ANNEXES
1.1 Partie I, Chapitre I
Les textes originaux en anglais
Note 3: Dunbar Ortiz: The history of the
United States is a history of settler colonialism- the founding of a state
based on the ideology of white supremacy, the widespread practice of African
slavery, and a policy of genocide and land theft. In the United States, the
founding and development of the Anglo-American settler-state involves a
narrative about Puritan settlers who had a covenant with God to take the land.
That part of the origin story is supported and reinforced by the Columbus myth
and the « Doctrine of Discovery.»
Note 4: Pennington: Las Casas who has lived
with his father on Espanola contributed to juridical and political thought was
his defense of the rights of indigenous peoples in Central and South America.
He also limited ecclesiastical authority in the secular world and was a
vigorous critic of slavery and defender of the right of every human being to be
free.
Note 5: Casas: Now to come to the Continent,
we are confident, and dare affirm upon our own knowledge, that there were ten
Kingdoms of as large an extent as the Kingdom of Spain, joining to it both
Aragon, and Portugal, containing above a thousand miles every one of then in
compass, which the inhumane and abominable villainies of the Spaniards have
made a wilderness of, being now as it were stript of all their people, and made
bare of all their inhabitants, though it were a place formerly possessed by
vast and infinite numbers of men; And we dare confidently aver, that for those
Forty years, wherein the Spaniards exercised their abominable cruelties, and
detestable tyrannies in those parts, that there have innocently perish'd above
Twelve millions of souls, women and children being numbered in this sad and
fatal list; moreover I do verily believe that I should speak within compass,
should I say that above Fifty millions were consumed in this Massacre.
Note 6: Margaret Kohn et Kavita Reddy: The
Spanish conquest of the Americas was taking place during a period of reform
when humanist scholars within the Church were increasingly influenced by the
natural law theories of theologians such as St. Thomas Aquinas. According to
Pope Innocent IV, war could not be waged against infidels and they could not be
deprived of their property simply because of their non-belief. The Spanish
quickly concluded that the habits of the native Americans, from nakedness to
unwillingness to labor to alleged cannibalism, clearly demonstrated their
inability to recognize natural law. This account of
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native customs was used to legitimize the enslavement of the
Indians, which the Spanish colonists insisted was the only way to teach them
civilization and introduce them to Christianity. Some of the Spanish
missionaries sent to the New World, however, noticed that the brutal
exploitation of slave labor was widespread while any serious commitment to
religious instruction was absent. Members of the Dominican order in particular
noted the hypocrisy of enslaving the Indians because of their alleged barbarity
while practicing a form of conquest, warfare, and slavery that reduced the
indigenous population of Hispaniola from 250,000 to 15,000 in two decades of
Spanish rule. Given the genocidal result of Spanish « civilization,»
they began to question the idea of a civilizing mission.»
Note 8: Jackson and Jackson: «
Evolutionary thought grew into a significant ideology that can be called «
scientific racism' at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth
century. Scientific racism was the result of two lines of scientific thought
merging. First new ideas about heredity provided an explanation of the way
traits could be held stable for generation after generation. Second, ideas
flowered about the supremacy of the north European races - what was called
Aryanism or Teutonicism in the nineteenth century and Nordicism in the
twentieth.» Most learned people of the nineteenth century believed in the
doctrine of « inheritance of acquired characteristics.» Most often
associated with the French evolutionist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck (1744-1829),
the doctrine taught that environmental pressures change the physical nature of
an organism and that these acquired characteristics were inherited by
subsequent generations.
Note 10: Jackson Darwin's cousin, Francis
Galton (1822-1911). Galton coined the phrase « nature versus nurture»
and he came down strongly on the side of nature. Galton's early life and
upbringing was much like his cousin's. He was born into a wealthy family and
expected to become a physician. Also like Darwin, he was miserable at medical
school. The most gifted protégé of Galton, and a key figure in
promoting Galtonian views of heredity and science, was Karl Pearson
(1857-1936), who set out his views about science in an influential work, The
Grammar of Science (1882). For Pearson, a good scientist avoided all
speculation about unobservable entities and focused only on directly sensed
evidence. Pearson founded the journal Biometrika in 1901, which became the main
outlet for statistical studies of the physical traits of organisms. This view
of the sufficiency of statistical constructs to explain scientific phenomena
would continue on into the twentieth century, particularly in psychometrics and
IQ testing. Galton and Pearson are correctly seen as the founders of this
approach and both contributed key ideas to the science of statistics. One of
Galton's most famous works makes his approach clear and underscores the social
motivations of his work. In Hereditary Genius,
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pubUshed in 1869, Galton undertook a statistical analysis of
« men of genius» in the United Kingdom. His book attempted to rank
the geniuses in the country in order to determine if mental ability was
inherited and concluded that it was. For Galton, society should take steps to
ensure the emergence of more geniuses and fewer of lower intellectual
ability.Galton believed that improving the race meant that the government
should encourage breeding among the best people and take steps to keep the
superior stocks from mixing with inferiors. Galton did not shy away from racial
interpretations of his data. He believed that Negroes were at least two grades
below Anglo-Saxons in ability and intelligence.
Note 12: Jackson: In the United States,
Madison Grant (1865, 1937) Much like Charles Darwin, Grant was not a scientist
by training. World War I brought with it the « Great Migration» of
blacks from the rural south to the urban North as they attempted to leave the
authoritarian Jim Crow systemos, the crushing poverty of the tenant farming
system, and systematic disenfranchisement. Grant, and others, despaired at the
growing number of dark faces they saw on the city streets and declared that
something must be done about it. In his last book, Conquest of a Continent,
published in 1933, Grant declared that « The Negro problem must be taken
vigorously in hand by the Whites without delay. States which have no laws
preventing the intermarriage of white and black should adopt them.»
Between 1900 and 1945 nearly every modernizing society had some form of
eugenics movement. Recent work on the history of the eugenics movements
underscores how diverse the ideologies and policies were that went under that
name. Popular understanding of eugenics is often restricted to the horrors of
Nazi Germany, but, in fact, leftists proclaimed their adherence to eugenic
doctrines as much as those on the political right. In many countries, eugenics
was confined to what we might think of as prenatal care, focusing on the «
future generations» carried by pregnant women. In other countries,
particularly those where Lamarckian doctrines were still scientifically
respectable, eugenics focused as much on environmental improvement as it did on
selective breeding. Eugenics was the idea that good people should be encouraged
to reproduce and bad people should be discouraged from it. Taken in this light,
eugenic thinking was a way to think about social problems in scientific
terms.The Nordics created the United States, according to Grant, but were in
danger of being swamped by the inferior races in what he called the «
survival of the unfit.» Grant blamed « sentimentalists» who held
the « fatuous belief in the power of environment... to alter
heredity.» Not so, Grant declared: « Speaking English, wearing good
clothes, and going to school does not transform a Negro into a white man.»
Immigration was a similar threat. « We shall have a similar experience
with the Polish Jew,» Grant warned, « whose dwarf stature, peculiar
mentality, and ruthless concentration on self-interest are being
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engrafted upon the stock of the nation.» The danger,
Grant warned, was allowing more than one race in the same geographical area
under the common « melting pot» notion that the environment would
erase racial differences.
Note 16 Allen: English and Africans working
side by side in the field or in the tobacco shed plitted their escape, met at
their rendezvous, and fled to freedom together. The assemblies of all the
plantation colonies enacted cruel and vicious penalties for such « stealth
of oneself». The form of corporal punishment most commonly used was
flogging and randing, but mutilation and even death were legal retribution
against the captured fugitive. The most common form of penalty, because it was
most profitable to the owners, was to extend the period of service: for each
day away, added service of two days in Virginia, seven in South Carolina, and
ten in Maryland. Most elementary and human, form of servant solidarity was
marrying without the consent of the master. Not only did the marriage impose
some barrier to extremes of exploitation, but it led to « lost time when a
wife became pregnant. For this « offense» there were severe legal
penalties. The usual penalty was a year's extension of time for marrying and a
year for pregnancy. The children of bond-servants were themselves bond-servants
until they were over twenty years of age. But the heaviest penalties were those
for white women who bore children where the father was African. For those women
the penalty was as much as seven years of extended service and a severe
whipping at the public whipping post, with the child to be a bond-servant until
thirty-one years of age. In 1705, the last step was taken: All servants who
were brought into the country, by sea or land, were to be slaves, unless they
came as three-star Christians as specified in the 1680 law. Only blacks were
slaves, not Indians, in Virginia. There remained the question of the free
persons of color. but their position was clearly defined as one of a lower
status than any white person. IN 1805, for instance, the law forbade any Negro
to own any white servant. In 1723, free Negroes, who had until then been voters
on the same basis as whites, were deprived of this right.
Note: 18 Allen: The white-skin privileges of
the poor free whites were simply reflexes of the liabilities imposed on the
Negro slave: to move about freely without a pass, to marry without any
upper-class consent, to change employment; to vote in elections in accordance
with the laws on qualifications; to acquire property; and last, but not least,
in this partial list, the right of self-defense. Africans and Afro-West Indians
had not taken part in the long history of negotiation and contest in which the
English lower classes had worked out the relationship between themselves and
their superiors. Therefore, the custom and law that embodied that history did
not apply to them. Africans and Afro-West Indians were thus available for
perpetual slavery in a way that English servants were not.
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Note 19: James Lee Ray: Slavery was common in
ancient Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, Greece, Rome, India, and China. The extent
to which ancient Greece relied on slaves plays an important role in two
controversies relevant to the focus of this article, possibly because the
practice became prominent in Greece.' The practice of slavery became distinctly
less prevalent as the Roman Empire declined, and for Marxists the reasons are
clear. When slavery disappears, it does so because it is replaced by a more
efficient and therefore more progressive mode of production. In the period from
1502 to almost 1900, slaves were brought from Africa to the Americas by the
millions. (Native Americans were used as slaves in the earlier years, but they
proved « unsuitable» in several ways, one of which was a stubborn
tendency to die.) Great Britain officially prohibited the slave trade in 1807
and played a role in bringing it to a virtual halt by the latter half of the
nineteenth century. The British also legally ended slavery in territories under
their control in 1833, while the Civil War brought it to an end in the United
States by 1865. Cuba and Brazil were the last holdouts in the Western
hemisphere; slavery was abolished in Cuba in 1886, while Brazil officially
terminated it in 1888. One of the most noted contemporary analyses of the
disappearance of slavery in the Western hemisphere is that of Eric Williams in
Capitalism and Slavery, which focuses on the history of slavery in the British
West Indies. Williams' thesis is straightforward: « When British
capitalism depended on the West Indies, they ignored or defended it. When
British capitalism found the West Indian monopoly a nuisance, they destroyed
West Indian slavery as a first step in the destruction of the West Indian
monopoly. But vital economic interests in the North, up to the time of the
Civil War, profited handsomely from the toil of slaves in the South. According
to Tem perley, « Northern cotton manufacturers were dependent on Southern
plantation agriculture for their raw materials. New York finance houses
provided Southerners with much of their capital and reaped their reward in
interest. New England shippers carried the South's cotton to the factories of
Europe and the North.» Granted, the clash of economic interests in the
rapidly industrializing North and the primarily agricultural South created
several issues, such as the focus on tariffs, to cite a prominent example,
which made victory for the Union beneficial to the pocketbooks of many in the
North. However, the predominant economic classes in the North were not
necessarily well served by the abolition of slavery in the South. The
antislavery position of the Union did bring clear political benefits, some of
which were international in scope, and those benefits, arguably, flowed
ultimately from the widespread feeling that slavery was indefensible on ethical
grounds.
Note 20: Mitchell: Blassingame (1972) and
Jacob and Landau (1971) found that African survival during slavery required
developing different types of personality traits and skills.
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Black survival also necessitated learning a number of craft
skills and trades. For the enslaved African, learning to read and write was
highly desired and from most existing accounts, difficult for most to achieve.
Yet for many, learning to read and write was the first step toward
self-emancipation. DuBois (1962) estimated that only five percent of enslaved
Africans could read by the end of the Civil War. This figure is very low,
perhaps debatable, but does suggest that anti-African public opinion and laws
were effective at curtailing Black literacy in the antebellum South. Genovese
(1972) suggests that Africans often possessed a greater desire to acquire
literacy than poor whites. According to Genovese (1972) and Webber (1978),
enslaved Africans were often aided by: 1) masters, mistresses, and children
(Note: Whites often taught their favorite captives and mixed-race children, who
often became domesticated house servants), 2) Africans taught themselves and
instructed others, and 3) Africans established « Sabbath schools» to
increase clandestine literacy efforts. Enslave Africans who labored as field
hands usually experienced much harsher treatment and rigid segregation,
particularly on larger plantations in the Deep South. In the twentieth century,
Malcolm X analyzed the « house versus field slave» condition and
suggested that the brutal and inhumane treatment of « field Africans»
contributed to their militant, defiant, and aggressive attitude towards whites
(X,1964). In comparison, Stampp (1956) and Harding (1981) found that Africans
were usually segregated and appropriated by occupations and trades.
Nevertheless, separating Africans by house and field designations was most
likely a slave management Method. Africans who could read often taught others
using whatever means and opportunities available. Inter-generational education
also occurred as father and mother taught son or daughter, who in turn taught
others, young and old. Some Africans taught themselves to read and write by
observing whites. However, what is known is that slaveholders generally reacted
with cruel punishment and swift violence directed at those who strove for
literacy. Some were informed on by children and plantation workers, while
others were discovered by their owners. American slavery dislocated and robbed
the African of culture and traditions, including over 100 languages.
Consequently, the psychological and sociological effects of centuries of
slavery and racism are evidenced in the writings, records, and testimonies of
participants, in particular, in the memories and « English» of former
captives. Their recollections reveal the degradation and dehumanization that
slavery, European/White American nationalism, and racism extracted on their
racial identity, self-esteem, and self-image. Joy DeGruy Leary's (2005) claim
that African Americans suffer from anti-Black socialization evidenced by
continued acceptance of deprecating language and images in the media and the
arts. DeGruy Leary labels this multigenerational maladaptive behavior
Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome (PTSS), which might also explain the preference
of
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many young African Americans for limiting educational
aspirations and lower ambitions in the larger American society. Thus, despite
slavery's lingering negative effects, the effort of enslaved Africans to obtain
literacy is a remarkable feat. This tumultuous journey would explode into
powerful freedom movements in the twentieth-century.
Note 21: Fields: One of the most important of
these absurd assumptions, accepted implicitly by most Americans, is that there
is really only one race, the Negro race. That is why the Court had to perform
intellectual contortions to prove that non-Negroes might be construed as
members of races in order to receive protection under laws forbidding racial
discrimination. Americans regard people of known African descent or visible
African appearance as a race, but not people of known European descent or
visible European appearance. That is why, in the United States, there are
scholars and black scholars, women, and black women. A second absurd assumption
inseparable from race in its characteristic American form takes for granted
that virtually everything people of African descent do, think, or say is racial
in nature. a third assumption: namely, that any situation involving people of
European descent and people of African descent automatically falls under the
heading `race relations'. Race is not an element of human biology (like
breathing oxygen or reproducing sexually); nor is it even an idea (like the
speed of light or the value of ) that can be plausibly imagined to live an
eternal life of its own. Race is not an idea but an ideology. It came into
existence at a discernible historical moment for rationally understandable
historical reasons and is subject to change for similar reasons. American
racial ideology is as original an invention of the Founders as is the United
States itself. Those holding liberty to be inalienable and holding
Afro-Americans as slaves were bound to end by holding race to be a self-evident
truth. Thus we ought to begin by restoring to race--that is, the American
version of race--its proper history. Race as a coherent ideology did not spring
into being simultaneously with slavery, but took even more time than slavery
did to become systematic. A commonplace that few stop to examine holds that
people are more readily oppressed when they are already perceived as inferior
by nature. The reverse is more to the point. People are more readily perceived
as inferior by nature when they are already seen as oppressed. Africans and
their descendants might be, to the eye of the English, heathen in religion,
outlandish in nationality, and weird in appearance. But that did not add up to
an ideology of racial inferiority until a further historical ingredient got
stirred into the mixture: the incorporation of Africans and their descendants
into a polity and society in which they lacked rights that others not only took
for granted, but claimed as a matter of self-evident natural law.27
Afro-Americans understood the reason for their enslavement to be, as Frederick
Douglass put it, `not color, but crime'.39 Afro-Americans invented themselves,
not as a race,
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but as a nation. They were not troubled, as modern scholars
often are, by the use of racial vocabulary to express their sense of
nationality. But race is neither biology nor an idea absorbed into biology by
Lamarckian inheritance. It is ideology, and ideologies do not have lives of
their own. Nor can they be handed down or inherited: a doctrine can be, or a
name, or a piece of property, but not an ideology. If race lives on today, it
does not live on because we have inherited it from our forebears of the
seventeenth century or the eighteenth or nineteenth, but because we continue to
create it today. Those who create and re-create race today are not just the mob
that killed a young Afro-American man on a street in Brooklyn or the people who
join the Klan and the White Order. They are also those academic writers whose
invocation of self propelling `attitudes' and tragic flaws assigns Africans and
their descendants to a special category, placing them in a world exclusively
theirs and outside history-- a form of intellectual apartheid no less ugly or
oppressive, despite its righteous (not to say self-righteous) trappings, than
that practised by the bio- and theo-racists; and for which the victims, like
slaves of old, are expected to be grateful. They are the academic `liberals'
and `progressives' in whose version of race the neutral shibboleths difference
and diversity replace words like slavery, injustice, oppression and
exploitation, diverting attention from the anything-but-neutral history these
words denote. They are also the Supreme Court and spokesmen for affirmative
action, unable to promote or even define justice except by enhancing the
authority and prestige of race; which they will continue to do forever so long
as the most radical goal of the political opposition remains the reallocation
of unemployment, poverty and injustice rather than their abolition. Nothing
handed down from the past could keep race alive if we did not constantly
reinvent and re-ritualize it to fit our own terrain. If race lives on today, it
can do so only because we continue to create and re-create it in our social
life, continue to verify it, and thus continue to need a social vocabulary that
will allow us to make sense, not of what our ancestors did then, but of what we
ourselves choose to do now.
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