Thru Black Eyes: Black Educators' Perspectives and Reflections On the Struggle for Quality Education-for-Liberation

Through Our Eyes:
Perspectives and Reflections From Black Teachers


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THE DOCUMENT

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B Y A S H L E Y G R I F F I N & H I L A R Y T A C K I E

“The difference I would like to make is a difference that my
fifth-grade teacher, an African American woman, made [for]
me,” says an elementary teacher from Oakland, California, who
is also a Black woman. She credits that teacher with instilling in
her a love of math, but also with fostering the self-confidence
that would buoy her when other teachers doubted her ability.
 
Now, she tries to give all her students — and especially her
Black students — that same assurance. “I make sure I get to
know each and every one of my kids, and let them know that
they can do it.”

This teacher experienced what research has shown: Teachers
of color bring benefits to classrooms beyond content
knowledge and pedagogy. As role models, parental figures,
and advocates, they can build relationships with students
of color that help those students feel connected to their
schools.1 And they are more likely to be able to enhance
cultural understanding among white colleagues, teachers, and
students.2 Acting as “warm demanders,” they more frequently
hold high expectations for all students and use connections
with students to establish structured classroom discipline.3
 
Furthermore, they are more likely to teach in high-need schools
that predominantly serve students of color and low-income
students.4 Black teachers especially are more likely to stay in
schools serving Black students.5

And yet, teachers of color represent only 18 percent of the
teaching population in the U.S. (Black teachers are 7 percent.)6
State and district leaders recognize the need to diversify the
teacher workforce and are working to recruit more Black
and Hispanic teachers.7 And their efforts may be paying off:
Research shows that the percentage of teachers of color in the
workforce grew at twice the rate of White teachers from 1987 to
2012.8 

But while leaders have been busy trying to pour teachers
of color into the profession, they have not plugged the drain
through which too many exit. Indeed, teachers of color, are
exiting the profession at higher rates than other teachers.9
 
Simply recruiting more teachers of color only gets them in the
door; we must pay equal attention to creating the conditions
to keep them. And while it is critical to diversify the teaching
force, just having a Black or Hispanic teacher in the classroom
isn’t enough. They must be strong teachers, so diversity and
excellence go hand in hand.

Holding on to teachers of color, though, requires education
leaders to understand their unique experiences and
perspectives. And who better to learn from than the teachers
themselves.

Toni Morrison Says TRUMPISM Is About Making America White Again

Making America White Again

The choices made by white men, who are prepared to abandon their humanity out of fear of black men and women, suggest the true horror of lost status.

By Toni Morrison

November 21, 2016 Issue of The New Yorker 

This is a serious project. All immigrants to the United States know (and knew) that if they want to become real, authentic Americans they must reduce their fealty to their native country and regard it as secondary, subordinate, in order to emphasize their whiteness. Unlike any nation in Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force. Here, for many people, the definition of “Americanness” is color.

Under slave laws, the necessity for color rankings was obvious, but in America today, post-civil-rights legislation, white people’s conviction of their natural superiority is being lost. Rapidly lost. There are “people of color” everywhere, threatening to erase this long-understood definition of America. And what then? Another black President? A predominantly black Senate? Three black Supreme Court Justices? The threat is frightening.

In order to limit the possibility of this untenable change, and restore whiteness to its former status as a marker of national identity, a number of white Americans are sacrificing themselves. 

They have begun to do things they clearly don’t really want to be doing, and, to do so, they are (1) abandoning their sense of human dignity and (2) risking the appearance of cowardice. Much as they may hate their behavior, and know full well how craven it is, they are willing to kill small children attending Sunday school and slaughter churchgoers who invite a white boy to pray. 

Embarrassing as the obvious display of cowardice must be, they are willing to set fire to 

churches, and to start firing in them while the members are at prayer. And, shameful as such demonstrations of weakness are, they are willing to shoot black children in the street.

To keep alive the perception of white superiority, these white Americans tuck their heads under cone-shaped hats and American flags and deny themselves the dignity of face-to-face confrontation, training their guns on the unarmed, the innocent, the scared, on subjects who are running away, exposing their unthreatening backs to bullets. Surely, shooting a fleeing man in the back hurts the presumption of white strength? The sad plight of grown white men, crouching beneath their (better) selves, to slaughter the innocent during traffic stops, to push black women’s faces into the dirt, to handcuff black children. Only the frightened would do that. Right?

These sacrifices, made by supposedly tough white men, who are prepared to abandon their humanity out of fear of black men and women, suggest the true horror of lost status.

It may be hard to feel pity for the men who are making these bizarre sacrifices in the name of white power and supremacy. Personal debasement is not easy for white people (especially for white men), but to retain the conviction of their superiority to others—especially to black people—they are willing to risk contempt, and to be reviled by the mature, the sophisticated, and the strong. If it weren’t so ignorant and pitiful, one could mourn this collapse of dignity in service to an evil cause.

The comfort of being “naturally better than,” of not having to struggle or demand civil treatment, is hard to give up. The confidence that you will not be watched in a department store, that you are the preferred customer in high-end restaurants—these social inflections, belonging to whiteness, are greedily relished.

So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble.

On Election Day, how eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump. The candidate whose company has been sued by the Justice Department for not renting apartments to black people. The candidate who questioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and who seemed to condone the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally. The candidate who kept black workers off the floors of his casinos. The candidate who is beloved by David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.

William Faulkner understood this better than almost any other American writer. In “Absalom, Absalom,” incest is less of a taboo for an upper-class Southern family than acknowledging the one drop of black blood that would clearly soil the family line. Rather than lose its “whiteness” (once again), the family chooses murder. ♦

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Toni Morrison is the author of twelve novels, from “The Bluest Eye” to “God Help the Child.” In 1993, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives in New York.

 

Photograph by Stan Grossfeld / The Boston Globe via Getty

This is a serious project. All immigrants to the United States know (and knew) that if they want to become real, authentic Americans they must reduce their fealty to their native country and regard it as secondary, subordinate, in order to emphasize their whiteness. Unlike any nation in Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force. Here, for many people, the definition of “Americanness” is color.

Under slave laws, the necessity for color rankings was obvious, but in America today, post-civil-rights legislation, white people’s conviction of their natural superiority is being lost. Rapidly lost. There are “people of color” everywhere, threatening to erase this long-understood definition of America. And what then? Another black President? A predominantly black Senate? Three black Supreme Court Justices? The threat is frightening.

In order to limit the possibility of this untenable change, and restore whiteness to its former status as a marker of national identity, a number of white Americans are sacrificing themselves. They have begun to do things they clearly don’t really want to be doing, and, to do so, they are (1) abandoning their sense of human dignity and (2) risking the appearance of cowardice. Much as they may hate their behavior, and know full well how craven it is, they are willing to kill small children attending Sunday school and slaughter churchgoers who invite a white boy to pray. Embarrassing as the obvious display of cowardice must be, they are willing to set fire to churches, and to start firing in them while the members are at prayer. And, shameful as such demonstrations of weakness are, they are willing to shoot black children in the street.

To keep alive the perception of white superiority, these white Americans tuck their heads under cone-shaped hats and American flags and deny themselves the dignity of face-to-face confrontation, training their guns on the unarmed, the innocent, the scared, on subjects who are running away, exposing their unthreatening backs to bullets. Surely, shooting a fleeing man in the back hurts the presumption of white strength? The sad plight of grown white men, crouching beneath their (better) selves, to slaughter the innocent during traffic stops, to push black women’s faces into the dirt, to handcuff black children. Only the frightened would do that. Right?

These sacrifices, made by supposedly tough white men, who are prepared to abandon their humanity out of fear of black men and women, suggest the true horror of lost status.

It may be hard to feel pity for the men who are making these bizarre sacrifices in the name of white power and supremacy. Personal debasement is not easy for white people (especially for white men), but to retain the conviction of their superiority to others—especially to black people—they are willing to risk contempt, and to be reviled by the mature, the sophisticated, and the strong. If it weren’t so ignorant and pitiful, one could mourn this collapse of dignity in service to an evil cause.

The comfort of being “naturally better than,” of not having to struggle or demand civil treatment, is hard to give up. The confidence that you will not be watched in a department store, that you are the preferred customer in high-end restaurants—these social inflections, belonging to whiteness, are greedily relished.

So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble.

On Election Day, how eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump. The candidate whose company has been sued by the Justice Department for not renting apartments to black people. The candidate who questioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and who seemed to condone the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally. The candidate who kept black workers off the floors of his casinos. The candidate who is beloved by David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.

William Faulkner understood this better than almost any other American writer. In “Absalom, Absalom,” incest is less of a taboo for an upper-class Southern family than acknowledging the one drop of black blood that would clearly soil the family line. Rather than lose its “whiteness” (once again), the family chooses murder. ♦

This article appears as part of a larger feature, “Aftermath: Sixteen Writers on Trump’s America,” in the November 21, 2016, issue.

Toni Morrison is the author of twelve novels, from “The Bluest Eye” to “God Help the Child.” In 1993, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives in New York.

• More

The Coleman Report@50: Still Relevant Today

The Coleman Report at Fifty: Its Legacy and Implications for Future Research on Equality of Opportunity

by Karl Alexander and Stephen l. Morgan

Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) in Cuba 1967: Revolutionary Solidarity With the Growing Black Liberation Movement

Tricontinental Routes of Solidarity: Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) in Cuba 1967

"Global South against imperialism, capitalism, and racism facilitated Carmichael’s solidarity with
Castro [in 1967]. Yet divergent views on the role of race in fighting oppression limited their solidarity.

Carmichael and Castro’s spectacular alliance demonstrated their personal affinity and ideological
commonalities but did not result in an institutional alliance between the black liberation movement and the Cuban state. Instead Carmichael’s connection with the Cuban Revolution left an underexplored legacy. Examining Carmichael’s visit to Cuba illustrates the possibilities and pitfalls of transnational solidarity and furthers our understanding of postwar struggles for change."

A Lttle Bit of Ancient African Mathematics

Young, Connected and Black- Technology and African American "Millennials"

Young, Connected and Black

African-Americans are exuberant and reflective—optimistic about present-day advances in income, education, entrepreneurship and health care, and determined to forge a better future as influential leaders and catalysts of social awareness against discrimination and social injustice. 

This latest report highlights African-Americans’ economic and cultural gains and continues to shine a spotlight on how African-American Millennials are forging ahead in their use of technology and social media to raise awareness and evoke a national discussion on civic and political issues. African-American Millennials are expanding the use of mobile devices (particularly smartphones with a 91% penetration rate for all African-Americans), expanding their shopping carts with fresh foods and contributing to the diversification of mainstream primetime television viewership—forging a significant increase in advertising dollars focused on African-American audiences. 

As African-Americans, particularly younger Millennials, continue to develop and expand their influence on mainstream America, companies are making changes to reach this culture-rich group with unique, captivating campaigns, as well as products and services that meet their needs.

African-American Population Growth

African-Americans continue to represent a significant percentage of growth in the U.S. population. Having grown 21% between 2004 and 2014, the U.S. Black population is currently at 46.3 million* (14% of the total U.S. population), according to the most recent U.S. Census information.

The U.S. is increasingly diverse and younger, which has largely been driven by Millennials, those born between 1982 and 2000, according to the U.S. Census. There are 83.1 million Millennials currently in the U.S. and of which African-American Millennials comprise 14% (about 11.5 million). African-American Millennials comprise 25% (about 11.4 million) of the total Black population.

 

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Illicit Drug Use Is Lower for Black Hi School Seniors Than for Whites

MAJOR REPORT: Among High School Seniors Illicit Drug Use Is Lower for Blacks Than for Whites

jbhe.com

September 26, 2016

A new report from the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan finds that illicit drug use is more prevalent among White students who are about to enter college than it is among African American students who are about to enter their college years.

The data show that for high school seniors, Blacks are significantly less likely than Whites to use drugs. This is true for nearly all drugs that students were asked about in the survey. (At lower ages, the racial gap in drug use is smaller and for some drugs including marijuana, Blacks are more frequent users than Whites.)

Among high school seniors, 15 percent of Whites reported that they had smoked a cigarette in the past 30 days. This is more than double the rate for Blacks. More than one in five White high school students reported that they had engaged in at least one incidence of heavy drinking within the past 3o days. This is twice the rate of Black high school seniors.

The report also offers a great deal of information on drug use by college students. However, there are no breakdowns by racial or ethnic groups.

The full report, Monitoring the Future: National Survey Results of Drug Use, Volume 2, College Students and Adults Ages 19 to 55, may be downloaded above.

Historian Gerald Horne: No One should Stand for the National Anthem!

Historian Gerald Horne Explains Why No One Should Stand for the National Anthem

by Robert J. Barsocchini

counterpunch.org
September 5, 2016

As Colin Kaepernick’s choice to remain seated for the US national anthem continues to highlight and provoke conversation about racism and oppression in the country, I asked attorney and Professor of African American studies at the University of Houston, Dr. Gerald Horne, for his reaction to some of the issues that have been brought to the fore.

The 35 year-old who wrote the US national anthem, Francis Scott Key, appears to have been a remorseless enslaver and abuser of black people, a tireless pro-slavery activist, a religious fundamentalist, and a proponent of genocide and land theft.  The full lyrics of his song contain a ghoulish and sadistic call for the mass murder of enslaved black people who might attempt to free themselves from US clutches, as well as evidence of the US intent to continue genocide and land theft campaigns against the Native nations.

It seems that asking a black or Native person to respect or honor this song would be like asking a Jewish person to honor a song written by a Nazi.  Even if the most blatantly offensive lyrics were removed, it is hard to imagine that anyone in the US, except maybe a neo-Nazi, would feel any anger towards a Jewish person who refused to honor a song written by, say, Joseph Goebbels.

That the dominant US culture chooses to use as its very national anthem a song written by a genocidal slave-driver, and becomes enraged when a black person chooses not to honor it, illustrates, Horne said, that the US was “founded on slavery and genocide”, but also, crucially, “in denial”.  Many scholars have pointed out that national denial is almost never broken unless a nation is militarily defeated and forced to fully acknowledge and atone for its crimes, and even then it is not guaranteed.

Asked if refusal to honor the US national anthem, given its background and surrounding history, should be the norm rather than the exception, Horne replied, categorically and emphatically, “Of course”.

The ruling state in the US invests large amounts of time and money in working to create an association between militant nationalism and sports, a link Horne says “has long been recognized.”  The reaction to Kaepernick’s protest has thus been all the more hostile, as he has, Horne points out, “disrupted the narrative” and the “chauvinist” atmosphere, further “inflaming sentiment” against him.

Since Kaepernick’s action began, a few articles, such as in The Intercept and New York Daily News, have noted the US anthem’s gleefully criminal and genocidal elements, though they seem to stop short of making the connection between the sentiments and goals expressed in the anthem and those that drove the US’s 1776 ‘revolution’ as a whole.  One of Horne’s areas of expertise, he details this connection in his book The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America.  Horne asserted to me that, indeed, “like DNA [that is] hard to obscure, the anthem perfectly captures the national essence” of the United States.

One criticism we seem to hear again and again from white people in the US is that Kaepernick is propagating a “victim’s mindset” by attempting to highlight oppression of black people.  This seems to reflect a need to believe that either A) the oppression is not real and is in the minds of black people (and domestic and international monitors and observers) or B) that the oppression is indeed real, but it is counter-productive to point it out, implying perhaps there should be no human rights organizations, journalists, or activists anywhere in the world – rather than shedding light on oppression, they are merely encouraging a ‘victim’s mindset’ and should thus keep quiet.

Horne affirmed that A is a typical example, globally and historically, of an attitude displayed by oppressive majority groups, and B an attempt by nationalists – people who conflate their personal identity with the ruling state – to discourage people from exposing ugliness in the national psyche.

Another common response to Kaepernick’s action suggests that instead of sitting through Key’s song, he should give money to help black people.  (Kaepernick has hosted charity events and is also giving money.)  Asked what he thinks about this suggestion given that the US may owe more than half its total assets in unpaid reparations, Horne said: “I have learned in life that the higher on the pole of success under capitalism, the more profound the insecurity, perhaps because as Balzac said: behind every great fortune is a crime.”  Indeed, Horne continues, there is a “gnawing reality” that the US national fortune “is grounded in the massive misfortune of billions of ‘others’—who too know this and are primed for a reversal of misfortune.”

Kaepernick has cited a lack of “accountability” for murders of black people committed by US state forces as one reason for his protest, apparently drawing from the language recently employed by the UN, which noted “a high level of structural and institutional racism” in the US, maintained partially due to a “lack of accountability for perpetrators of [racial] killings despite overwhelming evidence against them, including video footage of the crime, being present.”

He has also said there are numerous other issues related to oppression of African Americans.

 Washington’s Blog has pointed, for example, to Amnesty International’s report on the US maintenance of slavery as a “legal” institution under which it continues to work black people and others as slaves on cotton fields and at other tasks, a continuation of the post-Reconstruction convict-leasing slave-system that today generates billions for the ruling state and private corporations.  However, many white people in the US (like members of oppressive groups worldwide) are angered by the mere notion and deny that oppression exists in their country.

Horne suggested that some of these people may want to look into issues of “economic inequality… war… sexism…environmental degradation”, but affirmed that “sadly”, it has always been a “hegemonic norm” for the dominant white culture in the US to claim that black people have it good and are complaining about nothing.  (This includes during chattel slavery and the Civil Rights era.)

This form of angry “denial” is seen from people who would consider themselves liberal intellectuals as well as from the right.  Both sides appear generally blinded to the reality that when a black person tries to highlight oppression and the dominant response is anger and criticism of the black person rather than the oppression, this may be one key insight into why the US remains, as the UN recently noted, “far from recognizing the same rights for all its citizens.”

Horne draws from his historical expertise to suggest that because of the overwhelming hostility they face, anti-oppression movements in the US, to be effective, must coordinate with international allies.  How should they go about doing so?  Horne said they can “sue the US for reparations and justice in courts abroad … taking advantage of the emerging idea of ‘universal jurisdiction’”, and should “ally–as our ancestors did–with the prime antagonists of US imperialism.”

Robert J. Barsocchini is an internationally published independent writer who focuses on global force dynamics and serves as a cross-cultural intermediary for the film and Television industry. His work has been cited, published, or followed by numerous professors, economists, lawyers, military and intelligence veterans, and journalists. Updates on Twitter.

Thanks to Capitalism, South Florida Is Sinking

For the past 30 years, scientists have been sounding the alarm about how big developers, garbage and the ravages of unbridled tourism have helped accelerate what global warming was already doing to the ecological system of South Florida.

All the rightwing politicos who dominate Florida politics have made sure that no money or no extra monies have gone into the research and planning for saving Florida's fragile ecosystem.

Now "the gators are coming home to roost" as one can read in the essay below. A fightback is growing at the local level... uniting the scientific forces with the ordinary everyday folk of South Florida as well as the Seminoles who have been the Keepers of the Everglades.

Being A Black Woman In Brazil 2016

Black Life Matters In Brazil2016

The African Descendant population of Brazil (approx 100 million) is greater than the combined population of Ghana and Kenya. But, you would never know it when you look at the Rio Olympics and its coverage of "typical" Rio and Brazil.

For the past 50 years, there's been a powerful social, cultural and political movement of Black Brazilians to get some form of affirmative action, reparations, educational equity and be counted accurately in the census. Now, inspired by the US's BlackLivesMatter Movement, young Black Brazilians are pushing the government and society on the whole to recognize the centrality of AfroBrazilians to the development of Brazil's democracy.

The legacy of Portuguese slavery and colonialism has resulted in a very complex and, ofttimes, bizarre form of "racial" categorization in order to try to keep the "white" population the largest in the nation. Hence, at one point in Brazil's history, they actually had 127 racial categories based on skin color, height, hair texture, nose size, lip size, body build, eye color.... Today, it's down to about a dozen "racial" categories... with the results of the census indicating that 92 million (48%) Brazilians were white, 83 million (44%) were brown, 13 million (7%) were black, 1.1 million (0.50%) were yellow and 536,000 (0.25%) were indigenous. But, if we look at Brazilians thru the US "Race Lens", we find that that "brown" or pardo category looks like folk we call Black here in the US!

Racism runs deep in Brazil. And, with the use of the social media, the Black Brazilian antiracist fightback is gaining traction inside of Brazil. Below are some statement that Brazilian activist youth have been spreading around to help combat and eradicate Brazilian racism.

This Photo Series Shows What I Means To Be A Black Woman In Brazil

"Being a black woman is to strive three times harder than white people to achieve the same result. That's because of racism, sexism, and class oppression."

"Being a black woman is to be complete!"

“Being a black woman means to resist, in order to exist."

"Being a black woman is being a woman."

"My hair and my features are political acts. I carry in my skin and in my soul the pride of being black."

"Being a black woman is to be proud of what is natural!"

"Being a black woman is my essence!"

"Being a black woman is to be targeted with prejudice and to find out you are strong."

"Being a black woman ​means not talking about how we feel as black women."

"Being a black woman is being original, each black woman is unique."

"Being black is to have attitude."

"Black women: don't get used to offensive words."

"Being a black woman is to be powerful and beautiful."

"Being a black woman is to overcome standards."

"Being a black woman is to feel the sun every day."

"Being a black woman is to resist."

"Trying to live by 'white' standards in order to be accepted!"

"Being a black woman is love, resistance, strength. A fight against the system."

"It is not better to have straight hair and a slim nose."

"My own existence is a challenge."

"Being a black woman is to be the sister of everyone, except the racist."

"I exist to resist!"

BlackLivesMatter Evolving to Fight Racism & Capitalism

Alicia Garza on Progressives and the Black Community 

Alicia Garza, a Founder of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement

 ------------

  Aug 2, 2016

Alicia Garca, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, talks to OurFuture.org about strains in the relationship between the progressive movement and the African-American community, and how they can be repaired. Garza was a keynote speaker at the People's Action Delegates Assembly in Milwaukee.

Linda Burnham Analyzing Baton Rouge, Falcon Heights, Dallas

Baton Rouge, Falcon Heights, Dallas

Linda Burnham - July 11, 2016

A thick strand in the history of U.S. policing is rooted back in the slave patrols of the 19^th century. 

 

Patty rollers were authorized to stop, question, search, harass and summarily punish any Black person they encountered. The five- and six-pointed badges many of them wore to symbolize their authority were predecessors to those of today’s sheriffs and patrolmen. They regularly entered the plantation living quarters of enslaved people, leaving terror and grief in their wake. Together with the hunters of runaways, these patrols had a crystal clear mandate: to constrain the enslaved population to its role as the embodiment and producer of massive wealth for whites and to forestall the possibility that labor subordinated to the lash might rebel at the cost of white lives. 

 

How far have we come, really? Having extricated ourselves from a system of bottomless and blatant cruelty we have evolved a system that depends on the patty rollers of today to constrain and contain a population that, while no longer enslaved, is ruthlessly exploited, criminally neglected and justifiably aggrieved. Ruthlessly exploited by the low-wage industries that depend on ample supplies of cheap labor, by the bottom feeders of capital – pay-day loan companies and slumlords come to mind –­ by the incarceration-for-profit industry, by the municipalities that meet their budgets by preying on poor people, generating revenue by way of broken taillights, lapsed vehicle registrations and failures to signal.

 

Criminally neglected by policy makers – 152 years’ worth and counting – at every level of government. And so our education policy appears to be: starve the public system until it collapses and to hell with the children whose parents have no alternative. Housing policy stubbornly stacked against the development and maintenance of low-income housing. Jobs policy that, against an ideological backdrop that touts personal fulfillment and prosperity through honest effort, reduces grown men to selling loosies and cd’s on street corners to provide for their families.

 

Justifiably aggrieved because we still must assert, against the relentless accumulation of evidence to the contrary, that Black lives matter.

 

And all this on top of the foundational failure to financially repair or compensate the formerly enslaved or their descendants.

 

So today’s patty rollers are expected to contain any overflow of bitterness and anger on the part of the exploited, neglected and aggrieved, maintaining order in a fundamentally – and racially – disordered system. Their mandate is as clear as that of their forefathers: to constrain a population whose designated role is to absorb absurdly high rates of unemployment and make itself available for low-wage, low-status work without complaint, much less rebellion. Those who fear a spiraling descent into disorder, know this: we are merely witnessing the periodic, explosive surfacing of entrenched disorders we have refused to face or fix.

 

Our narratives and debates about good cops and rogue cops, better training and community policing are important but entirely insufficient. No doubt the patty rollers of the 1850s could have been trained to reign in their brutality. Given the gloriously diverse dispositions of our human family, patrollers likely ranged from the breathtakingly cruel to the queasily reluctant enforcers of patent injustice. All that is, at bottom, beside the point. Whether cruel or kind, restrained or rogue, their job was to police – and by policing, maintain – a barbaric system.

 

Today’s police can be better trained to recognize implicit bias, to dial back on aggression and deescalate tense encounters. All to the good, as far as it goes. But none of it changes their core mandate in poor Black communities: to control and contain, by any means necessary, a population that has every reason to be restive and rebellious.

*                      *                      *

“Was he colored?” That’s what my grandmother would say whenever she heard news about a criminal act. She knew that if the alleged perpetrator were “colored” his criminality would be read not simply as the act of an individual, but as an expression of an ingrained racial tendency. Somehow being Black meant that the actions of every random thief, rapist or murderer who was also Black redounded to you and your people. I imagine most Black families had a version of “Was he colored?” And I wouldn’t be surprised if Muslim American families have an equivalent expression today. 

 

Untying the knot of individual culpability and the consequences of racial belonging is nowhere near as straightforward as it might seem.

 

I was on a dance floor on Thursday night, desperately trying to shake off the news from Baton Rouge and Falcon Heights. My phone was in my back pocket and, like an idiot, when it buzzed with an incoming text, I left the dance floor and stepped outside to the news from Dallas. Though the action was still unfolding, I immediately surmised that the shooter was “colored,” and that he had been trained by the U.S. military.

 

 It has fallen to President Obama, time and again, to make sense out of the incomprehensible and bind the wounds of a nation apparently bent on self-destruction. In the aftermath of Dallas, Obama quickly condemned the despicable violence of a demented, troubled individual. The president’s intent was clear and laudable. He sought to defuse tensions by definitively asserting that the shooter’s action was not associated with a political movement or a particular organization, that his murderous deeds should in no way be linked to African Americans in general. He struggled to shift the focus from “Was he colored?” to “Clearly he was crazy, right?”

 

But before boxing Micah Johnson up and setting him aside as deranged and demented it’s worth asking a few questions. Honestly, good people, did anybody in their right mind – that is, not troubled or demented – think that the police could continue to pick off Black people at will and on camera without producing a Micah Johnson? And is troubled and demented shorthand for “traumatized by repeated exposure to the graphic depiction of the murder of people who look just like me?” Or for “agonized by the fact that the officers of the law who placed a handcuffed man in the back of a van and snapped his spine in an intentionally “rough ride” were neither held criminally accountable nor labeled troubled and demented?” Or for “depressed beyond imagining and haunted by the ghosts of the men and women whose lives were snatched by the side of the road, down back alleyways, and in precinct stations from one end of the country to the other before the era of cell phone video?” Or for “pierced through the heart by the voice of four-year-old Dae’Anna, comforting her mama?” Because if demented and troubled is shorthand for any of that, then Micah Johnson may have been a lone gunman, but he is far from alone. 

 

That whoosh you heard on Friday morning was the sound of people rushing to condemn the Dallas shootings, or to extract condemnations from others. There is, of course, no moral justification for gunning down police officers. And, retaliatory violence aimed at the armed representatives of the state, beyond being a suicidal provocation, also shuts down all avenues for advancing the cause of racial justice.  But there is a lot of room for reflection between the cheap polarities of condemn or condone.

 

So here we are, once again, with calls from all quarters for dialogue across the racial divide. But if the long years before the emergence of the various movements for Black lives have taught us anything, it is this: our purported partners in dialogue simply turn their backs and leave the table as soon as the pressure is off. This moment calls for the vigorous defense of our right to continued protest and the intensification and elaboration of multiple movements for Black lives – for the sake of our ancestors and the generations to come. And for the sake of this country that is our home.

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Linda Burnham is the Research Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. She is the co-author of Home Economics: The Invisible and Unregulated World of Domestic Work. Burnham was a leader in the Third World Women’s Alliance, a national organization that was an early advocate for the rights of women of color. In 1990 she co-founded Women of Color Resource Center. She was its Executive Director for 18 years. Burnham led large delegations of women of color to the 1985 UN World Conference on Women in Nairobi, the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, and the 2001 United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa.

ORIGINS OF CAPITALISM: Slavery As "Free" Trade

Slavery as free trade

The 18th-century thinkers behind laissez-faire economics saw slavery as a great example of global free trade

Plan of the French slave ship La Marie Seraphique c.1770. © Château des ducs de Bretagne - Musée d'histoire de Nantes.

Blake Smith -aeon.co

is a PhD candidate in history at Northwestern University in Illinois and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. His research, focusing on the French East India Company, has appeared in scholarly journals such as French Cultural Studies and the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, as well as popular media such as TheWire.in and The Appendix.

For nearly four centuries, the Atlantic slave trade brought millions of people into bondage. Scholars estimate that around 1.5 million people perished in the brutal middle passage across the Atlantic. The slave trade linked Africa, Europe and the Americas in a horrific enterprise of death and torture and profit. Yet, in the middle of the 18th century, as the slave trade boomed like never before, some notable European observers saw it as a model of free enterprise and indeed of ‘liberty’ itself. They were not slave traders or slave-ship captains but economic thinkers, and very influential ones. They were a pioneering group of economic thinkers committed to the principle of laissez-faire: a term they themselves coined. United around the French official Vincent de Gournay (1712-1759), they were among the first European intellectuals to argue for limitations on government intervention in the economy. They organised campaigns for the deregulation of domestic and international trade, and they made the slave trade a key piece of evidence in their arguments.
For a generation, the relationship between slavery and capitalism has preoccupied historians. The publication of several major pieces of scholarship on the matter has won attention from the media. Scholars demonstrate that the Industrial Revolution, centred on the mass production of cotton textiles in the factories of England and New England, depended on raw cotton grown by slaves on plantations in the American South. Capitalists often touted the superiority of the industrial economies and their supposedly ‘free labour’. ‘Free labour’ means the system in which workers are not enslaved but free to contract with any manufacturer they chose, free to sell their labour. It means that there is a labour market, not a slave market.
But because ‘free labour’ was working with and dependent on raw materials produced by slaves, the simple distinction between an industrial economy of free labour on the one hand and a slave-based plantation system on the other falls apart. So too does the boundary between the southern ‘slave states’ and northern ‘free states’ in America. While the South grew rich from plantation agriculture that depended on slave labour, New England also grew rich off the slave trade, investing in the shipping and maritime insurance that made the transport of slaves from Africa to the United States possible and profitable. The sale of enslaved Africans brought together agriculture and industry, north and south, forming a global commercial network from which the modern world emerged.
It is only in the past few decades that scholars have come to grips with how slavery and capitalism intertwined. But for the 18th-century French thinkers who laid the foundations of laissez-faire capitalism, it made perfect sense to associate the slave trade with free enterprise. Their writings, which inspired the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), aimed to convince the French monarchy to deregulate key businesses such as the sale of grain and trade with Asia. Only a few specialists read them today. Yet these pamphlets, letters and manuscripts clearly proclaim a powerful message: the birth of modern capitalism depended not only on the labour of enslaved people and the profits of the slave trade, but also on the example of slavery as a deregulated global enterprise.

For centuries after European colonisation of the Americas commenced, European governments regulated the Atlantic slave trade. They organised it in accordance with what was known as mercantilism. This was the authoritative economic thinking of the 16th, 17th and much of the 18th century. It favoured heavy government intervention, particularly in international trade. For mercantilist thinkers, trade was a kind of war in which nations could defeat their rivals by accumulating silver and gold, and by exporting manufactured goods while importing agricultural products. All aspects of trade were to be precisely organised in order to serve these goals, leaving little initiative to private traders. A few decades after Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean in 1492, it became clear to the Spanish monarchy that enslaving indigenous peoples of the Americas was not enough to supply its growing colonies’ need for labour. The Spanish turned to the slave trade in West Africa. Europeans and Arabs had long engaged in the African slave trade. Well-meaning Spanish critics of the horrific mistreatment of indigenous peoples, such as Bartolomé de las Casas, supported this decision. They argued that Africans were better fit for hard labour than American Indians.
In a system known as the asiento (contract), the Spanish government began granting some European merchants special monopoly contracts. These allowed the traders to become the sole merchants permitted to sell slaves in a particular area. The Spanish government carefully controlled the whole economy of its American colonies, only allowing a select handful of foreigners to trade with its valuable possessions. Since the slave trade was one of the most lucrative sectors of colonial commerce, it was particularly restricted. In the 16th century, the Spanish government granted these asiento monopolies over the slave trade in its colonies to Italian, German and Portuguese investors who came from countries in the orbit of Spain’s global empire. By the end of the 17th century, however, Spain was declining as a military power. It was less and less able to grant the asiento to merchants of its own choosing. Other European empires coveted the riches of the asiento for themselves, and tried to seize it. In 1701, the Spanish king died with no heir. The French king, Louis XIV, invaded Spain and installed his own grandson on the throne. One of the newly crowned ruler’s first acts was to hand over control of the asiento to his grandfather. Now France would have the sole right to supply Spain’s colonies with enslaved Africans, ensuring huge profits for French slave traders.
The asiento was a rich prize, and France was not the only country to covet it. Louis XIV’s enemies quickly snatched it back from him. Great Britain, the Netherlands and a number of other countries formed an alliance against France, initiating the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714). This ended in French defeat. As part of its share of the spoils of war, Britain took control of the asiento. In order to run this valuable new commerce, it created an innovative corporation called the South Sea Company. This was one of the first joint stock companies to attract thousands of investors, who imagined that the profits of the slave trade to the Spanish colonies made it a sure bet. The price of shares spiralled ever higher, until the frenzy of speculation triggered a nationwide financial crisis. Shocked by the sudden rise and disastrous fall of the value of their shares, bewildered investors discovered the stock-market ‘bubble’, the first of its kind.
More slaves in the colonies meant more consumption of sugar, coffee and chocolate in Europe: feeding on itself, the slave trade seemed to expand without limits

While the British public was trading shares in the slave trade, French slave traders faced an uncertain future. The end of the War of the Spanish Succession deprived them of access to what had been their best markets. They demanded action from the government. But the French government had financial problems of its own. The war left it burdened with massive debts and desperate for a way out. It turned to the professional gambler-turned-business guru John Law (1671-1729), who promised that a new twist on mercantilist polices would solve the problems of both the state and of slave traders. On his advice, the French monarchy created a new state-run corporation, the French East India Company. This behemoth had global ambitions. Headed by Law himself, it had a monopoly on all trade between France and Asia, and also the exclusive right to supply France’s sugar-producing colonies in the Caribbean with African slaves. The initial excitement of Law’s scheme, like initial excitement in Britain over the South Sea Company, led to wild speculation by the public on shares of the new company. When the price of these shares rose far enough beyond their real value, it finally collapsed, bringing Law, his company and the French economy into ruin.
With yet another economic crisis on its hands, the French government took a desperate, unprecedented step. In defiance of mercantilist ideas, it deregulated the slave trade. For the first time, the monarchy allowed private firms to send slave ships to Africa and on to the Americas. There would be no new state monopoly company to control the French slave trade. From a business perspective, the result was a wild success. Private traders sent increasing numbers of slaves to France’s colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). At the beginning of the 18th century, a few thousand slaves were brought to the French Caribbean each year. By the end of the 18th century, more than a 100,000 slaves were taken there annually. The huge increase in the volume of slaves coming to France’s colonies transformed these islands into centres of global commerce. The more that traders sent slaves to the colonies, the more colonial plantation owners could expand their production of sugar. The cheaper sugar became, the more a growing number of Europeans could consume it, often paired with other colonial substances such as coffee and chocolate. These were also produced in tropical colonies by enslaved Africans. More slaves in the colonies meant more consumption of sugar, coffee and chocolate in Europe, and thus also meant even more demand for slaves. Feeding on itself, the slave trade seemed to expand without limits.
This economic boom was a human tragedy. Slavery was brutal everywhere in the Americas, but slavery in France’s sugar plantations might have been the most brutal of all. Many enslaved Africans died before reaching the Caribbean colonies and, once they arrived, their average life expectancy was less than five years. They were simply worked to death. It was no accident that Saint-Domingue, the largest French colony, would be the scene of the most important and most violent slave revolt in the history of the Americas. Breaking out in the midst of the French Revolution, this revolt forced the French government to abolish slavery in 1793. When France began to attempt to restore slavery 10 years later, a new revolt broke out. This time, the rebels won their independence from France, creating the Republic of Haiti in 1804.
While tensions brewed in Saint-Domingue, the enormity of the Atlantic slave trade slowly began to register on French consciences. In the 1780s, on the eve of the French Revolution, anti-slavery activists gathered in Paris to lobby for the abolition of the slave trade. But a generation before this, another group of activists known as the Gournay Circle were more concerned about the lessons that the growing slave trade had for the French economy. They were inspired by Gournay, the intellectual who coined the phrase laissez-faire, laissez-passer (‘let do, let go’) to sum up his innovative views.
Gournay and his entourage revolutionised economic thinking by calling for the systematic elimination of international and domestic trade barriers such as state monopolies, guilds and prohibitions on foreign imports. Never before had a group of thinkers so directly challenged mercantilist ideas. When the French monarchy had deregulated the slave trade in the 1720s, it had acted out of desperation in regard to a particular crisis, not out of a conviction that mercantilism itself had failed. It was only three decades later that members of the Gournay Circle observed the dramatic growth of the slave trade and slave-based colonial economies, and drew a more general conclusion. They argued that the slave trade’s success proved that deregulation should be pursued not just as a last-ditch tactic, but as a deliberate and comprehensive strategy. The slave trade showed that the top-down regulations of mercantilism were obsolete.
The Gournay Circle lobbied the French monarchy for sweeping changes. One of its most important targets was the French East India Company, the successor to Law’s ambitious super-corporation. Deprived of its monopoly over the French Atlantic slave trade in 1720, this state monopoly company was now responsible for all French trade with the Indian Ocean region. No private traders were allowed to sail east past the Cape of Good Hope. The Company managed to make a reasonable profit most years. However, it neither satisfied French demand for South Asian commodities nor exported more than a handful of French goods to South Asia. It ran a massive trade deficit and, by the middle of the 18th century, was sinking into debt.
Sensing an opportunity to advance their ideals of laissez-faire, Gournay and his circle attacked the Company. They compared the unsatisfactory state of France’s trade with the Indian Ocean to the flourishing and ever-expanding Atlantic slave trade. The first revealed the weaknesses of mercantilism, while the second showed the strengths of laissez-faire. Gournay first developed this argument in a series of unpublished Observations on the Company written in the mid-1750s. He wrote that ‘the largest branches of commerce that the nation [France] has acquired since 1720… have been obtained only by parting from the Company’s privilege’. In the Atlantic market, where Law’s Company had lost the right the monopolise trade, business boomed. In the Asian market, where the Company’s successor still had a monopoly, trade languished. Gournay pointed to the growth of France’s Caribbean colonies after the deregulation of the slave trade. He noted that ‘the islands of Saint Domingue and Martinique would still be almost entirely without Negroes and thus without agriculture’ if the monarchy had not deregulated the slave trade.
Gournay died not long after making these comments, but his protégé André Morellet (1727-1819) picked up where he left off. Morellet became the spokesman for a movement against the French East India Company. In 1769, he published the incendiary pamphlet On the Current Condition of the India Company, which included Gournay’s notes in his own text, and expanded on their themes. Morellet insisted that state enterprises in general should be abolished, and cited the success of French slave traders after 1720 as proof of the superiority of laissez-faire over mercantilism. To those who felt that the deregulation of France’s trade with Asia was too risky, he answered: ‘This pretext is always relied on in the creation of monopoly Companies, and notably in the trade in Negroes on the African coast … However since then it has been observed that this competition, far from destroying commerce, sustained it. The French colonies in America had remained, until then [1720], in a state of great weakness; liberty revived them.’ Liberty, of course, meant in this case the expansion of the slave trade. Colonial slavery was a force for economic freedom.
Morellet reasoned that the slave trade proved Africans were equal to Europeans.
Self-interest motivated both groups to sell or purchase enslaved people

It is a grotesque irony that this pioneering free-trader could equate ‘liberty’ and the slave trade, but Morellet was not finished yet. Defenders of the Company argued that South Asia was so different from Europe that private traders would be unable to carry out business there. Only a monopoly company, they claimed, could afford to hire experts familiar with the region’s languages, cultures and geography. They warned that private traders would be unable to hire such experts, and would arrive in South Asia unable even to communicate with their local counterparts. The example of the slave trade, Morellet countered, showed that such arguments were false. After 1720, private traders from French ports began to arrive in West Africa. They had no experience of local cultures, yet African merchants and political leaders soon brokered contracts.
In spite of vast linguistic and cultural differences, French traders were able to purchase slaves in exchange for textiles, guns, tools and other items. Business would find a way to overcome any difference between diverse peoples. Indeed, the slave trade proved that Africans and Europeans were, at least in economic terms, exactly alike, hardly different after all: ‘the truth is that, on the subject of trade, people… act in the same way, because they are all guided by the same principle, that is to say, by interest’. Morellet reasoned that the slave trade proved Africans were equal to Europeans. Self-interest motivated both groups to sell or purchase enslaved people.
Morellet and his fellow free-traders’ campaign against the French East India Company, based on the example of the successfully deregulated Atlantic slave trade, was a triumph. They celebrated the deregulation of France’s trade with Asia in 1769. This victory, in turn, inspired economic thinkers across Europe to consider how laissez-faire principles could be applied to other markets. Morellet’s call for freedom of trade particularly struck Adam Smith, who referred to Morellet extensively in The Wealth of Nations (1776), a landmark text that still informs many people’s belief in the ‘free market’.
Indeed, Smith became far more influential than his teacher. As his own version of laissez-faire ideas came to seem like common sense in the following century, the pioneering Gournay Circle was largely forgotten. Their sense that the slave trade was a prime example of free trade in action disappeared. Yet the writings of Gournay and Morellet reveal that modern capitalism is entangled with slavery in multiple, profound ways. Slave labour supplied the cotton, sugar and other vital commodities. The profits from the sale of slaves created fortunes on both sides of the Atlantic. And, in a disturbing paradox, the founding fathers of laissez-faire saw the slave trade as a showcase of liberty.