Racist America

Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations

Joe R. Feagin, Kimberley Ducey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351388597
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

This fourth edition of Racist America is significantly revised and updated, with an eye toward racism issues arising regularly in our contemporary era. This edition incorporates many recent research studies and reports on U.S. racial issues that update and enhance the last edition's chapters. It expands the discussion and data on social science concepts such as intersectionality and gendered racism, as well as the concepts of the white racial frame, systemic racism, and the elite-white-male dominance system from research studies by Joe Feagin and his colleagues. The authors have further polished the book and added more examples, anecdotes, and narratives about contemporary racism to make it yet more readable for undergraduates. Student objectives, summaries, key terms, and study questions are available under the e-Resources tab at www.routledge.com/9781138096042.

1

Systemic Racism

A Comprehensive Perspective

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Preamble, U.S. Constitution

The American idea is the nation’s holiday garb, its festive dress, its Sunday best. It covers up an everyday practice of betraying the claims of equality, justice, and democracy.

John Hope Franklin

The year is 1787, the place Philadelphia. Fifty-five men are meeting in summer’s heat to write a constitution for what will be called the “first democratic nation.” These pathbreaking founders create a document so radical in breaking from monarchy and feudal institutions that it will be condemned and attacked in numerous European countries. These determined radicals are all men of European origin, and most are well off by the standards of their day. Significantly, at least 40 percent have been or are slaveowners, and a significant proportion of the others profit as merchants, shippers, lawyers, and bankers from the trade in slaves, commerce in slave-produced agricultural products, or supplying provisions to slaveholders and slave traders.¹ The man who pressed hard for this convention and chairs it, George Washington, is one of the richest men in the colonies because of the hundreds of black people he has held in bondage. Washington and his colleagues create the first “democratic” nation, yet for whites only. In the preamble to their document, the white founders cite prominently “We the People,” but this phrase does not encompass the one-fifth of the population then enslaved or the large Indigenous population.

Laying a Racist Foundation: The United States

Many historical analysts have portrayed slavery as only a minor matter at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Yet slavery was central, as a leading participant, James Madison, made clear in notes on convention debates. Madison emphasized how the convention was scissored across a slave/not-slave divide among the states.² Southern and northern regions were gradually diverging in their politico-economic frameworks. Slavery had once been of some importance in most areas, but by the late 1700s and early 1800s the northern states were moving away from chattel slavery as a part of their local economies, and some were seeing a growing antislavery sentiment. Even so, a great many northern white merchants, shippers, and consumers still depended on products produced by enslaved workers on southern and border-state plantations, and many merchants sold manufactured goods to the plantations. Northern shipbuilders and bankers were also central to the U.S. slavery economy.

Debates Influenced by Slavery

While all delegates to the Constitutional Convention agreed that the new government should protect private property, and thus existing economic inequality, this white male elite had a right wing, a center, and a left wing. The small left wing, with its strong views on class equality and popular revolution, was closest to many in the general white population, and some of its members had dominated the writing of the more radical Declaration of Independence. At the Constitutional Convention, however, the center and the right wing had more influence. The right wing even included numerous delegates who desired some form of monarchy. The left wing and center successfully countered this desire, for that seemed unacceptable to the majority of the population. In numerous provisions the final document was oriented to political liberty: there was agreement on rejecting religious tests for office and an established religion, on protecting freedom of debate in Congress, and on protecting (white) citizens from much arbitrary government. Even so, many conservative and center delegates at the convention were anti-democratic in their thinking, fearing “the masses.” Thus, the left wing of this white elite was unable to add a specific list of individual rights to the Constitution, and some states did not ratify the new document until their ratifiers were persuaded that a democratic Bill of Rights would be added.³

The trade in, and enslavement of, people of African descent was an important and divisive issue for the convention. Almost all of these prominent, generally well-educated men accepted the view that people of African descent could be the chattel property of others—and were not human beings with citizens’ rights. At the heart of the Constitution was protection of the wealth of the affluent bourgeoisie in the new nation. There was near unanimity on the idea, as delegate Gouverneur Morris (New York) put it, that property is the “main object of Society.” For these founders, freedom meant the protection of unequal accumulation of property, particularly property that could produce a profit in the emerging capitalist system. This was not just a political gathering with the purpose of creating a new bourgeois-democratic government; it was also a meeting to protect the racial and economic interests of men with substantial wealth in the colonies. As historian Herbert Aptheker has put it, the Constitution was a “bourgeois-democratic document for the governing of a slaveholder-capitalist republic.”⁴

The harsh reality of slavery conditions and the often death-dealing slave trade hung over the convention like a demonic specter. Slavery intruded on important debates, including debates over representation in the new Congress. Northern and southern delegates vigorously argued the matter and reached the famous three-fifths compromise on counting those enslaved for the purpose of white representation. Article 1 speaks only of three groups in the new nation: “free persons,” “Indians not taxed,” and “all other persons.” The “other” persons were those enslaved, mostly of African descent. Whether free or enslaved, African Americans were not to be citizens or voters, yet 60 percent of their number could be counted to enlarge white representation in the states. Interestingly, the earlier Articles of Confederation had used the term “white” in setting the formula for enumerating the country’s population. The new Constitution made use of the Confederation’s language in this regard but without the word “white.”⁵

One delegate from Pennsylvania, James Wilson, questioned the three-fifths compromise; he did not see

on what principle the admission of blacks in the proportion of three-fifths could be explained. Are they admitted as Citizens? Then why are they not admitted on an equality with White Citizens? Are they admitted as property? Then why is not other property admitted into the computation?⁶

The answer, however, was clear. Enslaved blacks were to be counted as human beings only when it suited whites to do so. Otherwise, they were just white property. Some framers of the Constitution realized that they were divesting black people of their humanity. After the convention, the Federalist Papers supported the compromise thus:

Let the case of the slaves be considered as it is in truth, a peculiar one. Let the compromising expedient of the Constitution be mutually adopted, which regards them as inhabitants, but as debased by servitude below the equal level of free inhabitants; which regards the slave as divested of two fifths of the man.⁷

The new country formed by European Americans in the late eighteenth century was openly viewed as a white republic. These founders sought to build a racially based republic in the face of monarchial opposition and against those on the North American continent that they defined as inferior. James Madison, who himself enslaved many black Americans, put it this way: “Next to the case of the black race within our bosom, that of the red on our borders is the problem most baffling to the policy of our country.”⁸

The concerns of slaveholders would appear again and again in debates over taxation, the presidency, commerce, and other matters. For example, there were two days of debates over the importation of enslaved Africans into the colonies. A compromise was reached and placed in Article 1, Section 9. This section allowed the brutal trade to continue until at least 1807.⁹ At the convention a few of these white delegates did speak critically of chattel slavery or the slave trade. George Mason, himself a prominent slaveholder, blamed the slave trade on the greed of British merchants. He noted the threat of slave uprisings and argued that slavery made poor whites lazy. As Mason put it, “every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant.” Strikingly, however, Mason did not mention slavery’s impact on those actually held in chains.¹⁰ He and delegate Elbridge Gerry (Massachusetts) would later refuse to sign the document, in part because of its slavery provisions. Yet their objections were not moral but political. Mason feared that the continuing slave trade would make the new United States “more vulnerable” and less capable of defense.¹¹ Not one of the 55 delegates advocated that the abolition of slavery and freedom for all Americans should be an integral part of the new Constitution. On key votes most northern delegations voted with southern delegations, in part because the trade in enslaved workers and slave-produced products was generally of economic benefit to northern traders and merchants.

The “Most Prominent Feature”

In one of the vigorous debates touching on slavery, the wealthy Gouverneur Morris noted cogently that “domestic slavery is the most prominent feature in the aristocratic countenance of the proposed Constitution.”¹² By the end of the summer of 1787 there were at least seven sections where the framers had the system of slavery clearly in mind:

1. Article 1, Section 2, which counts slaves as three-fifths of a person;
2. Article 1, Sections 2 and 9, which apportion taxes on the states using the three-fifths formula;
3. Article 1, Section 8, which gives Congress authority to suppress slave and other insurrections;
4. Article 1, Section 9, which prevents the slave trade from being abolished before 1808;
5. Article 1, Sections 9 and 10, which exempt goods made by slaves from export duties;
6. Article 4, Section 2, which requires the return of fugitive slaves; and
7. Article 4, Section 4, which stipulates that the federal government must help state governments put down domestic violence, including slave uprisings.¹³

The founders were generally aware of the oppressiveness of the slavery from which they profited. In spite of their freedom to speak, read, and do business in the colonies, they and other whites often described their own sociopolitical condition as one of actual or potential “slavery.” Ironically, many publications of the revolutionary period compared whites’ colonial conditions under the British king to black enslavement. As early as 1774, George Washington noted the crisis over colonists’ rights in this way: “The crisis is arrived when we must assert our rights, or submit to every imposition, that can be heaped upon us, till custom and use shall make us tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.”¹⁴ One convention delegate, John Dickinson, expressed the common view: “Those who are taxed without their own consent, expressed by themselves or their representatives, are slaves. We are taxed without our own consent, expressed by ourselves or our representatives. We are therefore—SLAVES.”¹⁵ Dickinson was at one time the largest slaveholder in Philadelphia.

Generally, the white male founders viewed Americans from Africa as slaves by natural law. Natural law was also used to explain why these founders and their compatriots could subordinate Native Americans. In Article 1 of the Constitution, the section dealing with Congress regulating interstate and foreign commerce briefly adds relations with “Indian tribes,” indicating Indigenous peoples were not generally seen by the founders as part of their new nation. Until the mid-to-late nineteenth century, Indigenous societies were mostly viewed as separate nations, with some whites advocating treaty-making, land purchases, and the “civilizing” of Indigenous Americans, while others pressed for land theft, extermination, or removal of all Indigenous Americans to distant western areas.¹⁶

A House Founded on White Racism

Anti-black racism is centrally about the lived experiences and interactions of black and white Americans. Historical events reflect and imbed the tangible realities of everyday life—the means of concrete oppression and the means of symbolizing and thinking about that oppression. Politicians, columnists, teachers, lawyers, executives, and ordinary Americans routinely cite the U.S. Constitution, and the founders’ actions, as the glory of U.S. society. The white founders’ decisions and understandings still shape our lives in a great many ways.

An “Agreement with Hell”?

The U.S. Constitutional Convention, the first such in the democratic history of the modern world, laid a strong base for the new societal “house” called the United States. Yet, from the beginning, this house’s foundation was fundamentally flawed and frequently undemocratic. While most Americans have thought of this document and the sociopolitical structure it created as keeping the new nation together, in fact this structure was created to maintain racial separation and oppression at the time and for the foreseeable future. The elite framers reinforced and legitimated a system of racial oppression that they thought would ensure that whites, especially men of means, would rule for centuries.

The social and political system they created was riddled with contradictions that have surfaced repeatedly over the course of U.S. history. The contradictions were obvious to many Americans. By the 1840s, for example, many black and white abolitionists were protesting slavery and the constitutional document undergirding it. Before this period there had been white antislavery advocates—black Americans, of course, had advocated abolition from the beginning—but large-scale action against the slavery system did not take place until the nineteenth century. At one 1843 meeting of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society, a resolution was adopted: “Resolved, that the Compact which exists between the North and the South is a ‘covenant with death, and an agreement with hell’—involving both parties in atrocious criminality—and should be immediately annulled.” At a gathering in Massachusetts on July 4, 1854, the eminent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison burned a copy of the U.S. Constitution, uttering the words: “So perish all compromises with tyranny.”¹⁷

The “Normality” of Slavery

In the first two centuries of the new country, most European Americans, in spite of a professed ethic of liberty, implemented or accepted the brutal subordination of black Americans and the driving away or killing of Native Americans. Religious leaders like Cotton Mather, the famous Puritan, and William Penn, a Quaker and founder of Pennsylvania, enslaved black Americans. The founder of U.S. psychiatry, Dr. Benjamin Rush, enslaved a black American. Men of politics like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, and Sam Houston were enslavers. Ten presidents (from George Washington to Ulysses S. Grant) at some point held African Americans in bondage.¹⁸ Many elite white men of this era also shared President Thomas Jefferson’s racist framing of Native Americans: “This unfortunate race, whom we had been taking so much pains to save and to civilize, have by their unexpected desertion and ferocious barbarities justified extermination and now await our decision on their fate.”¹⁹

Many at the head of the new United States supported, or were not uncomfortable with, the idea of a permanent slave society. Even the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, often called the “Great Emancipator,” was willing to support a constitutional amendment making slavery permanent in the existing southern states if that would prevent a civil war. Such a projected pro-slavery amendment was supported by many of his fellow Republicans and was actually approved by the U.S. Congress in early 1861.²⁰

The combination of white freedom and black e...