Slaves of the World Unite Part 4 : Negro is the Old Black

“In enlarging the meaning of freedom and giving it new expressions, the Negro had been a watchman on the wall. More fully than any other American, he knew that freedom was hard-won and could be preserved only by continuous effort. The faith and works of the Negro over the years had made it possible for the American creed to retain so much of its deep appeal, so much of its moving power.” Benjamin Quarles, 1964

When historians lop a century off documented African presence on the North American continent to declare 1619 as the “nation’s birth year.. as the beginning of American slavery,” one wonders what else they left out. Turns out, the “twenty odd Negars” sold off a Dutch frigate that year in Virginia weren’t technically slaves, although they were purchased by the colonial government of Roanoke. Of course they weren’t willing visitors, but this shipload had been baptized as Christians, so they couldn’t be slaves by English law. The Netherlands were agnostic on commercial matters, winding down their maritime reign as primary slave trader of the Atlantic passage.

These Negars became indentured servants, like so many English peasants and slum births shipped to the colony. The legal statues and court decisions that wrapped the Negro into perpetual Slave were woven in Virginia and the southern colonies of Maryland, Carolina and Georgia during the next century, however. A 1640 decision discriminated between two white runaway servants given four additional years and the negro servant, John Punch, sentenced to serving for the “Time of his natural life.”

When Anthony Johnson, a landholding Negro and former servant, sued his black servant in 1653, he claimed John Casor owed him service for life. By 1662, Virginia made lifetime “slaves” legal. Their 1667 law decided “conferring of baptisme does not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedome.” From then on God Himself was the judge of their character at the end of time, but not during their lifetime.

Racism, while ancient, was given scientific standing on the other side of the Atlantic. The European Enlightenment was birthed and fledged in the boom times from Spanish seized New World wealth in the 16th century. Profits from the Middle Passage and West Indies slave grown sugar and slave/servant produced tobacco, rice and timber of the North American colonies fed infant capitalism over the next two centuries to become the greedy, blind beast groping King Cotton in the 19th.

John Locke, the “pre-eminent liberal philosopher was an architect of the race-based slavery developing in the American colonies.” Locke co-wrote The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina of 1669, which gave slave owners “absolute power and Authority” over their chattel. Yet in his Two Treatises on Government, Locke proclaimed himself an opponent of “slavery, the political domination of an absolute monarch.” His liberality was focused on “the freedom and prosperity of Englishmen, and not troubled if they were gained at the expense of Africans.”

Immanuel Kant, a later moral philosophical giant of the Enlightenment, categorized race in 1775. “Humanity exists in its greatest perfection in the white race … The yellow Indians have a smaller amount of Talent. The Negroes are lower and the lowest are a part of the American peoples. [Whites] are the only ones who always advance to perfection.” He was an early animal rights advocate, if that helps.

Our own ringing beacon of Freedom, the Declaration of Independence signed in 1776 by slave owners, was hollow at the core. No wonder the Liberty Bell cracked. (Legend has it that when she tolls purely, White Buffalo Women will return.) “You Americans make a great Clamour upon every little imaginary infringement of what you take to be your Liberties; and yet there are no People upon Earth such Enemies to Liberty, such absolute Tyrants, where you have the Opportunity, as you yourselves are,” an English lord told Benjamin Franklin in 1764. Ten years later, Samuel Johnson jested, “How is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes?”

Some readers (not plural, simply non-binary) wonder why I harp on about slavery when we are obviously the Freest People on the Planet. Never mind the imprisonment of more people than any other country in the history of the planet, they are mostly poor. Global Corporations freely spread Toxins and Hazards in communities without our consent, but most densely in the poorest ones. Like Frogs Boiling while binge watching Red Queen’s Gambit we’ve gone through the Looking Glass. A sacrificed pawn, we are entering an era when slavery will be non-racialized again, equal opportunity, no matter melanin.

This time we are willingly skipping up the gangplank of the Flying Dutchman, lured by sounds of entertainment and Liberty on board. Enthralled by our own devices, we’ve slid into a Surveillance Society more observed than Pan Opticon prisons. None Such Agencies know less information about us than commercial entities that slice and dice our likes and clicks like so many subprime mortgages.

We’ve long been slaves to the automobile, even as we drive it over the cliff. Cue Mandatory Vaccinations by the Medical Monopoly with less interest in our health than banks gain from trillions in student loan debt carried for life. Deputy Dawg on the corner is the thin blue wedge of a legal system designed to crush the poor. Freeze is his preliminary greeting. Abandon Hope those who enter Halls of Justice shackled.

Like those Negars shuffling off the boat into the New World, we will find our status shifting like sand beneath our bended knees. Blacks have fought the long war from slavery to equality, making a way out of no way. They had allies of all colors, rebellions and patience, organized in cities and preached in the wilderness, joined together in celebration and sorrow when they could. Connecting through music, industry and agriculture, churches and saloons, law and crime, arts and sports, they carved out a persistent trail rainbow slaves will need to learn, when we are sold down the riber. Second star to the left.

Sources:

The Negro in the Making of America, Benjamin Quarles, Collier Books 1964

The Enlightenment’s Dark Side: How the Enlightenment created modern race thinking, and why we should confront it, Jamelle Bouie, Slate, 2018

Save Trillions with Universal Health Care, Stephen Simac, Paradise Press 2020