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Racism
Its tempting to assume that vile racism on the part of the planters brought
about this monstrous episode in history. Yet, as Eric Williams wrote in his
classic 1944 work Capitalism and Slavery, slavery was not born of racism:
rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.
The first source of labour in the new world had been white indentured
servants. People who wanted a better life than that offered by the dismal
prospects of Britain at the time would, in exchange for passage to the
Americas, sell themselves into the service of a wealthier landowner for
years at a time.
But this form of unfree labour could not satisfy the needs of the growing
colonies. Small farmers were pushed aside by the rapacious encroachment
of the plantation system, which produced not for subsistence, but for the
mass export of monoculture crops. From the 1680s onwards, African slaves
became the main source of labour on such plantations.
The reason was economic, not racial, Williams wrote. [I]t had to do not
with the colour of the labourer, but the cheapness of the labour [the
planters] would have gone to the moon, if necessary, for labour. Africa was
nearer than the moon, nearer too than the more populous countries of India
and China. But their turn was to come.
A scaffolding of racism grew around the slave system to justify and
reinforce it. Generations of people grew up in a society in which the word
Negro was synonymous with the word slave. Racism was born.
themselves reconcile the ideals of liberty for which they were fighting with
the existence of a system that represented the exact negation of liberty?,
asks US socialist Lance Selfa. The ideology of white supremacy fit the bill
to rule Black slaves out of the blessings of liberty, the leading head-fixers
of the time argued that Blacks werent really men, they were a lower order
of being.
The defeat of slavery in the latter half of the 19th century did not bring
equality for Black people; nor did it end racism. Rather, the ruling class of a
transformed United States adapted racism for use in a new context. Racism,
argues Selfa, no longer justified the enslavement of Blacks, but it justified
second class status for Blacks as wage labourers and sharecroppers.
Colonialism
The ideology of white superiority fit neatly with the age of empire. Rudyard
Kipling exalted those who would take up the white mans burden,
imposing colonial will on new-caught, sullen peoples half devil and half
child. World powers competed for territory and resources, justifying their
part in the scramble for Africa, and the conquests of Asia and the Middle
East, with a racist narrative in which white heroes brought civilisation to
lesser peoples.
Racism supported the British colonial project in Australia an immense land
grab that was subsequently justified by denying the existence of Aboriginal
peoples. Although Terra Nullius was constantly disproved by the courageous
resistance of Indigenous people, the British colonists steadily expanded
their settlements, forcing the original inhabitants from their land.
The developing wool industry, and the need for vast tracts of grazing land
for sheep, prompted some of the worst massacres of Aboriginal people in
the 1830s and 1840s as the squatters pushed hundreds of thousands of
people from the flat grasslands of eastern Australia.
As the Australian colonies grew, and with them their demand for labour, the
emerging ruling class changed its policy in some locations. In response to
the needs of industry, Aboriginal people were effectively enslaved, rather
than exterminated.
A pseudoscience emerged to justify the actions of empire all over the world,
and to refine the concept of race into its modern form of a set of
biologically inherited characteristics.