Interpretive Overview

In 1776, the Continental Congress launched a new nation, but a nation with an open wound. From the outset the nation has had a system of mutually reinforcing ideas, practices and institutions that that disadvantage people of color. Over the centuries the racial system has changed. Old ideas and practices have given way to new ones, and white behavior and attitudes toward blacks has changed in important ways. While many blacks have escaped from a 300-year-old "mud sill" stratum of American society and recently some have indeed risen to positions of influence, the imprint of slavery on the nation is still visible.

Through decades of American history, African Americans have remained virtually invisible to whites. From the beginning, however, whenever the nation has faced a crisis, the same question has emerged: What about the blacks? Thus, during the past century, as the nation moved toward globalism, blacks have been by no means invisible to scholars. Nothing has more occupied scholars than particular components of the nation's racial history. Many excellent studies have illuminated particular aspects of this history: works on slavery, peonage, segregation, constitutional rights, white racial attitudes, the Black Freedom Movement, the causes of black unemployment, among other important aspects. What is needed now is a long view of how American racial institutions and ideas began and how and why, over time, they have changed.

Certain studies have approached the centuries-old persistence of the white-over-black shape of American society, finding causes in "human nature." Such early twentieth century historians as U. B. Phillips thought that the lowly jobs held by African Americans could be explained by their limited mental capacity. In the 1950s and '60s, however, when blacks took to the streets, the theory of their inferiority fell into disfavor. But a prominent school of white historians, stressing psychology and culture, held that the problem lay not with the nature of blacks but with the nature of whites. Whites' prejudice derived, not from the way they treated blacks, but from the way they perceived them. These scholars thought that black had always been a color that whites associated with disagreeable things and that this limited their ability to fully accept black people. Two narratives but one conclusion: the status quo. Either because of the nature of blacks or the nature of whites, American society was likely to remain racially stratified.

Yet, while black and white have always existed as colors, in other times and places black people and white people have not always interacted the same way they have in the United States. The first task of the present study is, therefore, to demonstrate that the attitude of American whites toward Africans derived, not from their reactions to color, but from a new type of slavery that appeared in the Atlantic World of the 1500s. It differed from the then traditional slavery in two ways: slaves produced commodities for the market and slaves were taken almost exclusively from sub-Saharan Africa. A master was now motivated by profit. A slave was now recognized by color. This appearance of market-driven, color-defined slavery, and a legacy of anti-African lore that came with the Atlantic slave trade, were the beginnings of what came to be called "American racism." If one can establish that this self-reinforcing system of ideas and practices had a beginning, one can also venture the prediction that it will have an end.

Those who locate the origins of the American racial system either in the nature of blacks or in the nature of whites are not only mistaken about how it began, but they also underestimate the significance of the changes that have taken place. Important changes occurred at three historical moments when the racial system entered a crisis phase. The first was initiated by the American Revolution, the second by the Civil War. The latest crisis occurred during the Cold War when a "Jim Crow" nation set out to "lead the free world," which was then seething with revolution and colonial revolt by people of color. Each of these crises opened a window of opportunity for idealists who challenged the defenders of the racial status quo. Each of the ensuing conflicts resulted in a compromise that changed the way whites treated blacks, but fell far short of Thomas Jefferson's vision human equality.

But how is one to explain why change has taken place only at discrete historical moments? Why the relatively changeless behavior and ideas of whites during the long decades between these crisis events? To ask such questions is to probe the secrets of power. An important part of this study is an effort to illuminate these periods of near stability by the theory of "hegemony," or the idea that a governing class achieves firm control, or "legitimacy," by popularizing a consensus ideology, which advances its own agenda. These beliefs are accepted as "self-evident" by common citizens, even though they may actually conflict with their own self-interest.

People with power have the means to mold the way a society views the world. They can establish their own outlook as orthodox or the "mainstream" view. They can make the views of their challengers heretical or even turn the opposition into "solitary voices crying in the wilderness." They can establish the language of normal political discussion. The normal words and phrases used have inherent biases validating their position. Hegemony is complete when ordinary citizens do not perceive the limitations imposed by the belief system of their society, neither its assumptions, its restrictions on subject matter, nor the biases inherent in the words they use. Instead, one normally assumes that public discourse is framed by self-evident truths.

In the antebellum American republic, the people who the abolitionists called the "Slave Power" established a hegemonic North-South consensus of racial ideas. The planters and their northern business partners, the commodity brokers and bankers, held this hegemonic ideological power. The commodities that slaves produced provided two-thirds of the nation's exports, making planters the richest class in the country and their northern allies the second richest class. The defense of slavery was thus critical both to the prosperity of the planters and to the accumulation of capital in the North.

The Slave Power was most vulnerable in the North where slavery had been abolished in the wake of the War for Independence. Slavery was serving less and less the self-interest of most Northerners, indeed of most Southerners as well. More and more, it was harming their interests. As the unavoidable tensions caused by slavery mounted, the Slave Power "played the race card" with an intensity never seen before, saturating the nation, above all the North, with the message that blacks as slaves were happy and useful, but when free was lazy and dangerous. To convey this message they mobilized every vehicle of culture: the political rally, the newspaper, the church, the school, and most vividly the minstrel show. The formative American nation was thus thoroughly indoctrinated with an ideology of race.

The Republican revolution overthrew the Slave Power. But the Republicans did not complete their revolution in the South. During the struggles of Reconstruction, they repudiated their Radical contingency, and finally came to terms with the former Confederates, leaving them in local control and allowing them to restore plantation production based on half-free labor. By the turn of the twentieth century, the new national corporate establishment, after defeating the challenges of the agrarian movement and Knights of Labor, finally established a corporate hegemony which has continued into the twenty-first century. Also by the turn of the twentieth century, the ex-Confederates had finally crushed all opposition and achieved a "solid South." The "age of segregation" had begun.

Although the corporate elite in the North used free labor, they retained most of the racial ideology of the anti-bellum nation. They endorsed segregation in the South, and tolerated its labor system, half free for blacks and little better for whites. In the North, industrialists continued their "white only" hiring policy of the antebellum era. This policy helped keep black workers on the plantations, and made possible a vigorous revival of southern commodity exports. Also, just as at the beginning of the racial system, planters had used a few less-debased whites to control many blacks, now industrialists used a few more-debased black strike-breakers to control many whites. The racial ideology of the antebellum regime was well suited to the needs of the new northern leaders. Indeed they built on it with so-called "scientific racism."

The racial system showed increasing instability as the nation moved toward globalism. World War I opened industrial jobs in the North to black workers for the first time, giving rise to a process of black urbanization and the appearance of the more assertive "new Negro." The racial system became more unstable with the stock market crash of 1929, which created the first important split in the American elite since the Civil War. In response to the Great Depression, one faction, the New Dealers, favored economic and social programs. They began a reform movement. In the New Deal movement, African Americans came together with such other previously marginalized groups as the "new immigrants" and organized labor. Civil rights once again became a political issue.

After World War II, American leaders positioned themselves as the leaders of the "free world." At the same time, through the Atlantic Pact, they gave military support to the European powers which were trying to suppress the freedom movements in their colonies. The struggle of the "free world" against the "communist slave world" precipitated the "Cold War" ideological crisis of the racial system. The Black Freedom Movement saw their moment and seized it. The movement brought down the "white only" signs, opened the polling booth to black Southerners and restored vitality to the 14th and 15th amendments. By the late 1960s, more than half of African Americans had escaped from the "mud sill" stratum that they had occupied for three hundred years.

The Black Freedom Movement came to grief when it moved from the abolition of the legal disabilities that African Americans suffered to addressing their disproportionate poverty. Civil rights made slight demands on the nation's resources and enhanced its political image. But programs to provide jobs and to combat poverty required resources the nation's leaders wanted to use for their increasingly costly military ventures. Indeed social programs already in place were eroded ever more as the "welfare state" was displaced by the "national security state." In the backlash against social programs, new racial stereotypes have appeared, Sambo the servant being replaced by Willie Horton the criminal and by the "gangsta rappers." The plight of the black poor and other poor people worsened with the "information revolution," which privileged a quality education out of the reach of most people, and facilitated the outsourcing of jobs to low wage countries.

The nation's growing gap between rich and poor signals a new crisis in which, for the first time in 300 years, the line of class is more sharply drawn than the line of race. Historically, African Americans, however, as the last hired and first fired, have been "the miner's canary," the harbingers of coming trouble. In the misery, the chaos, and high incarceration rates suffered by African Americans of the inner city, one may see some of what lies ahead for the rest of American society.