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 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, 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 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.
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. 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 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, 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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