Capitalism, Slavery, and the Birth of Racism Capitalism, Slavery, and the Birth of Racism: The capitalist roots of European slavery in Linebaugh and Rediker’s The Many Headed Hydra, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, and the poetry of Phyllis Wheatley In his book Mythologies, Roland Barthes asserts that myths persist through “inoculation…admitting the accidental evil of a class-bound institution, the better to conceal its principal evil” (20). In other words, myth is carefully crafted to manipulate a society’s view of history. A myth that has become fully “naturalized,” (Barthes, 11) or integrated, in American society centers on its history of slavery. The prevailing myth insists that the institution was rooted in racism – that Europeans, from the onset of imperialism, enslaved Africans because of their skin color. However, historical documents and studies, including the slave narrative of Olaudah Equiano, the poetry of Phyllis Wheatley, and Linebaugh and Rediker’s text The Many Headed Hydra, show that early American and European slavery was justified not by race, but by class. Racism is the “accidental evil,” the ruse that conceals the motive of the myth; the preservation of capitalism, the “principle evil.” What is perhaps most important in examining the early history of British and American slavery is that the institution was not limited to any one group of people. “Religious radicals, indigenous Americans, Africans, commoners, sailors, and women” (Linebaugh and Rediker, 66) were all equally abhorred by the ruling class that developed in Britain in the 16th century. These were people of the lowest classes, who had neither wealth nor property, and were therefore of no value to the developing capitalist society. They were all thus enslaved or slaughtered, either forced to serve the system of commerce that oppressed them or be killed by it. Forced labor was used in conjunction with imprisonment and capital punishment to control the peasantry, and thereby make the ruling classes richer and more powerful. (Linebaugh and Rediker, 49) During the seventeenth century, “some two hundred thousand [British, Irish, and Scottish were shipped] to American shores” (Linebaugh and Rediker, 58) to become servants or slaves in the new world. The results of this system become clear in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, in which Equiano, among other hardships experienced as a slave, describes the Middle Passage between African and America. The “absolutely pestilential” (Equiano, 424) conditions in which the African slaves were kept were certainly inhumane, but the cruelty of the white sailors exacerbated the misery. The slaves were not well fed, and when they sought their own means of sustenance, they suffered “some very severe floggings.” (Equiano, 425) Given the myth that slavery was always racialized, one would assume that this cruelty was the product of the white sailors’ hatred of these black slaves. However, Equiano also describes an incident in which the white sailors “flogged [one of their own] unmercifully.” (Equiano, 425) This removes race as the motivation for cruelty. The inhumane treatment of slaves confirms that slaves were viewed as commodities instead of people. The equally inhumane treatment of a white sailor would then confirm that the sailors, too, were commodities in the capitalist system that they served. They, along with the slaves they shipped, were “the laboring subjects of the Atlantic economy,” (Linebaugh and Rediker, 111) the slaves that were “essential to the rise of capitalism.” (Linebaugh and Rediker, 28) This is not to ignore the fact that Africans were enslaved, but rather to call into question the grounds on which they were enslaved. The focus of European imperialists in Africa and the Americas was not on the race of the inhabitants, but their “uncivilized” nature. Beginning with Columbus and spanning through centuries of literature written by explorers and colonists, natives in the new territories were “savages,” but skin color was not deemed the cause of their savagery. They were instead chastised for their lack of civilization, specifically their lack of Christian religion, and it became widely affirmed that “all good Protestants in England had an obligation to help convert the savages in America to Christianity…all had a duty to extend English dominion.” (Linebaugh and Rediker, 15) Thus, colonization and subsequent enslavement were deemed not only a Christian duty, but also the only mode of salvation for African and American natives. This rhetoric was so deeply engrained that even those enslaved were made to believe it; Phyllis Wheatley, an African American poet and slave in the 18th century, says “ ‘Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land” (Wheatley, 505) in her poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” While the superiority of American society is conveyed in this poem, it is not a racial superiority. Rather, the supremecy lies in the knowledge “That there’s a god, that there’s a Saviour too.” Wheatley also asserts that “Negroes, black as Cain/May be refin’d and join th’ angelic train,” (Wheatley, 506) which clearly indicates that she was writing in a time before blacks were considered inferior because of their race; through Christianity, those born in “Pagan lands” could become equal to Europeans. If slavery was not always racialized, how and when did it become so? The seeds were planted towards the end of the 17th century. The capitalists who profited from the slavery and indentured servitude of the poorer classes quickly realized that those who served them vastly outnumbered them. By collecting Irish, Scottish, and English peasants as servants and enslaving African natives like Olaudah Equiano and Phyllis Wheatley, the slave and servant class became immense, which “facilitated new forms of self-organization among them, which was alarming to the ruling class of the day.” (Linebaugh and Rediker, 40, emphasis mine) The goal of the “Parliamentarians and royalists, former antagonists in the English Revolution and civil wars” (Linebaugh and Rediker, 132) was thence to divide this mass, in order to prevent them from conspiring to overthrow their oppressors. The most efficient way to divide this class was along racial lines. Citing fear that “[white] lives will be as cheap as those negroes,” (Linebaugh and Rediker, 134) white servants were granted rights to protect them, while black slaves were defined by law as a form of property. (Linebaugh and Rediker, 138) This divide would ensure that, like the sailors that abused Equiano, whites would continue to exercise power over their black charges, rather than uniting with them in resistance to the system that oppressed them both. According to Barthes, “myth deprives the object of which it speaks of all history.” (21) Indeed, the perpetuation of the myth that slavery was always a racialized institution deprives all others who were enslaved of their history. But to what end? All myths are also motivated – what is the motivation behind the assertion that slavery was always motivated by racial hatred? For the past century and a half, it has been accepted in American society that slavery is an immoral institution, one that has no place in a country that cites freedom as its most important principle. In order for slavery to be abolished, the ideologies that supported it had to be condemned. But capitalism could not be abolished, as America is as much rooted in capitalism as it is in ideas of freedom. Thus, although American slavery was “essential to the rise of capitalism,” (Linebaugh and Rediker, 28) it was not acknowledged as such. Myth gives “natural and eternal justification,” (Barthes, 17), and the “natural and eternal justification” given to slavery was race. Racism took capitalism’s place as the ideology to be disposed of along with slavery. This permits America to say, with confidence, that slavery is an institution entirely in the past, despite the fact that the roots of the system are still the roots of our existing society. The “accidental evil” is acknowledged as the whole evil, and reality is understood more cheaply. (Barthes, 20-22) Capitalism, the “principal evil,” therefore thrives.
Posted on: Sun, 27 Jul 2014 22:27:34 +0000
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