Open Wound: The Long View of Race in America

1. How the American Racial System Began: Atlantic Slavery Becomes Market-Driven and Color-Defined

13 Chapter 1 How the American Racial System Began Atlantic Slavery Becomes Market-Driven and Color-Defined Omar ibn Saíd was on the run. Taken prisoner in Africa, Omar ibn Saíd was now on the run in America. His African captors had sold him “into the hands of the Christians, who . . . sent me on board a great ship. . . . to a place called Charleston in the Christian language. There they sold me to a small, weak and wicked man called Johnson, a complete infidel, who had no fear of God at all.” He had escaped from Johnson and during his flight taken refuge in a church. “A lad saw me . . . and informed [his father] that he had seen a black man in the church. [His father] and another man . . . on horseback came attended by a troop of dogs. They took me.”1 The lad told his father that he had seen a black man in the church. But at no point does Omar ibn Saíd call himself black or his captors white. Where he came from, the all-important difference was religion. In America, it was color. In his homeland,mostmastersboughtslavestobehouseservants.InAmerica,masters mainly bought slaves to produce plantation commodities for the European market . The American racial system began in a market-driven and racially defined type of slavery, which had begun before there was a single English colony. The European conquerors had discovered a bottomless market in Europe’s growing addiction to sugar, rum, and tobacco. They had also discovered that stable plantation production of these commodities was not possible without black slaves, who had more resistance to the killer diseases that had devastated the American natives whom they had enslaved during the early decades of the conquest. From these two discoveries a historic mutation occurred in the ideology of slavery that would later be called racism. When the institution of slavery crossed the Atlantic, large changes took place. For centuries, most slaves had been white, and European Christendom had justified their enslavement as the proper fate of “enemies of the faith.” Now in the rising Atlantic World, above all in the plantation colonies, slavery became black slavery, justified as the proper fate of black Africans. In the Americas, there was a radical shift in the purposes for which slaves were exploited , in the way their labor was managed, in the geographical areas from which slaves were drawn, and, finally, in slavery’s justifying ideology. But none of the dominant features of slavery in the Americas was new. What was new was their dominance. First, the shift in the purposes for which slaves were exploited: Their most common use in the Old World was as household servants and as workers in local economies, for example, in the shops of artisans . Most of the household servants were women, who sometimes doubled as concubines. This form of the institution fostered ties of kinship between master and slave. But even for other slaves, the ideology of paternalism held out the prospect of eventual emancipation and full integration into a larger society defined by religion.2 Another important use of slaves was as soldiers, who often served to control nominally free but severely exploited peasants. Rulers indoctrinated these slaves with an esprit de corps that resembled the paternalism of the patriarchal household. They also systematically instructed them in the official religion. Such slaves looked forward to eventually being mustered out as free men and fully integrated into the religious community.3 A minor use of slaves in the Old World, their exploitation in work gangs, became the dominant use in the Americas. In the Old World, these slaves rowed galleys, toiled in quarries and mines, or worked on plantations in some Mediterranean lands. Not only was “gang slavery” unusual in the Old World, far from mainstream society, but it made no discernible impression on the traditional ideology of the institution, on the idea that slaves were quasi or inferior members of the master’s household; and, like his own children , they were being taught the true religion. Gang slaves could not look forward to improving their lot in life; and, unless ransomed, only death brought emancipation. This most debased type of slavery in the Old World became the standard type in the New. 14 part 1: the colonial period The Mediterranean Origins of the Plantation Between the 1300s and the 1600s, the use of gang slaves expanded with the...