This diary is, in a sense, a continuation of a process of educating myself, a process that began in the aftermath of the 2016 election, which exposed my wishful thinking and assumptions about what America is, and what it had become over the course of my life, especially in regard to matters of race and gender.
I reviewed one of my initial steps in this education in a diary not long after the election— ‘Racism without Racists’: Pretending the election wasn’t about white supremacy won’t help. (Nov. 29, 2016). That diary was based on the indispensable work of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, and his exposure of structural racism in Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America.
Bonilla-Silva demonstrates how structural racism resides at the very foundation of American society, its political and economic institutions, and provides countless examples of how it operates outside of our awareness, existing as a pernicious scaffolding around every aspect of public life.
This realization— structural racism resides at the very foundation of American society— leads to a very specific conclusion: there can be no successful fight for economic justice that does not explicitly address racial justice.
Among the implications for those who sincerely wish to pursue racial, gender and economic justice, is that we must understand how they are intertwined, and how these categories rest upon an edifice of philosophical pretenses and maneuvers, so fully ingrained in every Western academic and professional discipline as to be rendered invisible, just as anyone not white, male or heterosexual is rendered invisible in most academic, political and professional settings (this conceptual invisibility is in fact part of the mechanism for enforcing the social invisibility of ‘others’). (For a comprehensive and searingly incisive critique of the legal reification of Whiteness in American legal and political culture, see also the work of Prof. Cheryl Harris, whose work I outline in my diary White privilege and white entitlement give rise to white supremacy: Whiteness as Property.)
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If we learn to see the pervasive presence of these philosophical pretenses and maneuvers, and how they perpetuate systems of inequality, how they are a crucial element of white male heterosexual dominance in society, we arrive at another conclusion: to dismantle systems of inequality and dominance, we must dismantle the intellectual edifice upon which they are constructed.
Cedric J. Robinson sets about to do just that in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition.
Robinson explicates the intent of his book this way in his preface:
This work is about our people's struggle, the historical Black struggle. It takes as a first premise that for a people to survive in struggle it must be on its own terms: the collective wisdom which is a synthesis of culture and the experience of that struggle.The shared past is precious, not for itself, but because it is the basis of consciousness,of knowing, of being. It cannot be traded in exchange for expedient alliances or traduced by convenient abstractions or dogma. It contains philosophy, theories of history, and social prescriptions native to it. It is a construct possessing its own terms,exacting its own truths. I have attempted here to demonstrate its authority. More particularly, I have investigated the failed efforts to render the historical being of Black peoples into a construct of historical materialism, to signify our existence as merely an opposition to capitalist organization. We are that (because we must be) but much more.
The scope of the book evokes awe:
Black Marxism is far more ambitious than its modest title implies, for what Cedric Robinson has written extends well beyond the history of the Black Left or Black radical movements. Combining political theory, history, philosophy, cultural analysis, and biography, among other things, Robinson literally rewrites the history of the rise of the West from ancient times to the mid-twentieth century, tracing the roots of Black radical thought to a shared epistemology among diverse African people and providing a withering critique of Western Marxism and its inability to comprehend either the racial character of capitalism and the civilization in which it was born or mass movements outside Europe. At the very least, Black Marxism challenges our "commonsense" about the history of modernity, nationalism, capitalism, radical ideology,the origins of Western racism, and the worldwide Left from the 1848 revolutions to the present…
… capitalism emerged within the feudal order and grew in fits and starts, flowering in the cultural soil of the West-most notably in the racialism that has come to characterize European society. Capitalism and racism, in other words,did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of "racial capitalism" dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide. So Robinson not only begins in Europe; he also chips away at many of the claims and assertions central to European historiography, particularly of the Marxist and liberal varieties. (from the foreward, pp. xii-xiii)
But this scope, aside from how it demonstrates Robinson’s prodigious intellect, and the breadth and depth of his scholarly research, is simply what is required to develop what is a complete philosophical framework, one that stands in opposition to ‘traditional Western philosophy’, an edifice constructed by the Greeks, and their European inheritors, and which has no place for people of color or women in its moral or political scheme:
Fully aware of the constant place women and children held in the work force, Marx still deemed them so unimportant as a proportion of wage labor that he tossed them, with slave labor and peasants, into the imagined abyss signified by precapitalist, noncapitalist, and primitive accumulation.~ And how, can we suppose,was Marx's conception of the mode-specific, internal development of European productive forces to accommodate the technological borrowings from China, India,Africa, and the Americas which propelled the West into industrialism and imperialism?' As Andre Gunder Frank declares:
the original sin of Marx, Weber, and their followers was to look for the "origin,""cause,""nature,""mechanism," indeed the "essence" of it [capitalism, development,modernization] all essentially in European exceptionalism instead of in the real world economy system.
Marx's conceit was to presume that the theory of historical materialism explained history; but, at worst, it merely rearranged history. And at its best (for it must be acknowledged that there are some precious insights in Marxism), historical materialism still only encapsulated an analytical procedure which resonated with bourgeois Europe, merely one fraction of the world economy…
There was an obvious genealogy and a striking parallel between Aristotle's treatments of slaves and slavery and those of Marx. Aristotle saw slavery as necessary for the self-sufficiency of the polis,and in only rare instances were slaves expected to achieve a virtuous life. Given their marginal intelligence and development, Aristotle found no compelling reason for inquiry into the ethics, consciousness, or desires of slaves, content to state that "the slave is in a sense a part of his master, a living but separate part of his body."" Marx,though he found slavery abhorrent, similarly recessed slaves from his discourse on human freedom: "The slave only works swayed by fear, and it is not his existence itself which is at stake, since it is guaranteed to him even if it does not belong to him." (from the preface, pg. xxix)
With each historical moment, however, the rationale and cultural mechanisms of domination became more transparent. Race was its epistemology, its ordering principle,its organizing structure, its moral authority, its economy of justice, commerce,and power. Aristotle, one of the most original aristocratic apologists, had provided the template in Natural Law. In inferiorizing women ("[TI he deliberative faculty of the soul is not present at all in the slave; in a female it is present but ineffective"[Politics, i26oaiz]), non-Greeks, and all laborers (slaves, artisans, farmers, wage workers,etc.: "[Tlhe mass of mankind are evidently quite slavish in their tastes, preferring a life suitable to beasts" [Nicomachean Ethics, 1095b20]), Aristotle had articulated an uncompromising racial construct… from the twelfth century on, one European ruling order after another, one cohort of clerical or secular propagandists following another, reiterated and embellished this racial calculus. (from the preface, pg. xxxi)
Robinson offers a scathing indictment of the white European left, for its conflation of blindness to its origins with objectivity and universal truth:
The inquiry required that both Marxism and Black radicalism be subjected to interrogations of unusual form: the first, Marxism, because few of its adherents have striven hard enough to recognize its profound but ambiguous indebtedness to Western civilization; the second, Black radicalism, because the very circumstance of its appearance has required that it be misinterpreted and diminished. (pg. 1)
it is still fair to say that at base, that is at its epistemological substratum,Marxism is a Western construction-a conceptualization of human affairs and historical development that is emergent from the historical experiences of European peoples mediated, in turn, through their civilization, their social orders, and their cultures. Certainly its philosophical origins are indisputably Western. But the same must be said of its analytical presumptions, its historical perspectives, its points of view. This most natural consequence though has assumed a rather ominous significance since European Marxists have presumed more frequently than not that their project is identical with world-historical development… they have mistaken for universal verities the structures and social dynamics retrieved from their own distant and more immediate pasts. Even more significantly, the deepest structures of "historical materialism," the foreknowledge for its comprehension of historical movement,have tended to relieve European Marxists from the obligation of investigating the profound effects of culture and historical experience on their science.The ordering ideas that have persisted in Western civilization (and Marx himself as we shall see was driven to admit such phenomena), reappearing in successive "stages" of its development to dominate arenas of social ideology, have little or no theoretical justification in Marxism for their existence. One such recurring idea is racialism: the legitimation and corroboration of social organization as natural by reference to the"racial" components of its elements. Though hardly unique to European peoples, its appearance and codification, during the feudal period, into Western conceptions of society was to have important and enduring consequences. (pg. 2, emphasis added)
The process of incorporating racialism into European modes of thought (including Marxism) was anything but a natural process:
The obscuring of the Black radical tradition is seated in the West's suppression of Europe's previous knowledge of the African (and its own)past. The denial of history to African peoples took time-several hundreds of years beginning with the emergence of Western Europeans from the shadow of Muslim domination and paternalism. It was also a process that was to transport the image of Africa across separate planes of dehumanization latticed by the emerging modalities of Western culture. (pg. 3)
Robinson traces the process of re-writing the historical narrative of Europe, excising the presence and influence of Africans and African cultures, making a dizzying excursion through all of what has been taught as ‘Western history’:
In England, at first gripped by a combative and often hysterical Christianity-complements of the crusades, the "reconquests," and the rise of Italian capitalism-medieval English devouts recorded dreams in which the devil appeared as "a blacke moore,""an Ethiope." This was part of the grammar of the church, the almost singular repository of knowledge in Europe. Centuries later the Satanic gave way to the representation of Africans as a different sort of beast: dumb, animal labor,the benighted recipient of the benefits of slavery. Thus the "Negro" was conceived.The Negro-whose precedents could be found in the racial fabrications concealing the Slavs (the slaves), the Irish and others-substantially eradicated in Western historical consciousness the necessity of remembering the significance of Nubia for Egypt's formation, of Egypt in the development of Greek civilization, of Africa for imperial Rome, and more pointedly of Islam's influence on Europe's economic, political, and intellectual history. From such a creature not even the suspicion of tradition needed to be entertained. In its stead there was the Black slave, a consequence masqueraded as an anthropology and a history. (pp. 3-4, emphasis added)
In many ways Robinson presaged the sociocognitive analysis of discourse, which seeks to situate speech, information, and what is held to be ‘objective knowledge’ within cultural and cognitive contexts. The importance of exposing and identifying the cultural and cognitive context of political speech, especially in regard to race and racism, is delineated by Teun A. van Dijk:
Discourse, context and cognition
Discourse Studies 2006; 8; 159
I advocate a broad multidisciplinary approach to discourse, which integrates a detailed and explicit study of structures of text and talk with an analysis of their social and cognitive contexts as a basis for problem-oriented critical discourse analysis. In such an approach, the study of relevant knowledge,ideologies and other socially shared beliefs is crucial in describing many of the properties and social functions of discourse. In the same way, both these cognitions and the discourses based on them need to be studied in relation to the relevant structures of institutions, groups, power and other aspects of society and culture. Thus, if we want to account for the role of discourse in the reproduction of racism in society, we obviously need such an integrated approach. (pg 161, emphasis added)
…. contexts are not ‘objective’ or ‘deterministic’constraints of society or culture at all, but subjective participant interpretations,constructions or definitions of such aspects of the social environment. From what we know about minds, such ‘definitions’ are mental, and in many situations they areonly mental, and not expressed or formulated in discourse, although they may influence discourse… (pg. 163, emphasis in original)
Contexts defined as participant definitions, that is, as mental constructs, are able to function as the interface between situational and societal structures and discourse structures, because they subjectively ‘represent’ relevant aspects of situations and society and directly interfere in the mental processes of discourse production and comprehension. If contexts ‘control’ discourse at all, this is only possible when we conceive of them as cognitive structures of some kind. And only in this way are we able to define the crucial criterion of ‘relevance’, that is, in terms of a selective focus on, and subjective interpretation of some social constraint as defined by the participants. This also explains why discourse maybe influenced by alternative, fictitious or misguided definitions of the social situation, as long as the speaker or writer ‘sees’ it that way. Thus, it is not‘objective’ gender, class, ethnicity or power that control the production or comprehension of text and talk, but whether and how participants interpret,represent and make use of such ‘external’ constraints, and especially how they do so in situated interaction. (pg. 164, emphasis added)
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The point of departure Robinson gives for undoing the erasure of the contributions Africa from the historical record of Europe, is to shine a light on its indelible presence in every aspect of European cultural, political and economic ‘development’. In doing so, he exposes the hollow core of Marxism, its inexcusably narrow perspective:
… the Atlantic slave trade and the slavery of the New World were integral to the modern world economy. Their relationship to capitalism was historical and organic rather than adventitious or synthetic. The Italian financiers and merchants whose capital subsidized Iberian exploration of the Atlantic and Indian oceans were also masters of (largely "European") slave colonies in the Mediterranean.Certainly slave labor was one of their bases for what Marx termed "primitive accumulation." But it would be an error to arrest the relationship there, assigning slave labor to some "pre-capitalist" stage of history. For more than 300 years slave labor persisted beyond the beginnings of modern capitalism, complementing wage labor, peonage, serfdom, and other methods of labor coercion. Ultimately, this meant that the interpretation of history in terms of the dialectic of capitalist class struggles would prove inadequate, a mistake ordained by the preoccupation of Marxism with the industrial and manufacturing centers of capitalism; a mistake founded on the presumptions that Europe itself had produced, that the motive and material forces that generated the capitalist system were to be wholly located in what was a fictive historical entity. From its very foundations capitalism had never been-any more than Europe-a "closed system."Necessarily then, Marx's and Engels's theory of revolution was insufficient in scope:the European proletariat and its social allies did not constitute the revolutionary subject of history, nor was working-class consciousness necessarily the negation of bourgeois culture. (pg. 4, emphasis added)
It is not possible to speak of, or address, any aspect of economic theory, such as the nature of economic classes, independent of race and racism:
The historical development of world capitalism was influenced in a most fundamental way by the particularistic forces of racism and nationalism. This could only be true if the social, psychological and cultural origins of racism and nationalism both anticipated capitalism in time and formed a piece with those events that contributed directly to its organization of production and exchange. Feudal society is the key. (pg.9)
The social, cultural, political, and ideological complexes of European feudalisms contributed more to capitalism than the social "fetters that precipitated the bourgeoisie into social and political revolutions. No class was its own creation. Indeed,capitalism was less a catastrophic revolution (negation) of feudalist social orders than the extension of these social relations into the larger tapestry of the modern world's political and economic relations. Historically, the civilization evolving in the western extremities of the Asian/European continent, and whose first signification is medieval Europe,~ passed with few disjunctions from feudalism as the dominant mode of production to capitalism as the dominant mode of production. And from its very beginnings, this European civilization, containing racial, tribal, linguistic, and regional particularities, was constructed on antagonistic differences. (pg. 10, emphasis added)
Marx’s analysis of capitalism (and every other Eurocentric historical, philosophical, and economic theory and model), as Robinson demonstrates, remains embedded in a framework of cultural domination:
Marxism, the dominant form that the critique of capitalism has assumed in Western thought, incorporated theoretical and ideological weaknesses that stemmed from the same social forces that provided the bases of capitalist formation. (pg. 10, emphasis)
[The] history of "the rise of the middle class" is an amalgam of bourgeois political and economic power, the self-serving ideology of the bourgeoisie as the ruling class and thus an intellectual and political preoccupation-mediated through the constructs of evolutionary theory: From Darwin has descended the language of error, a language that has locked up historical thinking and imposed slovenly and imprecise conclusions even upon scholarly and sensible researchers. Words like "growth,""decline,""development,""evolution,""decay," may have started as servants but they have ended as masters:they have brought us to the edge of historical inevitability.~~Hegel's dialectic of Aufhebung, Marx's dialectic of class struggle and the contradictions between the mode and relations of production, Darwin's evolution of the species and Spencer's survival of the fittest are all forged from the same metaphysical conventions. (pg. 19, emphasis added)
Robinson also notes the white European framework of cultural domination is predicated on violence:
The class that ruled, the nobility, by its orchestration of the instrumentalities of the state, imprinted its character on the whole of European society. And since much of that character had to do with violence,8~ the lower orders were woven into the tapestry of a violent social order. By the nature of hierarchical societies, the integration of the lower classes-wage laborers, peasants, serfs, slaves, vagabonds, and beggars-into the social, political, and economic orders of the Absolute State was on the terms of the clients of the latter. The function of the laboring classes was to provide the state and its privileged classes with the material and human resources needed for their maintenance and further accumulations of power and wealth. (pg. 21, emphasis added)
We begin to perceive that the nation is not a unit of analysis for the social history of Europe. The state is a bureaucratic structure, and the nation for which it administer sis more a convenient construct than the historical, racial, cultural, and linguistic entity that the term "nation" signifies .l08 The truer character of European history resides beneath the phenomenology of nation and state. With respect to the construction of modern capitalism, one must not forget the particular identities, the particular social movements and societal structures that have persisted and/or have profoundly influenced European life. (pg. 24, emphasis added)
European civilization is not the product of capitalism. On the contrary, the character of capitalism can only be understood in the social and historical context of its appearance. (pg. 24, emphasis added )
Robinson focuses his attention squarely on the economic order that Marx studied most closely as he developed Das Capital, the capitalist system and the working classes of Britain:
In Ireland, the late 1840s was the time of the great harvest disasters that came to be known as the Potato Famine or the Great Hunger. Its immediate consequences were both the momentous emigration from Ireland to the United States and the precipitation of an even more extreme nationalism among Irishmen both home and abroad.70 Together, these political and economic setbacks-on the one hand to English and Irish industrial workers, and on the other to Irish farmers, peasants, and industrial workers in Ireland-resulted in both an ideological and physical drifting apart of the two "races." From the mid-nineteenth century on, among English workers, the ideology of English nationalism gained ascendancy over the counter ideology of international class solidarity and socialist hopes. This was a part of a conservative reaction(trade unionism) to political defeat and economic growth, but it also had to do with the radical directions the Irish working classes (and the nationalist Irish middle class)had taken.71 As Marx had often stated in one fashion or another: "The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland."72 Early on, of course, it had been the presence of the Irish immigrant as a distorting and depressive element in the labor market that had produced markedly anti-Irish sentiment among English workers. This hostility had merely confirmed and complemented the racial feeling extant among England's ruling classes…
… we have seen that the generic terms "the English working class" or "the English proletariat" mask the social and historical realities that accompanied the introduction of industrial capitalism in England and its Empire.Social divisions and habits of life and attitude that predated capitalist production continued into the modern era and extended to the working classes located in Britain specific social sensibilities and consciousness. The English working class was never the singular social and historical entity suggested by the phrase. An even closer study of its elements-for we have merely reviewed the more extreme case with the Irish would reveal other social divisions, some ethnic (Welsh, Scottish, and more recently West Indian and Asian),'~ some regional, and others essentially industrial and occupational.The negations resultant from capitalist modes of production, relations of production, and ideology did not manifest themselves as an eradication of oppositions among the working classes. Instead, the dialectic of proletarianization disciplined the working classes to the importance of distinctions: between ethnics and nationalities; between skilled and unskilled workers; and, as we shall see later in even more dramatic terms, between races. The persistence and creation of such oppositions within the working classes were a critical aspect of the triumph of capitalism in the nineteenth century. (pg. 42)
Robinson goes on to dismantle the most basic and fundamental concepts employed by Marx:
Perhaps the most obvious of the ideological constructs that appear in the work of Marx and Engels (and most of the Marxists who have followed them) are the notions of the proletariat as the revolutionary subject, and the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. They persist in Marxian thought in precisely the terms suggested by Isaiah Berlin:
[Tlhe Marxist doctrine of movement in dialectical collisions is not a hypothesis liable to be made less or more probable by the evidence of facts, but a pattern,uncovered by a non-empirical historical method, the validity of which is not questioned.
To comprehend this "haunting" of radical European thought, and its Eurocentrism, it becomes appropriate to review the socialist tradition from which Marx and Engels emerged and that had for its historical setting the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century. (pg. 43)
To accept the notion, so frequently put forth, that early socialist thought was the ideological and theoretical negation of capitalist society (industrial capitalism during the stages of competitive and monopoly capitalism) is to presume a historical relationship that is not in evidence. (pg. 47)
The function of the alternative "history" of socialism is to obscure the obvious: that the origins of socialist thought are not with the European proletariat but the middle classes. (pg. 48)
He then exposes an uncomfortable and ugly facet of Marx’s work, which has clear significance for apprehending current debates within the contemporary progressive left (of the US, in particular)— nationalism:
Because nationalism is the most important ideology of our time, its treatment by Marx and Engels and later Marxists can be informative both with respect to the essence of Marxist thought as well as the nature of ideology. (pg. 52)
the historical figure of the nation, conceived in terms of its historic role in the development of capitalist production, remained an aspect of the acceptance or rejection of nationalist movements by Marx and Engels. Nationalism was acceptable if its success resulted in the construction of a "viable" industrial nation. In the same vein, it was unacceptable ("nonsense,""impracticable,""fanatical") for nationalist movements to threaten what Engels had termed "true [i.e. productive] national boundaries"in Po und Rhein.
As late as 1888, Engels was still giving his blessing to German nationalism on this basis… (pg. 60)
It appears that with respect to the actual nationalist movements of their time, in Germany, Poland, eastern,or southern Europe, neither Marx nor Engels achieved an extraordinary comprehension or fully escaped the parochialisms of the day. Rather, their historical method provided them with a means of supporting their predispositions on the historical worth of peoples and the varying capacities of the several European national movements. Their own nationalism whether "unconscious or subconscious:'as Davis is forced to or otherwise, made them generally unsympathetic to the national liberation movements of peoples (eg, the Russians and other Slavs) that historically threatened what Marx and Engels believed to be the national interests of the German people. (pg. 61)
The dismissal of culture, that is, a transmitted historical consciousness, as an aspect of class consciousness, did not equip the Marxian movement for the political forces that would not only erupt in Europe and the Third World but within the movement itself. (pg. 62)
Returning briefly to van Dijk’s sociocognitive model of discourse, we can better understand Robinson’s characterization of Marx’s nationalism as residing at the core of his historical and economic models, and the subsequent inability of Marxists to grapple with culture, because Marxist theory does not account for it:
Contemporary cognitive psychology provides a theoretical notion that is uniquely suitable to account for what we have called ‘subjective constructs or definitions of communicative situations’, namely mental models. Although the theory of mental models, which is now over 20 years old, is still far from complete and explicit, it has yielded a large amount of descriptions and explanations of many phenomena of human understanding. Indeed, the notion of a mental model has been crucial in the theory of discourse production and understanding… (pp. 168-9)
Mental models represent people’s experiences, and people’s episodic memory is thus populated by mental models. These are subjective, and possibly biased representations of ‘reality’, and may also feature evaluations of events or situations (opinions), as well as emotions associated with such events – as is typically the case by the dramatic or traumatic events of our lives… (pg. 169)
Mental models have culturally based (and hence variable) schematic structures, although some of their properties may be very general if not universal. That is, people do not understand discourses and the events they are about in arbitrary and infinitely variable ways, but use handy schemas, moves and strategies so as to facilitate their task to understand potentially infinitely variable discourses and situations. (pg. 169, emphasis added)
That is, purportedly ‘universalist’ theories of history, politics and economics (like Marx’s) are confined within the limits imposed by their cultural context, all the more so because the proponents of these models have largely been blind (willfully or otherwise) to the cultural schemas embedded in every element of their perception and analysis:
The limits of Western radicalism as demonstrated in Marxist theory, the most sustained critique of the modern era, are endemic to Western civilization. Those limitations relate directly to the "understanding" of consciousness, and the persistence of racialism in Western thought was of primary importance. It would have been exceedingly difficult and most unlikely that such a civilization in its ascendancy as a significant power in the world would produce a tradition of self-examination sufficiently critical to expose one of its most profound terms of order. Racialism, as I have tried to show, ran deep in the bowels of Western culture, negating its varying social relations of production and distorting their inherent contradictions. The comprehension of the particular configuration of racist ideology and Western culture hast o be pursued historically through successive eras of violent domination and social extraction that directly involved European peoples during the better part of two millennia. Racialism insinuated not only medieval, feudal, and capitalist social structures,forms of property, and modes of production, but as well the very values and traditions of consciousness through which the peoples of these ages came to understand their worlds and their experiences. Western culture, constituting the structure from which European consciousness was appropriated, the structure in which social identities and perceptions were grounded in the past, transmitted a racialism that adapted to the political and material exigencies of the moment. In the medieval and feudal social orders of the European hinterland and the Mediterranean, racialism was substantiated by specific sets of exploitation through which particular caste or classes exploited and expropriated disparate peoples. (pg. 66)
Robinson seeks to remove these distorted cultural lenses:
… there were at least four distinct moments that must be apprehended in European racialism; two whose origins are to be found within the dialectic of European development, and two that are not:
1. the racial ordering of European society from its formative period, which extends into the medieval and feudal ages as "blood and racial beliefs and legends.
2. the Islamic (i.e., Arab, Persian, Turkish, and African) domination of Mediterranean civilization and the consequent retarding of European social and cultural life:the Dark Ages.
3. the incorporation of African, Asian, and peoples of the New World into the world system emerging from late feudalism and merchant capitalism.
4. the dialectic of colonialism, plantocratic slavery, and resistance from the sixteenth century forward, and the formations of industrial labor and labor reserves.
It is now a convention to begin the analysis of racism in Western societies with the third moment; entirely ignoring the first and second and only partially coming to terms with the fourth. As we shall observe in the next section of this study, the results have been rather bizarre: some students of racism have happily reiterated the premise of a sort of mass psychology of chromatic trauma in which European reactions to darker-skinned peoples are seen as natural; others, including Marxists, have argued for a simplistic "empiricism" where the inevitable consequences of slavery and domination are the rationalizations of racial superiority and inferiority. (pg. 67)
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Robinson shows how the racist intellectual underpinnings of Eurocentric philosophy, history, political and economic theory form the basis of American political culture:
Racist ideologues observed that all Blacks were identical and supplied the content of that identity. More important, though, few of the proponents of the philosophical,epistemological, or historical traditions of Western culture have found the authentic reality easy to grasp. For longer than the African slave trades to the old or new worlds, the Eurocentric traditions of Western civilization have categorically erred.And though he appeared rather late in this process, Hegel, perhaps somewhat crudely,spoke for these traditions when he declared, "The true theatre of History is therefore the temperate zone" (pg. 73)
Except, perhaps, in its form of expression, the Eurocentrism that Hegel displays in these passages has proven to be neither anachronistic nor idiosyncratic. He would be echoed by legions of European scholars (and their non-European epigony) in a myriad of ways into the present century.The tradition persisted and permutated. Such was the character of the world consciousness that dominated thought in Western Europe. (pg. 74)
This cultural tradition of a moral and social order that rested on racial distinctions was nevertheless readily available for the extension to Asian, African, and other non-European peoples when it became appropriate. With respect to the African, that occasion presented itself in the trade that saw its most bountiful fruition in the New World. (pg. 74)
In America, the accommodation of Western historical consciousness to racial ideologies created a particular chain of social misperceptions and historical distortions that endured into the present century. Not only was popular thought affected but the very foundations of that American academic thought which first began to mature in the nineteenth century was suffused with racialist presumptions. (pg 76)
The violent event of colonial aggression and its corollary of "Indian" slavery had already been transmuted in [Benjamin] Franklin's neo-nativistic "American" mind into a relationship of supplication secured by an economic rationale; indeed, the dependence of"new Comers" on natives already reversed. The curtain of supremacist ideology had by now begun its descent on American thought, obscuring from the historically unconscious generations of descendants of colonialists and later immigrants the oppressive violence and exploitation interwoven in the structure of the republic. (pg. 77)
He also displays how the racist cultural mythology of Eurocentric intellectual traditions could only be maintained by erasing African (especially Islamic) achievements:
The architects of European consciousness had begun the construction of that worldview that presumed the basic structure of other than European societies was at its foundation a European structure, that the moral, ideological, and spiritual scaffold of these societies was the same bottom structure discernible in European culture, that the measure of mankind was indeed the European. The legend of Prester John and his wondrous realm, the formidability of this purely Christian king who waited in patience for his Christian allies at the other end of the world, all this was the form of the impulse in its appropriate medieval costume. Thus, when the miraculous kingdom could not be located in the deserts and steppes of central Asia or even Cathay, it did not cease its fascination but was transferred to the south beyond the upper Nile. The fantasy and its attendant resolve to bend the very existence and being of other peoples into convenient shapes were important beginnings for the destruction of the African past. While the vitality of Islam had seemed to mock the pathetic feebleness of Christ's chosen, humiliating them in defeat and with the persistent threat of further occupations and invasions, the legend was compelling. And a basic lesson of propaganda was learned: Europe's destiny was incompatible with the autochthonous meaning of the non-European worlds. An increasingly prominent concomitant of the European millennium(roughly from the tenth to the present century) would be the refutation of those terms. (pg. 99)
In retrospect the Western potential for creating the Negro had moved closer in away to its realization. The cultural and ideological inventory was at hand. A native racialism had already displayed its usefulness for rationalizing social order, and with the advent of the Islamic intrusion into European history it had further proved its value by its transformation into an instrument of collective resistance and a negation of an unacceptable past. For the Negro to come into being all what was now required was an immediate cause, a specific purpose. The trade in African slaves, coming as it did as an extension of capitalism and racial arrogance, supplied both a powerful motive and a readily received object. (pg. 100)
In painstaking detail, Robinson catalogues the African slave trade as the economic underpinning of European expansion into and domination of ‘The New World’:
… when Columbus and the others with him (and those who followed) came face to face with the Arawaks, the Tainos, the Aztecs, the Mayans, the Quechuas,and all the other inhabitants of the western hemisphere, it was this complex mixture offeudal authority and privilege, comingled with the appetites of emergent merchant capitalism, national ambitions, and missionary compulsions that stood at their backs. (pg. 109)
The significance of African labor for the development and formation of the commercial and industrial capitalist systems can be only partially measured by numbers.This is the case because, first, the numbers we have are questionable, but more disconcerting, the relationship between the growth of capitalism and slave labor has persistently been in dispute. At least'one influential "school" of historiography has denied this relationship, challenging the volume of the slave trade, its profitability,and in some instances even arguing for the benevolence of the trade and slavery. As Roderick McDonald puts it, "The shadows of Adam Smith and Ulrich B. Phillips loom large and dark over the profitability question, and their perspectives continue profoundly to influence the debate.70 Still it is not quite the case, as McDonald terms it, that "you pays your money and you takes your pick." (pg. 112)
… whatever the actual number was, the volume of the trade was enormous. The work of Inikori, McDonald, D. R. Murray, and others, however, serves to underscore dramatically Curtin's remark that before the nineteenth century the number of Africans crossing the Atlantic each year exceeded that of Europeans.
Moreover, as we shall see momentarily, the relative decline of European colonists to African populations from the end of the seventeenth century-and in some instances the decline of the Europeans was absolute-may have helped to confuse the issue of the profitability of the slave system.With respect to the significance of African labor for the development of European-directed economies on both sides of the Atlantic, the literature again is substantial.We have already noted Marx's assessment in his letter to Annenkov in 1846, and his later treatment of the same issue in the first volume of Capital. For Marx, slavery had been "the chief momenta of primitive accumulation,""an economic category of the highest importance."'' First, African workers had been transmuted by the perverted canons of mercantile capitalism into property. Then, African labor power as slave labor was integrated into the organic composition of nineteenth-century manufacturing nd industrial capitalism, thus sustaining the emergence of an extra-European world market within which the accumulation of capital was garnered for the further development of industrial production.Marx, however, was not the first to recognize the existence of a relationship between Britain's economic growth and the business in slaves. (pp 112-3)
The invention of the Negro was proceeding apace with the growth of slave labor.Somewhat paradoxically, the more that Africans and their descendants assimilated cultural materials from colonial society, the less human they became in the minds of the colonists. Just as instructive, the rebels among these Africans and "negroes" were described as "runaways," a term that has endured in the historiography of the period.It should be remembered, however, that it was from the efforts of men and women such as these that the Black settlements of Virginia's piedmont and the Afro-Creek"Exiles of Florida" (the Seminoles) would consist. 114 In similar fashion, the maroon peoples of the Caribbean and South America would be formed. They were as well, at the end of the eighteenth century, among the estimated 55,000 who fled to the British forces and the loyalist settlements when the colonists pursued the logic of the fear of their own enslavement to the point of revolution.115 Still, enough of the African laborers remained in the colonies of North America and the Indies to play a significant role in the development of the English imperial economy. The "triangular trade" in slaves, as Eric Williams asserted, broadened the"home market" by stimulating the production of British manufactures that English merchants exchanged in Africa for Black workers. Once in place, these workers formed the labor for British tropical production, craft work, and extractive industries.The end result was capital accumulation for the advance of productive forces in England and Europe (the Industrial Revolution), for the growth of staple industries in northern America (fisheries, food crops, etc.), for timber, ship-building, and textiles,and for the expansion of colonization and settlement. The concomitant, however,was the degradation of these African peoples and their social institutions when touched by that trade, and, as Walter Rodney has argued, the underdevelopment of Africa's economies.116 This trade, this movement of Black workers, though, did not end with slavery's legal termination in the nineteenth century. Leopold's Congo, Harry Johnston's Central Africa, Cecil Rhodes's southern Africa, Lugard's West Africa, Portuguese Africa,and French Africa as well as the New World's slave descendants all contributed to the further development of the capitalist world system. (pp. 119-20)
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Having set forth cultural landscape of white supremacy from the earliest origins of European history, Robinson describes the countervailing development movement of Black radicalism:
The transport of African labor to the mines and plantations of the Caribbean and subsequently to what would be known as the Americas meant also the transfer of African ontological and cosmological systems; African presumptions of the organization and significance of social structure; African codes embodying historical consciousness and social experience; and African ideological and behavioral constructions for the resolution of the inevitable conflict between the actual and the normative. Michael Craton grasps this when he recounts that:
their African peasant roots clearly predisposed all slaves to regard plantation agriculture as being as unnatural as the institution which sustained it. From the earliest days, runaway slaves settled around provision grounds (called "polinks" inthe English colonies, "palenques" in the Spanish), worked in a manner owing something to African farming, something to the conuco agriculture of the Amerindians.. . .More deeply, the slaves retained and developed concepts of family and kin quite beyond the comprehension and control of the master class, and a concept of land tenure that was in contradiction to that of the dominant European culture. . . .They wanted to live in family units, to have ready access to land of their own, andbe free to develop their own culture, particularly their own, syncretized religion.These were the basic aspirations, which varied according to the different conditions in each of the colonies affected [by rebellion] .
These were the terms upon which the response of the enslaved to the slave system would be grounded. (pg. 122)
The efforts by colonialists to subdue Africans necessarily took the form of (literally) demonizing their culture and beliefs, in order to eradicate it, because the colonialists recognized that African cultural identity served as the basis for resistance:
in keeping with the cosmologies of Congolese and Angolan societies,magicians had been banned as inimical to the king's authority.99 Among those people sit was most often the case that legitimacy of authority and the very existence of social order were concomitants to the eradication of sorcery and witchcraft. l00 In the British West Indies, the elimination of obeah had become an official preoccupation.101
And for good reason. Obeah men and women were frequently the source of ideology for the slave rebellions:
[Olbeah functioned largely in the numerous rebellions of the slaves. This was particularly the case with the obeah-men from the Gold Coast. . . . In the plotting of these rebellions the obeah-man was essential in administering oaths of secrecy, and, in cases, distributing fetishes which were supposed to immunize the insurgents from the arms of the whites. I02
As it happened, obeah proved to be more resilient than its opponents. Indeed, it was never extinguished. It continued its mutational adaptation and development in Jamaica(and elsewhere) over the centuries, successively manifesting itself in the societies of Myalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Pocomania movement of the late nineteenth, and the Rastafarians of the present.I03 (pp. 136-7)
All-whether landed nobility, landed colonists,or the masters of long distance trade-believed the brutality of the slave system to be a practical necessity. Maroon settlements like those of Jamaica, Cuba, and North America had to be destroyed, or failing that, quarantined. They could not be allowed to contaminate a labor upon which so much depended. Frequently-too frequently for the masters, however, it did not seem to matter.
Who, then, resisted slavery in the eighteenth century? The records concerning armed revolt indicate that it was mainly the African-born, including male and female, young and old, plantation slave and urban slave. This emphasis on the African-born may have been for the simple reason that Africans outnumbered the Creoles owing to the low birthrate on the plantations and the heavy importation ofAfricans.12*
Wars of repression, then, still had to be undertaken, severe discipline maintained.Even then, the masters' nightmares kept recurring and their hysterias periodically assumed epidemic proportion^.' As Christians, it might be added, they were possessed by a mythology of apocalypse too easily converted into frightening visions.130 (pg. 141)
Colonial North America was particularly vulnerable to slave liberation movements in those regions where Blacks made up a majority. At the century's beginning,South Carolina and the eastern counties of Virginia were two such areas. And in the early eighteenth century when South Carolina's African population was being hastily enlarged-at a rate in the 1730s of more than 1,000 per year, according to Peter Wood'~~-as a concomitant to the colony's growing domination by rice production,Harvey Wish writes that "the plantation-system had yielded bumper crops of slave uprisings and revolts."135 In 1713, 1720, the 1730s, and the I740s, conspiracies and actual rebellions were routinely reported to London. (pp. 141-2)
Robinson further demonstrates that African cultural identity itself— in Africa and the Americas-- formed the basis for resistance to the colonial economic regime:
The historical integration that the slave trade had accomplished almost instantaneously in the New World was now occurring on the African continent.Discrete societies were slowly achieving the social organization that the attack on colonialism required. Terence Ranger, though not entirely comfortable with the"supra-rational" elements to which we have attended, thought such movements "eminently utilitarian":
The resistances were a defiance of a power which enjoyed great technological superiority and began with a superiority of morale based upon it and upon confidence in its ability to shape the world. The religious leaders were able to oppose to this a morale which for the moment was as confident, if not more so, based upon their supposed ability to shape the world; and they were able to oppose to modern weapons the one great advantage that the Africans possessed, that of numbers. In no other way could the African peoples of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries . . . have offered a challenge to the Europeans. Moreover the so-called"superstitious" injunctions of the religious leaders not only served the purpose of creating a sense of the new society but also ensured the minimum of discipline essential in movements such as these.286
This achievement as a structural phenomenon was a concomitant of the world system and the imperialist expansion that it demanded. Its coherence, however, was based on the African identities of its peoples. As a structural process, its dynamics were seated in the very expansion of imperialism. This was the dialectic of imperialism and liberation, the contradiction that compelled the appearance of resistance and revolution out of the condition of oppression-even from its ideology. (pg. 166)
This sweeping, detailed account of the history of white supremacist cultural domination, obscured by Eurocentric polemics, leads to a reformulated radicalism, rooted in African identity, African traditions, and the African slave experience, rather than abstracted from them:
This is what the Black radical tradition made manifest. It was a consciousness implicated in what Amos Tutuola so many generations later would name "the bush of the ghosts.'''~ In the twentieth century, when Black radical thinkers had acquired new habits of thought in keeping, some of them supposed,with the new conditions of their people, their task eventually became the revelation of the older tradition. Not surprisingly, they would discover it first in their history, and finally all around them.The Black radical tradition that they were to rediscover from a Black historical experience nearly grounded under the intellectual weight and authority of the official European version of the past, was to be the foundation upon which they stood. From this vantage point they could survey the theoretical, ideological, and political instrumentation with which Western radicalism approached the problem of revolutionary social change. The Black radical tradition cast doubt on the extent to which capitalism penetrated and re-formed social life and on its ability to create entirely new categories of human experience stripped bare of the historical consciousness embedded in culture. It gave them cause to question the authority of a radical intelligentsia drawn by its own analyses from marginal and ambiguous social strata to construct an adequate manifestation of proletarian power, And it drew them more and more toward the actual discourse of revolutionary masses, the impulse to make history in their own terms. And finally, the Black radical tradition forced them to reevaluate the nature and historical roles of ideology and consciousness. (pg. 170)
Again, van Dijk shows why providing this ‘re-contextualization’ for understanding African and European history is essential, if we are to remediate structural social injustices (which are the at the core of economic injustice):
CONTEXT AND THE CONTROL OF DISCOURSE
Contextual control over discourse production and understanding affects all levels and dimension of text and talk, such as the conditions of speech acts, the selection of (‘appropriate’) topics or the change of topics, levels of semantic description (general versus specific), the distribution of knowledge in assertions and presuppositions, lexicalization, syntactic structure and intonation, among many other ‘stylistic’ aspects of discourse. In this sense, context models control‘ways of speaking’. They adapt the discursive expression of (semantic) mental models – content, information, etc. – to the ongoing communicative situation.That is, they define appropriateness as well as relevance. (pg. 171)
Robinson shows how white supremacists controlled the discourse of ‘how to understand America’:
It is by now generally understood that the formation of nation-states and political reigns precipitate the development of founding myths-myths of origin, in the language of anthropologists. Though the process may have been obscured by time in more distant eras, the emergences of the bourgeoisies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made it explicit. Their use of print and press, their appeals to and seductions of the classes they wished to dominate, made the fabrication of national myths quite evident. These myths were to be recognized in the official instruments of class hegemony: national creeds, social ideologies, philosophical tenets, constitutions,and the like, their function was to legitimate the social orders that had come into being. These myths made the new order a necessary one, an inevitable and benevolent event. They indicated to the national populace that the strains of historical novelty,the insecurities and anxieties accompanying the break with established forms were temporary, that change was natural, organic, and right. Founding myths were substituted for history, providing the appearance of historical narrative to what was in actuality part fact and part class-serving rationales. Endlessly elaborated, these myths were produced by ideologues who identified with the dominant creed and depended upon those classes in the society that possessed power and the capacities to extend social privilege.
The formation of the American state provided no exception. The American Constitution,the Declaration of Independence, the considerations raised in the Federalist Papers were all expressions of the interests and creed of the American bourgeoisie. (pg. 186)
Black history thus began in the shadow of the national myths and as their dialectical negation. (pg. 190)
In the beginning of Black Reconstruction, Du Bois identified the fundamental contradiction in American history; the contradiction that would subvert America's founding ideology, distort its institutions, traumatize its social relations and class formations,and, in the twentieth century, confuse its rebels and revolutionists:
From the day of its birth, the anomaly of slavery plagued a nation which asserted the equality of all men, and sought to derive powers of government from the consent of the governed. Within sound of the voices of those who said this lived more than half a million black slaves, forming nearly one-fifth of the population of a new nation.
It was thus the black worker, as founding stone of a new economic system in the nineteenth century and for the modern world, who brought civil war in America.He was its underlying cause, in spite of every effort to base the strife upon union and national power.
(pg. 199)
The ideology necessary to rationalize slavery disallowed the further development of liberal democracy except as a myth. But Du Bois understood that the relationship between slavery and democracy was not a question of the clash of ideas. His approach to history was similar in this respect to that which Marx and Engels had presented in The German Ideology:
This conception of history. . . comes to the conclusion that all forms and products of consciousness cannot be dissolved by mental criticism, by resolution into "selfconsciousness"or transformation into "apparitions,""spectres,""fancies," etc., bu tonly by the practical overthrow of the actual social relations which give rise to this idealistic humbug.75
For Du Bois, the creation of those political institutions and structures identified with American democracy involved congruence with the country's economic character,that is, with the slave system and capitalism. (pg. 203)
Later challenges to the American capitalist order (for instance, socialist and worker movements) did not escape the cultural and racial framework the nation was founded upon:
The labor movement-whether it was trade unionist, electoral-party, or revolutionary-was largely organized on the basis of national, ethnic, and industrial groups:
In the Socialist Party of 1914, the membership in the Northeastern and Midwestern states was largely. . . Jews, Germans, Poles, Czechs and Slovaks, Hungarians, South Slavs, and many others. . . .Later immigrant groups, however, formed parties or groupings that were still related to the Socialist parties of their respective countries, of which so many had been members. These federations of immigrant workers played a special role in American socialism.93
This, then, was one critical contradiction in early American socialist development.The organizing principle was ethnicity while at the same time nationalism-a logical conclusion of ethnicity-endangered and frustrated socialist unity. Ethnicity dominated the movement organizationally, ideologically, conceptually, and theoretically. (pg. 211)
By challenging Eurocentric philosophical, historical, political and economic orthodoxy— and the revolutionary responses to them (as with Marxism and later social movements)— Robinson brings us to what may be considered the central premise of this whole monumental work:
Without myths, that is, without meaning, consciousness is set adrift into terror. The desperation that is the condition of this degree of alienation (or Max Scheler's ressentiment, or Husserl's "crisis")67 inevitably requires violence. Violence is the final, the last possible form that social action may assume.
Moreover, [Richard] Wright was demonstrating both the necessity and inevitability of ideology and its arbitrariness. No matter what meanings ideologies systematize, they are always subject to the abuses of power. When ideology is used for the purpose of domination, it must be opposed, not by a counter-ideology but by the negation of ideology: theory. In short, he was making the case for the necessity for a critical commitment, the sort of commitment that achieves its purpose by extraction from the historical legacy: the culture of a people. Such a commitment is made possible only through a consciousness capable of re-creating meaning. (pg. 301-2)
That is, the entire theoretical scaffolding of white supremacy, all of its terms, definitions, axioms and presumptions, its conceits and myths, must be conceptually disintegrated, if the historical, experiential cultural truths of individuals and entire communities are to be reclaimed.
