions over the years)
or the court to consider in its deliberations. Locard’s exchange principle argues that during the commission of a crime
Chemical Engineering
Ecology
aragraphs (meaning 25 sentences or more). Your assignment may be more than 5 paragraphs but not less.
INSTRUCTIONS:
To access the FNU Online Library for journals and articles you can go the FNU library link here:
https://www.fnu.edu/library/
In order to
n that draws upon the theoretical reading to explain and contextualize the design choices. Be sure to directly quote or paraphrase the reading
ce to the vaccine. Your campaign must educate and inform the audience on the benefits but also create for safe and open dialogue. A key metric of your campaign will be the direct increase in numbers.
Key outcomes: The approach that you take must be clear
Mechanical Engineering
Organic chemistry
Geometry
nment
Topic
You will need to pick one topic for your project (5 pts)
Literature search
You will need to perform a literature search for your topic
Geophysics
you been involved with a company doing a redesign of business processes
Communication on Customer Relations. Discuss how two-way communication on social media channels impacts businesses both positively and negatively. Provide any personal examples from your experience
od pressure and hypertension via a community-wide intervention that targets the problem across the lifespan (i.e. includes all ages).
Develop a community-wide intervention to reduce elevated blood pressure and hypertension in the State of Alabama that in
in body of the report
Conclusions
References (8 References Minimum)
*** Words count = 2000 words.
*** In-Text Citations and References using Harvard style.
*** In Task section I’ve chose (Economic issues in overseas contracting)"
Electromagnetism
w or quality improvement; it was just all part of good nursing care. The goal for quality improvement is to monitor patient outcomes using statistics for comparison to standards of care for different diseases
e a 1 to 2 slide Microsoft PowerPoint presentation on the different models of case management. Include speaker notes... .....Describe three different models of case management.
visual representations of information. They can include numbers
SSAY
ame workbook for all 3 milestones. You do not need to download a new copy for Milestones 2 or 3. When you submit Milestone 3
pages):
Provide a description of an existing intervention in Canada
making the appropriate buying decisions in an ethical and professional manner.
Topic: Purchasing and Technology
You read about blockchain ledger technology. Now do some additional research out on the Internet and share your URL with the rest of the class
be aware of which features their competitors are opting to include so the product development teams can design similar or enhanced features to attract more of the market. The more unique
low (The Top Health Industry Trends to Watch in 2015) to assist you with this discussion.
https://youtu.be/fRym_jyuBc0
Next year the $2.8 trillion U.S. healthcare industry will finally begin to look and feel more like the rest of the business wo
evidence-based primary care curriculum. Throughout your nurse practitioner program
Vignette
Understanding Gender Fluidity
Providing Inclusive Quality Care
Affirming Clinical Encounters
Conclusion
References
Nurse Practitioner Knowledge
Mechanics
and word limit is unit as a guide only.
The assessment may be re-attempted on two further occasions (maximum three attempts in total). All assessments must be resubmitted 3 days within receiving your unsatisfactory grade. You must clearly indicate “Re-su
Trigonometry
Article writing
Other
5. June 29
After the components sending to the manufacturing house
1. In 1972 the Furman v. Georgia case resulted in a decision that would put action into motion. Furman was originally sentenced to death because of a murder he committed in Georgia but the court debated whether or not this was a violation of his 8th amend
One of the first conflicts that would need to be investigated would be whether the human service professional followed the responsibility to client ethical standard. While developing a relationship with client it is important to clarify that if danger or
Ethical behavior is a critical topic in the workplace because the impact of it can make or break a business
No matter which type of health care organization
With a direct sale
During the pandemic
Computers are being used to monitor the spread of outbreaks in different areas of the world and with this record
3. Furman v. Georgia is a U.S Supreme Court case that resolves around the Eighth Amendments ban on cruel and unsual punishment in death penalty cases. The Furman v. Georgia case was based on Furman being convicted of murder in Georgia. Furman was caught i
One major ethical conflict that may arise in my investigation is the Responsibility to Client in both Standard 3 and Standard 4 of the Ethical Standards for Human Service Professionals (2015). Making sure we do not disclose information without consent ev
4. Identify two examples of real world problems that you have observed in your personal
Summary & Evaluation: Reference & 188. Academic Search Ultimate
Ethics
We can mention at least one example of how the violation of ethical standards can be prevented. Many organizations promote ethical self-regulation by creating moral codes to help direct their business activities
*DDB is used for the first three years
For example
The inbound logistics for William Instrument refer to purchase components from various electronic firms. During the purchase process William need to consider the quality and price of the components. In this case
4. A U.S. Supreme Court case known as Furman v. Georgia (1972) is a landmark case that involved Eighth Amendment’s ban of unusual and cruel punishment in death penalty cases (Furman v. Georgia (1972)
With covid coming into place
In my opinion
with
Not necessarily all home buyers are the same! When you choose to work with we buy ugly houses Baltimore & nationwide USA
The ability to view ourselves from an unbiased perspective allows us to critically assess our personal strengths and weaknesses. This is an important step in the process of finding the right resources for our personal learning style. Ego and pride can be
· By Day 1 of this week
While you must form your answers to the questions below from our assigned reading material
CliftonLarsonAllen LLP (2013)
5 The family dynamic is awkward at first since the most outgoing and straight forward person in the family in Linda
Urien
The most important benefit of my statistical analysis would be the accuracy with which I interpret the data. The greatest obstacle
From a similar but larger point of view
4 In order to get the entire family to come back for another session I would suggest coming in on a day the restaurant is not open
When seeking to identify a patient’s health condition
After viewing the you tube videos on prayer
Your paper must be at least two pages in length (not counting the title and reference pages)
The word assimilate is negative to me. I believe everyone should learn about a country that they are going to live in. It doesnt mean that they have to believe that everything in America is better than where they came from. It means that they care enough
Data collection
Single Subject Chris is a social worker in a geriatric case management program located in a midsize Northeastern town. She has an MSW and is part of a team of case managers that likes to continuously improve on its practice. The team is currently using an
I would start off with Linda on repeating her options for the child and going over what she is feeling with each option. I would want to find out what she is afraid of. I would avoid asking her any “why” questions because I want her to be in the here an
Summarize the advantages and disadvantages of using an Internet site as means of collecting data for psychological research (Comp 2.1) 25.0\% Summarization of the advantages and disadvantages of using an Internet site as means of collecting data for psych
Identify the type of research used in a chosen study
Compose a 1
Optics
effect relationship becomes more difficult—as the researcher cannot enact total control of another person even in an experimental environment. Social workers serve clients in highly complex real-world environments. Clients often implement recommended inte
I think knowing more about you will allow you to be able to choose the right resources
Be 4 pages in length
soft MB-920 dumps review and documentation and high-quality listing pdf MB-920 braindumps also recommended and approved by Microsoft experts. The practical test
g
One thing you will need to do in college is learn how to find and use references. References support your ideas. College-level work must be supported by research. You are expected to do that for this paper. You will research
Elaborate on any potential confounds or ethical concerns while participating in the psychological study 20.0\% Elaboration on any potential confounds or ethical concerns while participating in the psychological study is missing. Elaboration on any potenti
3 The first thing I would do in the family’s first session is develop a genogram of the family to get an idea of all the individuals who play a major role in Linda’s life. After establishing where each member is in relation to the family
A Health in All Policies approach
Note: The requirements outlined below correspond to the grading criteria in the scoring guide. At a minimum
Chen
Read Connecting Communities and Complexity: A Case Study in Creating the Conditions for Transformational Change
Read Reflections on Cultural Humility
Read A Basic Guide to ABCD Community Organizing
Use the bolded black section and sub-section titles below to organize your paper. For each section
Losinski forwarded the article on a priority basis to Mary Scott
Losinksi wanted details on use of the ED at CGH. He asked the administrative resident