Rooming in the Master's House

Power and Privilege in the Rise of Black Conservatism

Molefi Kete Asante, Ronald E. Hall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781594518904
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317252658
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Rooming in the Master's House is a strikingly original portrait of the black conservative movement by two of the most celebrated African American scholars. Asante and Hall show that today's black conservative movement can be traced to the original class and social distinctions created during slavery when certain Africans were given positions in the master's house and consequently felt that they were better than the Africans who worked in the fields. Using historical and social sources, the authors weave a narrative explaining how the house Negro syndrome continues in current discourses on the black community and in American Politics.

CHAPTER ONE

Slave Psychology

The Shape of Race Relations

How does a person who is a member of a persecuted group, in the course of oppression, find common cause with the oppressor? The psychology of human bondage is complex, and victims do not cooperate with their captor unless those victims are subjected to some form of violence, either by threat or physical attack. Because humans are naturally opposed to bondage, victims who are subjected to it are thus forced to endure psychological and emotional torment capable of compromising their human spirit in order to tolerate an otherwise unnatural state (Akbar, 1996).

Generally speaking, all people regard themselves, in a normal situation, with pride and self-respect. Africans have participated in kinship respect and ancestral reverence from the earliest of times; in fact, humanity’s origin is the African continent. Just like all other people, African people seek life-fulfilling activities. Thus, there are no differences among humans in terms of the enthusiasm for life and the protection of posterity, and few other aspects of the human spirit equal people’s innate desire for freedom. Consequently, because freedom is the natural and preferred state of human existence, any attempt to make enslaved Africans of human beings requires that they not only be processed psychologically for what otherwise might be considered an unnatural state of human existence but also that they themselves be forced to cooperate in their own denigration.

Africans who reached America during the European Slave Trade came from people who resisted their enslavement in any way they could. The capture, kidnapping, and imprisoning of Africans in the slave dungeons along Africa’s coast were ordeals of criminal magnitude. Often the slave traders would pay Africans to go into the interior to capture young people; most Africans captured for the slave ships were between the ages of 14 and 22. Nothing was assured in these activities: Some victims fought violently and died whereas others succeeded in escape, after killing their capturers. The Africans who were eventually brought to the Americas endured a horrible Atlantic crossing and a naked, dehumanizing, and brutal enslavement (Asante, 2007). In fact, it would not be before the middle of the seventeenth century that British law would require that Africans be clothed.

Europeans altered the slavery formula by classifying people as chattel, as property. Among Africans, there was no history of regarding humans as the property of another. But it was through this notion of human beings as chattel that Europe was able to reduce the African person to something less than a human being in Europe’s legal structure. This justification for enslavement was new to the African world, so despite examples of enslavement elsewhere, scholars generally agree that the enslavement of Africans by Europeans was historically unprecedented for Africa.

Slave traders aimed to profit through the bodies of African people, which required the most violent practices in order to break the human spirit so those enslaved might submit willingly to this state of human degradation. Like chattel, Africans were their master’s property, given no more rights or privilege than a horse, a cow, or a farmer’s pig. In this practice, the African’s life purpose was dedicated to serving the master, who might exploit them in any way that served his best interest. Only the most brutal, violent, and omnipotent exercise of power could sustain what was, for all intents and purposes, nothing more than a form of slave psychology. The impact of this slave psychology on the sons and daughters of the house Negroes would, over time, lead to a form of modern-day African American conservatism.

The tenets of this political ideology would not fully emerge until after the campaign for Equal Opportunity led by A. Philip Randolph, the Civil Rights Struggle led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Black Power Movement inspired by Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Maulana Karenga, Kwame Ture, Huey Newton, and Bobby Seale, among others. However, it is important to understand how the reactive elements of black conservatism were inherent in these movements. Black conservatives would come to view the liberation efforts of the black community as narrow and shortsighted and would, therefore, posit an approach based on “good American values,” by which they always meant following the path of the whites. One can see the emergence of these ideas in historical racist approaches to knowledge.

The effort to influence the African—that is, to make the African a slave and to groom the house Negro—had philosophical antecedents in Europe; it was something grounded in the religion and literature of a great deal of European thought. The English had tried it on the Irish, and the Franks had tried it on the Gauls. However, without apparent reason, blackness itself was viewed as denigration in all facets of Western civilization. Leading European intellectuals such as Hegel and Voltaire expressed their negative opinions about Africans and blackness without critique from their peers. Many Europeans simply accepted that Africans were inferior beings. In fact, Thomas Jefferson, who was deeply influenced by European ideologies, likewise believed in black inferiority.

Furthermore, Christianity may have been the main key to the moral and ethical foundations supporting the enslavement of Africans. It had profited extensively from exploiting enslaved Africans, thereby increasing the wealth of the church and expanding the territory controlled by the church. However, in order to live with such stark contradictions while operating in the name of Jesus Christ, it needed to create the psychological mechanism to justify the exploitation of Africans (Myrdal, 1944). Thus, Christian America eventually aligned itself with pseudo-scientific and religious justifications that described persons of African descent as inferior and/or evil; in fact, because Africans existed in such a state, white intervention was necessary in order to save Africans from themselves. Moreover, as whites sought to maintain a sense of African inferiority, America’s first leaders wrote its sacred documents with these intentions in mind. Ultimately, America’s earliest institutions justified white exploitation of African people by proclaiming the lofty ideals of white individualism and liberty in one instance while enabling power over and domination of Africans in another (Myrdal, 1944).

As the major American slaveholders practiced Christianity, they also used it to justify killing Native Americans and enslaving Africans. This abuse of Christianity meant that these terrible contradictions would stain the conscience of the founding fathers of the American nation, a mark that would carry the white American ethos into the twenty-first century. Those in power also used Christianity to persecute women, both white and black, who were called witches and burned at the stake during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, despite the poor media surrounding the persecution of women as witches, this idea of Christianity maintained a firm grasp on all American cultural institutions. Indeed, slavery was the principal activity in which Christianity failed as a moral ideal.

* * *

The antebellum South, where African exploitation and brutalization was the most severe, embraced religion to such an extreme so as to psychologically justify its violence against African victims. At that time, white Southerners took their religion so seriously that it came to dominate every aspect of their life, culture, and outward behavior (Myrdal, 1944). White Southerners harbored a deep hatred for Africans, a practice that they often spoke of as the will of God, and this feeling was deeply embedded in the structure of their religion. However, why would God will such horrible crimes against another people—people who were innocent of crimes against their own race? Answers were not necessary, and the propaganda coming from the preachers, priests, editors, scientists, and politicians was so intense that, eventually, white Southerners felt no guilt about the exploitation and degradation of Africans. In fact, the culture of the South and, to some extent, the American population in general used the statements, sermons, reports, and documents of their opinion makers to avoid any inclination toward guilt.

One could reasonably say that the church was the principal institution leading the justification of African enslavement. Where it did not lead, the church was a co-equal partner with the commercial interest in dictating the relationships between whites and blacks. Neither the rebellion of blacks nor the reform movement of the church could end the brutality toward Africans because the ideas justifying African enslavement aggressively pervaded all art forms, institutions, social graces, trivia, and proverbs that constituted white culture. Even soap and food were decorated with negative or pejorative images of Africans.

Although the enslavement of human beings clearly contradicted the teachings of the church, because Europeans found the slave trade profitable, they fashioned a psychology that could alleviate the moral contradiction. This process would lead to two phenomena: assuaging white guilt and embedding black self-hatred.

White guilt could be eased by applying the concept of individual free will, which was first derived from the Protestants during their rebellion against the dominance of the Catholic Church. This concept holds that individuals—and in this case, white individuals—could demonstrate that they were free in relationship to their morality by claiming individual free will. They could do what they pleased, as they pleased, and when they pleased so long as they interpreted it in the context of the Christian doctrine. They did not have to wait for the policy of a church hierarchy that might have thrown them into a quagmire of moral confusion. The clean-cut, precise, and usable “individual free will” could function in ways that many had not even predicted. It was the sine qua non of the American slave practice. This was not the case, say, in Brazil or some other nations where the influence of the Catholic Church was omnipotent. In those countries, church hierarchy essentially dictated policies regarding relationships between Africans and Europeans, the care of the enslaved children, the spiritual health of the enslaved, and so forth.

Conversely, Protestantism gave whites the status of free individuals who are no longer dependent on the unifying voice of the church. Africans were outside of this conversation from the beginning, and the fact that enslaving Africans constituted such a serious moral infraction forced the Protestants to seek a resolution by resorting to individual free will. Accordingly, because humans were seen as divine and “God” existed within the individual, people could embrace the practice of slavery while still believing themselves to be moral. Individual freedom became the mantle on which the white American slaveholder could rest his moral concerns. By the authority of his religion, the lone individual became destined, as a white person favored by “God,” to rule over the African. Although certain brands of Protestantism more explicitly interpreted this relationship between humans and the divine than others sects, all seemed to define the African as outside of humanity.

It is important to understand that although the Lutheran and Calvinist movements objected to what they considered the abuses of Catholicism, they did not have a more enlightened view about the enslavement of Africans; those branches of Christianity also worked to assuage white guilt over the treatment of Africans. Even though the European enslavement of millions of Africans was unprecedented, Europeans and Arabs had practiced slavery for centuries before the mass forced migration of Africans to the Americas. Thus, when Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and other European Christians began participating in the slave trade in the fifteenth century, they brought to the practice of slavery a unique disregard for the humanity of the enslaved. Although they took part in violence and abuse much as other men did in controlling the enslaved, through their religion and, eventually, science, whites degraded African people as apes, monkeys, or other animals, and they even treated the enslaved worse than they treated animals. The slave master could treat the slaves any way he desired because, from a religious standpoint, Africans had no souls and thus were not included in the laws of God or morality.

The European Renaissance and Industrial Revolution had tremendous impacts on the lives of enslaved African people in the American South. During the late Renaissance, the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, European society was transformed by centralizing political institutions and world exploration. In a sense, the people had been freed from fears stoked by the ruling religious hierarchies of the European Middle Ages.

The Renaissance had given Europeans a vehicle through which to pursue activities gratifying to both soul and body, responding to both abstraction and physicality. The Industrial Revolution, emerging in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, would encourage the development of factories to manufacture goods created or harvested by enslaved Africans. The changes brought about by these two movements were so revolutionary that European governments would create new money and opportunities, often without consideration for long-established, traditional practices and beliefs. Individuals were granted permission to seek whatever goals they desired for personal benefit, which contrasted the sternness imposed by the era of Luther and Calvin. Even if American whites seldom acknowledged that their romantic attitudes of individual liberty and democracy grew out of European ideas grounded in individualism, when one understands how individual free will allowed the most decadent form of individualism, the truth becomes inescapable. As noted African scholar W. E. B. Du Bois has stated, “it was the freedom to destroy freedom, the freedom of some to exploit the rights of others” (Dubois, 1939, p. l27). Indeed, this individualism permitted freedom to be intolerant and to cast the collective interests of society to hell. Hence, in the reality of the antebellum South, because the white man was determined to be free, he, despite contradiction, felt entitled by race to enslave and otherwise oppress African people.

This invasive individualism, exploitative and avaricious, would also transform all rights into individual rights. Supported by the legal systems of the state, institutionalized individualism sought to make collective identities illegal, marginal, and fictional. Thus, each entity was recognized legally as an individual, whether it were a business or a not-for-profit organization, and black people, as descendants of enslaved persons, were transformed legally into isolated cells to be picked off at will by the more aggressive ideological individualist.

Furthermore, Christian ideology, with its good and evil dichotomy constructed to maintain white superiority and black inferiority, affected deeply the psychology of the African. In fact, it can be argued that when slavery began, no African believed him or herself inferior to Europeans. Instead, Africans believed themselves to be unfortunate. African cultures and civilizations were often older, more developed, and more stable than those of Europeans. Because of this, whites must have exerted a remarkable amount of effort to embed such self-hatred in people whose ancestors had tamed incredible territories by bringing those lands under the plow and hoe as well as making iron and refining gold long before whites came to Africa. Enslavement was itself the first stage to self-hatred.

How can a people whose freedom had never been questioned and whose liberties as African citizens had been ensured by their constitutions be made to doubt the worth of their own selves? What methods of indoctrination must be practiced to gain entry into the psyche of Africans to the extent that they would claim they had no knowledge when indeed they descend from a tradition that is known for creating knowledge? Or who would deny that they had institutions of higher learning when there were several schools that taught the higher disciplines in West Africa? What could make a beautiful person accustomed to being ornamented in fine jewelry and clothes claim that Africans had no clothes and no jewelry? What form of human torture must be used to cause the African to lose these memories? There has to be, if not a physical waterboarding, a psychological waterboarding of tsunami proportions.

From the moment a slave hunter captured an African boy or girl, man or woman, he led that African away from the village and down to the coast to be placed in dungeons to wait for the arrival of the European slaving ship, which could take months. There, the slave captors deprived the African of his or her own thoughts and began the process of brainwashing. There were several aspects to this early stage of making a slave. First, the person was made to believe that there was something wrong with him or her because they had been captured whereas the Africans who were working cooperatively with the white man were not somehow wrong. Captured people could see other Africans in the service of the whites at the dungeons, and they knew that some of these Africans were from ethnic groups that were different from their own. Such knowledge probably made them believe that there was something wrong with their group, and this was why they were the ones captured and held in bondage. Secondly, the captors exposed the captives to Christianity, making them listen to Christian hymns even as the whites abused them. There was always something quite odd about the nature of the enslavement when sad dirges of pain would mix with the Christian songs coming from the church. The shock of these differences and the uncertainty of one’s fate must have been the cruelest actions against the psychological health of the captives. One was outside of the power of one’s own king or queen, separated from one’s own mother or father, concealed from the searching spirits of the ancestors, and abandoned by one’s named god. Clearly, one was now in the hands of a monster that could bring about the most horrible of deaths, could eat you, leaving no traces that could be tracked by your loved ones.

Crossing the ocean in a small boat, with nearly 800 people packed tightly together for a 30- to 60-day journey, was the gate of hell. In response to this experience, the African would question existence and divinity. However, whereas some accepted existence and divinity, others accepted only divinity, and still others, the more rational thinkers, accepted existence. In our judgment, the fact that Africans could not see the contradictions inherent in a system of cruel oppression practiced by white slave holders and, later, their own reliance on the same Christian god is another gate to hell. It was the opening the slave masters needed to destroy Africans’ self-confidence and erase their memory.

By 1600 the system for assuaging white guilt and blaming the African had been firmly established. Spaniards and Portuguese were among the first and most organized Europeans to set up trade mechanisms with Africans and build forts from which to conduct their business. After a hundred years of kidnapping and trading in African people as chattel, whites began to consider African enslavement as normal and, in turn, looked for new more profitable ways to exploit them.

The potential wealth from slavery prompted Europeans to consider the question of who among them should be licensed to trade in human cargo. This consideration was a reflection of the emerging competition and the significance of slave traffic to economic power. To reach such a state, Christianity had soundly rationalized slavery as justified. To rescue the white psyche, the Portuguese and Spaniards then organized missionary trips to Africa and elsewhere to save heathen native peoples from themselves. In this way, whites could claim the support of God and thus psychologically justify what they were doing. If they raped and pillaged African civilizations, it was not for selfish interests but rather a divine inspiration supported by both God and the king. Whites would enlist the church as one of the arbiters of licenses, called asientos, that would ensure a certain nation or trading company the right to search for captives in a certain area of Africa without fear of competition from other nations or companies. The asiento was paid to the Catholic Church and the Spanish king and was based on the number of Africans ripped from the land. Because it gave a company or nation the rights to the area for up to 30 years, the asiento was considered a prized possession because it almost ensured wealth. Those who held the asiento also had the right to trade it to another power, so selling asientos was a profitable business as well.

Although, begi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Chapter One Slave Psychology: The Shape of Race Relations
• Chapter Two Field Negroes and House Negroes
• Chapter Three House Negroes and the Crisis of Identity
• Chapter Four The Conservative Political Agenda
• Chapter Five Self-Mutilation in the Master’s House
• Chapter Six Extending the Metaphors: Conservatives and Liberals
• References
• Index
• About the Authors