How Blacks Built America

Labor, Culture, Freedom, and Democracy

Joe R. Feagin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780415703291
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134474769
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

How Blacks Built America examines the many positive and dramatic contributions made by African Americans to this country over its long history. Almost all public and scholarly discussion of African Americans accenting their distinctive societal position, especially discussion outside black communities, has emphasized either stereotypically negative features or the negative socioeconomic conditions that they have long faced because of systemic racism. In contrast, Feagin reveals that African Americans have long been an extraordinarily important asset for this country. Without their essential contributions, indeed, there probably would not have been a United States. This is an ideal addition to courses race and ethnicity courses.

1

White Racism, Black Resistance

Seeking Freedom, Justice, and Democracy

Today, the dominant mythology of the United States emphasizes the country’s early creation and development as mostly being about white courage, hard work, and commitments to freedom. European colonists viewed the new colonies’ development as an example for the entire world. In 1630, several ships crossed the Atlantic and brought hundreds of English Puritans to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. On arrival, their leader, the lawyer John Winthrop, gave a sermon insisting that “we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”¹ These ethnocentric Puritans viewed themselves as setting a distinctive spiritual and societal example for “all people.” By the time of the 1770s American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence, advocates of this American universalism were rhetorically accenting liberty, justice, and equality as the new country’s guiding principles.

A Long Racist History

Clearly, the official mythology about the early founding centuries ignores or downplays the extreme violence and oppression, and thus the immorality, necessary to subordinate those in the way of this European American expansion—initially, the large-scale genocide targeting Native Americans and extensive enslavement of African Americans. It also ignores the role and significance of the large-scale pushback against this subordination coming from these and other Americans of color. From the seventeenth century to the present, European Americans have generated and maintained an array of inegalitarian economic and other social institutions that have unjustly enriched whites and unjustly impoverished Americans of color, institutions so oppressive that they have generated recurring freedom and resistance movements by Native Americans, African Americans, and other Americans of color.

To a substantial degree, many white leaders of the American Revolution revolted against Britain not only to secure greater freedom for themselves but also to protect the country’s slavery-based economic system, and thus the enslavement of African Americans, including their own wealth linked directly or indirectly to that system. Certainly, there were other major factors in their revolt, but most white revolutionaries did not revolt to create real democracy. Indeed, the expansion of democracy was proceeding faster in Britain than in what became the United States. At the time of the American Revolution, the fifth of the population that was African American (and mostly enslaved) and the substantial population of Native Americans (mostly beyond its borders) facing genocide certainly did not view the emerging United States as a country strongly committed to real liberty, justice, and democracy.

The conventional story about U.S. development after the Revolution is a rosy one about generations of immigrant groups voluntarily creating a socially healthy country reflecting the founding ideals of liberty and justice for all. Yet, Native Americans were already here when the numerous Atlantic migrations took place. In addition, one important group, Africans, constituted the only large group forced to come to these shores—often in chains.

Consider the long timeline for white oppression of African Americans, from 1619 to the present day. In 1607, Jamestown became the first permanent English colony in North America. Twelve years later, enslaved Africans were purchased with supplies from a Dutch-flagged ship; they were apparently treated by European colonists as indentured servants. The colonists did not firmly institutionalize slavery until the mid-seventeenth century, yet even in the first decades European-named “negro servants” were treated in very discriminatory ways, as socially and legally inferior.² Once the slavery system became economically central and extensively developed by the 1700s, the privilege, status, and wealth that whites in various classes secured generally guaranteed it would be very difficult to move back in time and undo the slavery system. This was demonstrated when an official end to slavery did not come for another century and a half, in 1865, well past the midpoint of this country’s four-centuries-old history. Even then, after a brief attempt at ending some racial oppression in the Reconstruction era (about 1865–1877), whites established the near-slavery of legal segregation (Jim Crow) for another nine decades (about 1878–1969). Altogether, about three-fourths of this country’s history has been grounded in slavery and Jim Crow oppression. Indeed, this country has been officially “free” of extreme racial oppression only since about 1969, when the last major civil rights law went into effect.

Evidently, there is a societal inertia that keeps a social system going over a long period of time and relatively impervious to change unless it is met by a very strong counter force. Established in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this country’s system of extreme oppression has indeed been inertial. In making sense of this reality, we need to consider how dominant societal institutions regularly reproduce racial oppression and its racial inequalities. Over nearly four centuries now, an estimated 60 to 70 million African Americans have lived under systemic white racism. Their enslavement, legal segregation, and contemporary oppression have had profound impacts not only on themselves but on many other aspects of this country. As the brilliant African American novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison long ago underscored, without the African American presence, there would be “no slave economy, no Civil War; no violent destruction of the Reconstruction; no KKK and no Jim Crow system.”³

Covering up Racist History

Opinion surveys have recently shown how few colleges and universities require much in the way of U.S. history courses and how majorities of students know little about white founding figures such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Over the course of their early educations and later lives, most people learn little about this country’s two-centuries-plus slavery era or its eight-plus decades of legal (Jim Crow) segregation that followed and only ended about 1969. North American slavery, especially in southern and border states, was an extreme political-economic system that racialized and controlled most major aspects of the lives of enslaved African Americans. The Jim Crow segregation that followed continued this extreme racialized control for most African Americans, again especially in southern and border states. These extraordinarily oppressive realities have frequently been hidden from public view and critical analysis by societal myths. For example, at popular plantation tourist sites, slavery’s brutal, torture-filled history is routinely ignored or whitewashed.⁴ (One dictionary defines torture as the “practice of inflicting severe pain on someone as a punishment or to force them to do or say something.”⁵) Few white Americans, in particular, seem to want critical enlightenment about our history of racial oppression.

The scientist Werner Heisenberg, co-developer of quantum physics theory, commented that, “We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”⁶ Likewise, what we learn about our past and present societal history is substantially shaped by the questions we ask. White Americans, especially elites, have tried from the beginning to the present day to control serious questions probing deeply and publicly into the country’s systemic racism. They have frequently covered up or whitewashed the central societal plot of systemic racism, such as by rarely funding research on such a topic or barring educational curricula dealing critically with it. This centuries-old cover-up has made it almost impossible for most white Americans, and many other Americans, to understand that deep-lying historical plot. Nonetheless, this suppressed past dramatically shapes our present.⁷

A remarkable example of hidden history is the fact that for decades Francis Scott Key, who authored our national anthem, the Star Spangled Banner, during the U.S. War of 1812 with the British, was a slaveholding lawyer even as he proclaimed a desire for freedom from the British. He wrote several times in that frequently sung song about the “land of the free,” yet did not mean what he said, for he viewed the new nation as a slaveholding republic of free white men.⁸ Significantly, in the anthem’s seldom-sung third verse, Key wished death upon formerly enslaved African Americans who, promised their freedom by the British, had fled to British lines, with some fighting courageously with the British for real liberty. The slaveholding immorality on which this country was based is clear in these facts about the slaveholder who authored the Star Spangled Banner. From the viewpoint of enslaved African Americans, the British were defenders of real freedom, and thousands migrated to freedom in the British lines.

Given the massive historical cover-up, what are the contemporary consequences of telling an accurate story of the role of African Americans in U.S. history? Bringing an honest account of white-on-black oppression and black resistance to oppression into the retelling and writing of U.S. history would require a dramatic change in that history’s overall presentation and general interpretation. Historical truths are difficult to face when they are as immoral, bloody, and enduring as this country’s deepest racial truths. Yet, one can better understand the rage and resistance of African Americans, in the past and the present, if one understands that many critical events in the history of U.S. racial oppression are largely unknown because of a huge cover-up or whitewashing. In addition, over nearly four centuries, a great many Africans and African Americans have battled oppression, but only a little of this history is known outside of black America. From the beginning, enslaved Africans and African Americans fought back. They frequently injured and killed white sailors and other enslavers, fought fiercely against being put on ships, and threw themselves overboard from slave ships. Once inside the U.S. slavery system, they also revolted on a large scale, individually and collectively. Plantation houses and other buildings were burned, crops destroyed, and overseers and slaveowners attacked. At least 300 slave rebellions, including successful revolts and unsuccessful conspiracies to revolt, were recorded during the United States’s slavery centuries.⁹

Ignorance of, or misunderstanding, our racialized history means that we cannot act intelligently in regard to many racial matters in the present day. Without understanding our deep societal plot of racial oppression, we cannot understand the urgent need for meaningful reparative actions for Americans targeted by oppression, including a large-scale makeover of this society. Unsurprisingly, few whites today have the ability to comprehend, even moderately, the realities of systemic white racism from a black point of view. Ralph Ellison underscored how different this experience is:

In our society it is not unusual for a Negro to experience a sensation that he does not exist in the real world at all. He seems rather to exist in the nightmarish fantasy of the white American mind as a phantom that the white mind seeks unceasingly, by means both crude and subtle, to lay to rest.¹⁰

Systemic Racism and its White Frame

Let us pause to consider a few dimensions of the systemic racism that is central to the deep racial plot of the United States. Systemic racism is a material, social, and ideological reality that is well embedded in all major institutions. Over the long history of white oppression of Americans of color, racism has been systemic and foundational and has included: (1) the many exploitative and discriminatory practices of whites; (2) the significant resources, privileges, and power unjustly gained by whites and institutionalized in a dominant racial hierarchy; (3) the maintenance of substantial racial inequalities by well-institutionalized social reproduction mechanisms; and (4) the many racial prejudices, stereotypes, images, ideologies, emotions, interpretations, and narratives that constitute the dominant white racial frame (worldview) that rationalizes and implements everyday racial oppression.¹¹

Very important in reproducing this systemic racism over the centuries has been the transmission from one white generation to the next not only of unjustly gained material resources but of a strong white racial framing of this society. A long-term historical creation, this still-dominant racial frame, this racial worldview, and its important pro-white and anti-others sub-frames are reproduced moment to moment within social networks that contextualize whites’ everyday lives. An individual’s understandings, images, and knowledge about racial matters hang together because they draw important elements from the larger white racial framing, which is stored and reproduced in that individual’s social networks.¹² Whites routinely operate out of this dominant white racial frame—for example, in discriminating against Americans of color—and often with little awareness of its existence.

In addition, the dominant white racial frame is opposed by the anti-oppression counter-frames of African Americans and other Americans of color and by the traditional home-culture frames that the latter draw on for their everyday lives and in developing resistance counter-frames. Living in this systemically racist society has required the development of a major black counter-frame to the dominant white frame, one that assists in survival and individual and collective resistance (for detail on racial frames, see Chapter 3). In interview studies involving hundreds of black respondents, my colleagues and I have found that black Americans in all walks of life are usually very aware of, and sensitive to, the multifaceted reality of everyday racism for themselves, their families, and other Americans of color. They are, on average, much more conscious of the reality and importance of the country’s highly racialized past and present than are white Americans.

Still, the country’s major white-controlled institutions, such as the public schools and mainstream media, constantly press the all-pervasive white racial frame on the minds of all Americans, including all Americans of color. Most of the latter are influenced by that omnipresent and dominant frame. For example, research using the white and black photos of the Implicit Association Test has found that nearly half of black respondents revealed a subtle pro-white or anti-black bias in responses to the photos. (The overwhelming majority of whites show this serious bias.) Because of societal pressures, virtually all black Americans must operate to some degree out of it to make their way in white-dominated institutions, and some have indeed operated very aggressively out of it. This contemporary situation of constantly competing interpretive frames confronting black Americans—the pervasive white racial frame versus the resistance-linked black counter-frame—signals just how powerful systemic white racism still is.¹³

Of course, many whites have been able to see at least a few of the problematical aspects of the dominant white frame, and a few have been able to assess it critically and operate frequently out of deeper understandings of racism gained from paying serious attention to the black counter-frame. In later chapters, we assess some white examples, such as John Brown and Albion Tourgée (see Chapter 5). There we observe that major progress in the anti-racist direction has required much equal-status contact with black Americans—and extensive and willing white learning from them about racism’s realities.

In addition, the collective memory of whites that protects and communicates the white racial frame is essential to perpetuating racial oppression across the generations. Also important for white perpetuation of systemic racism is the sustained collective forgetting of society’s harsh racist realities. Perpetuating racial oppression over the long term requires much collective forgetting and selective remembering. Recent research on the Jim Crow era demonstrates that most such forgetting and misremembering abandons white responsibilities for past oppression or glorifies white achievements, all in line with whites’ racial-group interests.¹⁴ This white repression of history and trained ignorance of oppression have been critical to living comfortably as a white person in a still-racist society to the present day.

The principal architects, builders, and maintainers of this society’s racial oppression, including its rationalizing frame, have long been white men, especially elite men. For the most part, they have made the most critical decisions and substantially developed the more important U.S. structures and institutions and the dominant white framing from which the w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 White Racism, Black Resistance: Seeking Freedom, Justice, and Democracy
• 2 Black Labor: Building the Economy
• 3 Black Genius Shaping U.S. Culture
• 4 Black Counter-Framing: Real Freedom, Justice, and Democracy (1600s–1910s)
• 5 Black Action: Accelerating Freedom, Justice, and Democracy (1700s–1800s)
• 6 Black Counter-Framing and Liberatory Action (1900s–1970s)
• 7 Contemporary Global Impacts: Freedom, Justice, and Democracy
• Notes
• Index