What is the “creation myth” that you referred to just now, as you understand it? The usual story runs — and you will hear it in profusion in about six to eight weeks — is that these Olympian Founding Fathers—capital O, capital F, capital F — in their utmost wisdom, revolted against tyranny from a despotic monarch in London and established a glorious republic with freedom and justice and liberty for all, as embodied in a wondrous Constitution that emerged subsequently. Quite frankly, in a stunning array of ideological diversity, scholars and ideologues from left to right have basically bowed down before that creation myth. Was this a myth you believed in prior to writing this book? Why do you think it’s so powerful? Coming to this book and writing this book was a process for myself. That is to say, maybe 20-odd years ago, like many who have lived in the United States of America, I had not given deep thought to the creation myth and to that extent I think I can indict myself. With regard to the United States of America, I think the fact that so many Europeans truly were rescued from persecution by the creation of the United States of America helped to blind some to the unavoidable fact that their rescue in some ways was based on and founded upon a country that committed genocide against indigenous people and then enslaved tens of thousands — hundreds of thousands — of Africans. ...Did you find anything in your research that might explain why, exactly, most historians up to now haven’t fully integrated slavery into their analysis of the Revolution? I think historians have really downplayed the amount of unrest amongst slaves in the colonies — that is to say, in the 13 colonies that formed the United States of America. Even today, if you look at the historiography, there is an ongoing tendency to really downplay the unrest amongst the Africans. There are historians who are earning good livings by seeking to show, for example, that a number of slave revolts really weren’t slave revolts. They were basically hallucinations on the part of slave masters, guilty fears on the part of slave masters. There has been a lot invested in suggesting that these ancestors of today’s African-Americans were not very restive. I’ll leave it to future scholars to try to puzzle out why that has been the case. Secondly, I think that historians of colonial North America too often have looked at colonial history as sort of pre-U.S. history. That is to say, when they look at colonial history they only look at the 13 colonies; they don’t look at Jamaica, Antigua, Barbados; they don’t look at what was going on there even though these sites were all a part of one empire, even though there was a lot of back-and-forth between those islands and the North American mainland, even though all of them were administered from London, even though a number of leading colonists on the mainland were either born or spent time in the Caribbean (Alexander Hamilton quickly comes to mind but there are many more), even though in the Caribbean there were — even more so than on the mainland — repetitive plots to liquidate the settlements, which at once caused many of the Europeans to flee to the mainland and generated a sort of antipathy towards Africans, the fruits of which I think are still with us. So, I think that part of the problem with previous scholarship is a) as noted, the downplaying of restiveness among Africans on the mainland, and b) the sort of teleological approach where you don’t necessarily expand your gaze to look beyond the 13 colonies. salon/2014/05/30/white_supremacy_and_slavery_gerald_horne_on_the_real_story_of_american_independence/
Posted on: Thu, 19 Jun 2014 20:59:59 +0000
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