What do we owe Africa?

No matter how much digging people do it seems that the roots of American racism are hard to reach. Slavery was part of the British Empire before the American colonies even existed, but sources say that British enslavement of Africans was more a matter of convenience and economy than of a stance of white superiority. This issue is certainly not dead, and cogent arguments range wide across it. Several years ago at the 2001 United Nations’ World Conference several African countries claimed that they deserved some form of reparations from the countries that mistreated their ancestors through the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade years ago (Howard-Hassman p.1). These reparations are not likely to be granted because of the ambiguity of the history of the slave trade (Howard-Hassman p.1). Even so, the argument is interesting: if these reparations were to take place, who would owe the most to the mistreated African countries? Evidence shows that although the practice of African enslavement began on the British Isles, the American colonies were the ones who actually developed a racist attitude against the African people that led to the largest forced exodus of people in the history of the world.

History is a tricky thing because it can be easily misinterpreted through the eyes of the historian who is from a different time and in a different situation than the people he is studying. This is most certainly the case with the study of American racism. Racism is, and has been, such a hot issue that historians such as Carl Deglar have had a tough time viewing the past in the context of those times without relying on the knowledge of the eventual outcome of the particular issue (Breen 25-26). In other words, it’s difficult to not view every action and law against an African slave as overt racism, because of the well-known outcome that eventuated from various actions. Author Rhoda Howard-Hassman notes that even the simplest issues dealing with racism and slavery are hard to understand. She notes that the estimates of slaves transported from Africa during the era of the slave-trade range from 12 million to about 100 million slaves forcefully taken from the continent (Howard-Hassman p.2-3). This being the case, it is much more difficult for the historians to pinpoint the exact time and place that racist attitudes emerged from the practice of slavery. It is necessary to view arguments and counter-arguments of this issue to gain the fullest understanding of the evidences and interpretations of evidences that can lead to the most realistic opinion of how and where racism developed.

Winthrop D. Jordan’s book White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro explores the development of racism in America from the years 1550-1812, and it is a common springboard used by other writers and historians to leap, not only into the analysis of Jordan’s work, but also into the issue of American racism in general. In his analysis of Jordan’s thesis, Karl Westhauser notes that Jordan displayed the necessary understanding of the subject by realizing “that to discover the origins of American racism, he would first have to trace the development of English attitudes toward Africans (Westhauser p. 112).” Jordan began naturally from the beginning – the British ideas of the Africans during their first encounter in 1550. The darkness of the color of the skin of the African peoples was of extreme interest the Englishmen because it was so far from anything they had ever seen. This meeting came at a time when the difference between white and black – light and dark – in the mind of the Englishmen carried heavy significance. Jordan notes that “White and black connoted purity and filthiness, virginity and sin, virtue and baseness, beauty and ugliness, beneficence and evil, God and the devil (Jordan p.7).” Jordan explains that this was not an uncommon train of thought among different peoples and cultures. This being the case, Africans naturally found themselves to be the most beautiful while the white Europeans weren’t attractive to them in the least. Their views were “inverse to the European’s (Jordan p.10).” Despite the difference in opinions regarding the beauty and meaning of different colors, the two cultures didn’t automatically regard the other as fitting a specific role – the Europeans didn’t “[prejudge] the Negro as a slave, at least not as a slave of Englishmen. Rather, Englishmen met Negroes merely as another sort of men (Jordan p.4).” The view of racism that assigned the Negro to the position as an inferior human being designated for work as a slave didn’t come along until relations between black and white men were much more developed.

From this realization Jordan researched and proved “that English ideas about black people were fluid well into the seventeenth century, grounding the rise of racism in contingency rather than the certainty of hindsight (Westhauser p.112-113).” Jordan’s interpretation of the development of racism eschews the idea that the American colonists’ attitudes were already founded upon the idea of white-supremacy when they established the colonies in America. To further the point first illustrated by Jordan, Westhauser states that the British’s practices of slavery and attitudes of racism only correlated with the development of that in the colonies to a certain degree. He notes:
Yet some doors that closed in the Americas remained open in England, creating meaningful opportunities for black people and for the development of race relations. Most importantly, no legislation establishing slavery was ever enacted in England; the laws enacted in the colonies found no parallel at home…. English courts had to decide over and over again, case by case, whether to uphold rights of property or of liberty; their decisions differed from one case to another. (Westhauser pp. 113-114)
Westhauser’s evidence buttresses Jordan’s idea by proving that in statutory law the British didn’t enact anything of the same magnitude and racial discrimination that the American colonies did. If the Americans received their racist attitudes from the British then it would have been more likely that the British would have displayed a similar amount of brutality and racism towards Africans that the Americans did.

The American colonies inherited the idea of slavery from the British, but how the Americans fused all Africans to the position as slaves and thus created white-supremacist ideals requires some investigation. Perhaps it was bound to happen to some degree, because even the British developed racist attitudes toward Africans, although these attitudes weren’t near the same degree as what the Americans. However, this idea supposes that even if America was bound to develop some form of racist attitude, they still had power over how deep they would allow this racism to run in their society. Considering that the American colonies and the British differed in the extent of their racism then it also leads to the idea of the possibility that each society was actually in control of whether or not racism developed and found place in their statutes at all.