“By these words and acts, and in these stages, the masters of Colonial America committed themselves and America to the institution of human slavery. Having made that decision, the masters had to make another decision, for neither the masters nor the servants had been prepared for the new script of roles in the statures. Nature does not create masters or slaves. Nor does it create blacks and whites. In order to make masters and slaves, in order to make blacks and whites, it is necessary to kill them-it is necessary to separate them by rivers of blood. But terror alone is not enough. One must condition the mind and the eye and the heart. And the conditioning of one generation must be repeated in the next generation and on and on ad infinitum. The men who ran Colonial America did not shrink from these exigencies. Moving swiftly and ruthlessly, they began in the middle of the seventeenth century to separate blacks and whites and to create a race problem in America.” “Curiously enough, there is no full-length treatment of this process. Most historians avoid the subject by posing a natural or cultural bias in the European psyche. But this maneuver fails to explain why this natural or cultural bias manifested itself in one way in 1619 and another way in 1819 or why it developed in one way in Maryland, another way in Massachusetts, and a third way in Brazil. Nor is it possible, from the traditional standpoint, to explain why the laws against blacks became progressively worse and differed significantly in different demographic and economic situations. From time to time, some historians admit, in so many words, that the traditional view is untenable. Stanley Elkins, for example, who has advanced a fanciful theory of slavery, said that ‘the interests of white servants and blacks were systematically driven apart.’ After reading the same evidence, the Handlins said that ‘the emerging difference in treatment [of blacks and whites] was calculated to create a real division of interest between Negroes on the one hand and whites on the other.’….” “No one reading the evidence can doubt this. Nor can it be doubted that blacks and whites had to be taught the meaning of blackness and whiteness. This is not to deny ‘differences’ in color and hair formation, etc. It is only to say that perceptions had to be organized to recognize the differences and that men had to be organized to take advantage of them. The so-called differences were not the cause of racism; on the contrary, men seized on the differences and interpreted them in a certain way in order to create racism. Not only did they exploit ‘differences,’ but they also created ‘differences’ and preserved them by force and violence. The differences, in other words, were rationalizations and excuses, not the causes of racism. Once established, however, the ideology of rationalizations assumed a calamitous autonomy and influenced the interests from which they derived.” “Who was responsible for this policy?” “The white founding fathers, the Byrds, the Mathers, and Winthrops, the Jeffersons, the Washingtons, the heroes of all the Fourths of July: they divided blacks and whites, they sowed the seeds of division and hate and blood. In an attempt to evade the implications of this fact, some men blame ‘the English’ or ‘Colonial public opinion. But Colonial public opinion was the public opinion of the planter-merchant aristocracy….” Lerone Bennett, JR. “The Shaping of Black America: The Struggles and Triumphs of African-Americans, 1619 to the 1990s” Page 68
Posted on: Fri, 02 Jan 2015 22:26:14 +0000