Transcription
There was a deliberate decision to destroy blacks and to bring them down into the pits of American society. And this decision, or more precisely, these decisions, were made starting in the 1600s. Most people don't know why this happened, but you're going to be well aware of who made those decisions and why they made those decisions after you finish watching this video.
So, to get into this subject, we're going to go into this book here. It's called "The Shaping of Black America" by historian Mr. Lon Bennett Jr. And so, I want you to pay attention as we go on this journey. Now, let's go on here to page 62, where it says, "Fork by fork, step by step, option by option, America, or to be more precise, the men who spoke in the name of America, decided that it was going to be a white place, defined negatively by the bodies and the blood of the Reds and the blacks." And as we go on, he's going to show how these men of power decided to do this and why.
Let's continue. And that decision, which was made in the 1660s and elaborated over a 200-year period, foreclosed certain possibilities in America, perhaps forever, and set off depth charges that are still echoing and re-echoing in the Commonwealth. And so, what, what are the possibilities that these decisions may have potentially closed off forever in America? One of them is the country ever being completely united. And another is a certain segment of blacks never rising above the permanent underclass position in America, which Dr. Claude Anderson also talks about. And so, these possibilities may be cut off forever, at least for the rest of the country's existence, because of some of these foundations that the country was built upon.
Now, let's continue. What makes this all the more mournful is that it didn't have to happen that way. There was another road, but that road wasn't taken. In the beginning, as we have seen, there was no race problem in America. And that's because the idea of race, it wasn't a dominant worldview in early America, especially amongst the common people. They had to be conditioned to see the world through the racial lens.
Here we go. The race problem in America was a deliberate invention of men who systematically separated blacks and whites in order to make money. And that's what fueled the idea of race. It was money. And the few figured out how to exploit the many and to get power and to make profits. And that's it, right? When you understand a game, that's it. They created this game almost 400 years ago, and they still have people today emotionally wrapped up in this game that they created, right? To deliberately exploit people. And that's crazy to me when you think about it. And the people who take on the identity of black, they were set up to be the biggest losers in this game, right? And they're the ones who are the most emotionally attached to playing this game. Which is why, for those of you who are climbing out of the pit, the one thing you have to do is get away from this black identity, and you have to get your mind out of the racial worldview, because that game is stacked for you to lose.
Let's continue. This was, as K.T. Stamp so cogently observed, a deliberate choice among several alternatives. Slavery, he said, cannot be attributed to some deadly atmospheric miasma or some irresistible force in the South's economic evolution. The use of slaves in Southern agriculture was a deliberate choice among several alternatives made by men who sought greater returns than they could obtain from their own labor alone, and who found other types of labor more expensive. They weren't going to get out there in the field and work. And just like any other business based on capitalism, they were looking to lower their expenses and to increase their returns. And they found the Negro slave to be the most appropriate for the job, as we're going to find out. And for many obvious reasons, which we're also going to go over.
Let's continue reading. It didn't have to happen that way. Back there, before Jim Crow, before the invention of the Negro or the white man, or the words and concepts to describe them, the colonial population consisted largely of a great mass of white and black bondsmen who occupied roughly the same economic categories and were treated with equal contempt by the lords of the plantations and legislatures. Now, this is talking about the earlier years in the American colonies. They were in the process of working out the system for the society. Where at that time, they treated the European servant similar to the Negro slave and servant.
Let's continue reading. Curiously unconcerned about their color, these people worked together and relaxed together. They had essentially the same interests, the same aspirations, and the same grievances. They conspired together and waged a common struggle against their common enemy, the big planter apparatus, and a social system that legalized terror against black and white bondsmen. No one says, and no one believes, that there was a Garden of Eden in colonial America. But the available evidence, slight though it is, suggests that there was widening bonds of solidarity between the first generation of blacks and whites. And this was another thing that they had discovered that the rulers had to put an end to, because this degree of unity and solidarity had the potential to grow into something that would have potentially jeopardized what these rulers had in mind and the goals of the leaders in that, in those colonies.
Let's continue. And the same evidence indicates that it proved very difficult indeed to teach white people to worship their skin, or more precisely, to teach English, Irish, and other European people to drop those identities and to think of themselves as white, right? As white people, which was introduced in the 1600s, and to value this idea of whiteness above all other things.
Let's continue. All this began to change drastically in the sixth decade of the 17th century, 1600s. The decade of the 1660s. This was the first great fork in the making of Black America. Now, what does he mean by that, the great fork in the making of Black America? When you look at a fork, it starts off on one end as a single road, and then when you get to the other end of the fork, it starts to break off into these multiple roads. And one of these roads leads to the very bottom, in the pits of society. And it is this road that the colonists forced the blacks to travel down. They set up the society to herd black people like cattle to go down this road that leads to the very bottom of the pit. That's the making of black people and the making of Black America. And you have to understand this.
Here we go. For it was at this fork that certain men decided to ground the American economic system on human slavery. To perceive the importance of that fork, it is necessary first to travel the roads that lead to it, roads that were not taken. The first road, a road never seriously considered, although it was open at least for a while, was the road of fraternal cooperation with the Americans, I.E., the Indians, in a program of free and creative development of the immense resources of the American continent. This obviously would have required consummate diplomacy and an abandonment of the peculiar European ideas that Europeans were divinely ordained to appropriate the resources and alter the institution of non-Europeans. It would have involved, in other words, the transformation of both Americans and Europeans and the creation of a new synthesis made up of the best elements of both configurations. This road, the only road to justice, was rejected out of hand by the white founding fathers who adopted a policy of genocide. This was one of the forks on the road, right? To find a way to cooperate with the natives and to make cultural adjustments to create a just society where everyone in that society can win. But the colonizers were way too greedy and cunning to make such compromises and to travel down that road.
Let's continue. The second road, also rejected, was a free and cooperative system of labor for all immigrants. This would have involved, at a minimum, an abandonment of the European principles of masters and servants and would have required all men to live by the sweat of their brow. Because the Europeans were already hooked on the master principle, because they could never somehow get over the idea that it was necessary for somebody else to work for them. This road was not taken. And the decision not to take that road left only two alternatives: temporary servitude and eventual freedom for all workers, red, black, and white, and the road of permanent servitude based on the work of one or possibly all three of the subordinate labor groups. Now, did they go down the road of creating freedom for all workers, or did they go down the road of creating permanent servitude? Let's find out.
The last road was taken. And one group was singled out for permanent servitude. And who is this group? Negroes. Who they created as black people. They deliberately took them down the dark alley where the light doesn't shine. That's where they took the Negro consciousness, right? All the way down into the pit for the purpose of making it stay down there permanently. Understand why? To answer that question, we must back up again and consider the groups not selected. First, the Indians. A popular idea to the contrary notwithstanding, the Indians were enslaved in all or most of the colonies. But Indian slavery and servitude created problems that colonists preferred to deal with in other ways. To begin with, there was the problem of security. It was difficult to keep Indian servants and slaves from running away because they knew the country and could easily escape to their countrymen who were only a forest or river away. Another, and possibly more persuasive, argument against large-scale enslavement of Indians was that the supply was relatively limited. Finally, and most importantly, Indian servants and slaves were members of groups with a certain amount of power. These groups could and did retaliate. For this combination of reasons, it was considered unwise to enslave large groups of Indians, who were usually sold into slavery in the West Indies so they could easily run away and find themselves in the familiar terrain. They were relatively small in number, and they could retaliate, right? Which made them not the ideal slaves.
Here we go. From the standpoint of the masters, the poor whites of Europe presented equally serious problems. The supply of poor whites, like the supply of Indians, was limited. And poor whites, like Indians, but for different reasons, could escape and blend into the whiteness of their countrymen. The most serious problem, however, was that poor whites had tenuous, but nonetheless important, connections with the circuits of power. There were pressure groups in England that concerned themselves with the plight of poor whites, and so they had people speaking on their behalf back home in England and putting pressure on the government. And so there was no way that these colonists in America could legally get away with making them permanent slaves, although they definitely would have if they could have gotten away with it.
Let's continue. This fact alone drastically limited the options of colonial masters. For in order to safeguard the relatively limited supply of poor whites, it was necessary to make costly, from the standpoint of the masters, concessions to white servants and to improve their living conditions. So the Europeans were also limited in number. They could escape, and they could blend in with the other free Europeans, and they had groups back home that were speaking on their behalf, right? And all this caused problems and interfered with the goals of the colonists on American soil. And so, what did they have left? Negroes.
Now, here we go. The last group, the group finally selected, did not have these disadvantages. As Oscar and Mary F. Handlin noted, farthest removed from the English, least desired, the African communicated with no friends who might be deterred from following. Since his coming was involuntary, nothing that happened to him would increase or decrease his numbers. Meaning that it didn't matter how hard they worked the Negroes, or how long the Negro served, because they didn't come by choice. Which was different from many of the Europeans, outside of the convicts or the people that were kidnapped. The other Europeans came by choice.
Let's continue. To raise the status of Europeans by shortening their terms would ultimately increase the available hands by inducing their compatriots to immigrate. Which is saying that if the Europeans heard that the terms were shorter, they would be more willing to sign up in a labor contract, right?
Here we go. To reduce the Negro's term would produce an immediate loss and no ultimate gain. Meaning that there was no benefit to reducing the Negro from being a permanent slave to a limited-time slave, because they didn't come on their own will. They didn't need to be incentivized to come over to America because they were getting captured by the slave raiders, right? And then sold to the merchants. And this was against their own will. So this would have been a loss to the colonial masters. And in other words, they would have had to stop thinking from the view of an extreme capitalist and think more from the view of a humanitarian, which they were most definitely unwilling to do, right?
Let's continue. By midcentury, the servitude of Negroes seemed generally lengthier than that of whites. And thereafter, the consciousness dawns that the blacks will toil for the whole of their lives. Unhappily for the African, they had none of the disadvantages of the Indian and poor whites. And they had, again, from the standpoint of the planters, distinct advantages. And what were some of these distinct advantages of the Negro? I'm glad you asked. Let's find out.
They were marked by color, and hence could not escape so easily. That's the first distinct advantage. They had the rich brown skin, not the black skin. They had the rich brown skin, and they could not blend in with anyone. And this is what the thinking colonist clearly noticed. And so the idea was to make that brown skin color the symbol of the slave, so that just by the sight of that rich brown skin color, it was supposed to signal to the unconscious mind of the people within that society that that person is the slave, right? As soon as they saw it, the trigger was supposed to go off, and it was supposed to know that's the slave, right? This is the conditioning process, and the conditioning of the mind of the people, right? They wanted to permanently link that skin color with being a slave, right? And that's including in the mind of the Negro too, right? And so this was the first distinct advantage of using the Negroes, right?
Here's the next one. The supply seemed inexhaustible, and the labor of Africans was relatively inexpensive when compared with the cost of transporting and maintaining white indentured servants for a limited number of years. And the African slave raiders, they caught so many Negroes that it could make someone's head spin. They caught and rounded up Negroes by the millions, right? They operated these huge businesses for the sole purpose of capturing these vulnerable people from these various tribes. And who benefited from this? The African rulers, right? It wasn't the common tribal people who were the ones who were doing this. It was the African rulers and the staff that they had working for them. They were just as malicious as the European colonists. And so I place both of these in the same category. And I'm quite certain that the African rulers, if they had the opportunity to make more money, they would have came over here to America, and they would have had no problem further pushing down the Negro's consciousness into the pit. No problem whatsoever. Because it's a character thing, right? It's not a color thing. And malicious character traits have the potential to be expressed by all humans. Understand this. And on top of that, those African rulers and those people who work for them, they didn't see the people that they were rounding up as people, right? We have to get away from these utopias, and we have to face reality, and stop placing these modern ideas and lumping them back into the minds of people living 500 years ago, because they didn't think like that, right? They did not think like that. And that's why they were able to supply an inexhaustible, inexpensive supply of vulnerable people to the European merchants, right?
Let's continue reading. This last fact was decisive, and it was clearly understood by colonists as early as 1640. And this is talking about the English. Pay attention. This was already clear in the minds of the Portuguese and the Spanish decades prior, but it took the English a little longer to catch on.
Here we go. It was in that year that Emanuel Downing sent a famous letter to his brother-in-law, John Winthrop, saying, among other things, "If upon a just war the Lord should deliver Nanned Indians into our hands, we might easily have men, women, and children enough to exchange for Moors, which will be more gainful pillage for us than we conceive. For I do not see how we can thrive until we get a stock of slaves sufficient to do all our business, for our children's children will hardly see this great continent filled with people, so that our servants will still desire freedom to plant for themselves and not stay but for very great wages. And I suppose you know very well how we shall maintain 20 Moors cheaper than one English servant." 20 Africans for the price of one English servant. How could a Puritan resist such a deal? They couldn't resist it, right? Which is why they went that route.
Let's continue. And how could he overlook the final and deciding factor? And what is this final deciding factor? I'm glad you asked. Here it is. The Africans were vulnerable. Now, what does it mean to be vulnerable? That means to be emotionally or to be physically exposed to the attacks of other people, right? And so they were vulnerable during their capture, and also vulnerable during their arrival to the new land, right?
Here we go. There were no large power groups nearby to retaliate in their name, like the Native Americans had. They didn't have that. So they were vulnerable. And what else? Nor did they have the power groups on the international scene to raise troublesome questions, like the Europeans had. There were no groups standing out on behalf of the captured Africans that had a voice on the international scene. And so, therefore, they were vulnerable.
Here we go. They were, in fact, naked before their enemies, and their enemies were legion, right? Everywhere they looked, to the left and to the right, enemies were all around, right? From the African slave catchers all the way over to the European slave masters, all playing a hand in dragging the Negro consciousness all the way down into the pit.
Let's continue. As the pointer of the roulette wheel neared the African number, the power brokers of England suddenly and dramatically increased the odds against Africans by announcing a new policy of restricted white immigration and massive support of the African slave trade. With the formation of the Royal African Company, 1672, the wheel of fate came to an abrupt halt before the black square. Henceforth, as James C. Ballagh has pointed out, it would be the policy of the king and the Duke of York, who stood at the head of the Royal African Company, to hasten the adoption of slavery by enactments cutting off the supply of indentured servants at the same time that large importations of slaves were made by their agents. But we must take care here to preserve perspective. Ballagh suggests, as others suggested before and after him, that history or some impersonal force decided for the colonists. But history is made by men, and not by circumstances. And I would add that it's a combination of both, the circumstances and combination with the men. They both make it together.
Here we go. If history created the circumstances and the alternatives, it was still left to men in the colonies to choose between the alternatives. Which is very true, because when the circumstances are created, it's still the human's role to decide what they're going to do in that circumstance. And the colonists, they made their choice, which was to enslave, right?
Here we go. That happened in the first instance in isolated areas in the menacing decades of the 1640s. In that decade, certain men in Maryland, Virginia, and Massachusetts began holding certain Africans in lifetime servitude. There are some indications that this was a deliberate gambit on the part of designing men who wanted to force a favorable legal decision in favor of slavery. If so, the gambit had its desired effect, for the first legal enactment in favor of slavery in the colonies came in 1641 in Massachusetts, which declared in its Body of Liberties that "there shall never be any bond slavery, villain, or captivity amongst us, unless it be lawful captives taken in just wars, and such strangers as willingly sell themselves or are sold to us." This was, all things considered, a fateful and ominous "unless," for the following words clearly authorize African, Indian, and European slavery. Once the genie was out of the bottle, there was a more or less deliberate effort to create a legal structure for slavery, a fact noted by Herbert San, who said, "Once these first hints about the existence of a status of slavery within the colony of Virginia has been made by the legislature, there seems to have developed at this point a conscious effort on the part of the Virginians to create a statutory framework on which to firmly base this condition." This effort unfolded roughly in four stages. Pay attention, because it's about to go into the plot on how they created the game and set it up to destroy the blacks.
The first stage is this. The first stage, linked in part with the Massachusetts precedent, was the extension of the term of black servants from a specific number of years to life. Lifetime servitude is the first stage. And Dr. Winthrop D. Jordan, in his book "Black Over White," he says that the English, they had been in constant contact with the Spanish and the Portuguese, so they were already familiar with this practice of lifetime servitude before they put it into practice, right?
Here we go. Following Massachusetts on this point were Connecticut in 1650, Virginia in 1661, Maryland in 1663, New York and New Jersey in 1664, South Carolina in 1682, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island in 1700, North Carolina in 1715, and Georgia in 1755. They were all in it together, right?
Here we go. The second and more momentous stage, a stage that marked the institutional divergence of servitude and slavery, was the introduction of the principle of heredity. And what heredity is in this case is referring to the slave passing on their status to the children that they have. And so the idea, because these are human ideas that are made manifest in the physical world, the idea was that the children of the slaves would be born into this world already cast into the status and position of being a slave. And this was to go on forever, right?
Let's keep reading. Virginia pioneered in this development, declaring in December 1662, "Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children gotten by an Englishman upon a negro woman shall be slave or free, be it therefore enacted and declared by this present Grand Assembly that all children born in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother." Which is another idea that's taken from the mind of the colonist, right? Because in nature, these ideas don't exist. Nature doesn't have any laws or any books that say the children follow the status of their mother. These are human inventions, right? Coming from their imagination and then being passed as laws and then turned into realities for the society. And why did they choose the status to follow that of the mother? Because when the English and the Negro had children, the mother was often the slave, and so they cast the children off to the side of the slaves so they can keep the free English side as pure as possible and as recognizable as possible. Which, when you think about it, makes sense and is reasonable from their perspective, and to achieve the goals and the objectives that they had in mind, right? From their side.
Now, let's continue reading. This raised more questions and doubts than it answered. For what precisely was a Negro? And what was the child of a Negro man and a white woman? And what, in the world, was a white person? Was it a matter of blood, or culture, or Christianity? The third phase of the process, defining slavery and providing a rationale for the system, was involved almost entirely with the farsical or ridiculous quest for answers to these questions. The first question requiring attention was the question of religion. For religion, and not race, was the first rationale for slavery. This caused no end of problems for colonial masters, for it was an axiom of their faith that freedom in Jesus Christ was real. More to the point, the whole colonization crusade of the colonists was based on the idea of carrying the word to the heathens. And remember, these are just justifications for the things that they really wanted, which was wealth and the control over people, right? And so all the colonizers used religion at some point as a tool for their conquest.
Let's continue reading. How then could they deny freedom to a heathen who had seen the light? And someone who had seen the light was someone who accepted Jesus as their savior. That simple slave religion. And how were they to deny the freedom to the people who had converted? Just watch, because you're going to find out how. The answer, as usual, was both practical and profitable. Baptism, to quote Ballagh again, thus involved a dilemma. If conferred, it sealed the pious end of slavery, but freed the Christian slave. And this was a problem, because they were not coming there to the new world for the purpose of just converting people, right? They needed workers. They needed workers so they could get wealthy.
Let's continue. On the contrary, if enfranchisement was a possible result, Christianization was certain to be [ __ ] or completely stopped. The wisdom and the conscience of colonial assemblies were equal to the emergency. They held both to their justification and to their slaves. Their justification was their religion, and their slave was the Negro. And they held on to both of them. But how? The Virginia assembly, in a law of 1667, presents but a typical example of a general colonial action. It settled the question by the naive declaration, worthy of the metaphysician, that "rightly separates the spiritual person from bodily form, baptism does not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedom." Meaning that becoming a Christian didn't free someone from being a slave. This was the concern that many of the masters had during this time, who didn't want to Christianize their slaves, right? Due to the fear that this Christianization would cause many of them to have a free status or be eligible to be free. And the courts declared that this did not free anyone. And here's the rest of the quote from the courts: "In order that diverse masters, freed from this doubt, may more carefully endeavor the propagation of Christianity." Meaning that they could allow their slaves to be converted, and they would not have to worry and have doubts that they would become free.
Here we go. That settled that. But it did not settle the legal question on who could be enslaved. And in 1670, the Virginia legislature spoke again on the subject, saying, "All servants not being Christian, imported into this country by shipping, shall be slaves for life." Whether by design or by accident. This law accepted blacks who had been baptized in Africa, Europe, or the West Indies, or other colonies. So that law basically included anyone who wasn't Christian. It wasn't very narrow, and it wasn't very specific. So some blacks who were previously Christians, they could use this as a loophole. But watch this. But this loophole was eliminated in the Act of 1682, which declared that "all servants except Turks and Moors, which shall be brought or imported into this country either by sea or land, whether Negroes, mulattoes, or Indians, who and whose parentage and native country are not Christian at the time of their first purchase of such servant by some Christian, although afterwards and before such their importation." And so, if any one of them were captured and then sold into the hand of the English on American soil, then this is what happened: "They shall be converted to the Christian faith." Meaning white Jesus is going to be implanted into their minds. And then this happens: "Afterwards, shall be judged, deemed, and taken to be slaves." And they went into slavery still. And this Jesus that they had got people to worship wasn't going to do anything whatsoever to save them from that situation. And the colonists clearly understood that, right? That Jesus may have given the enslaved a little bit of hope while they were down in the pit, but that was about it, right? Jesus is not coming back to save anybody, right? At least not the Jesus that they're talking about and interpreting in that way. It's not happening. And we're going to talk about that in other videos. But for now, let's continue reading.
In plain English, this meant that all Jews, Asians, and Africans, except Turks and Moors, were subject to slavery in Virginia. It meant also that Virginia was embarking on the process, completed in the 18th century, of basing slavery on race rather than religion. And so they were switching up the game because they had a new target in mind. That target is called the Negro. They had their eyes fixated on the Negro as a mill ticket to financial freedom.
Here we go. The Virginia legislature finally said that a Negro was anyone with one Negro grandparent. And who were the ones who were creating these definitions? It was the Virginia lawmakers, the elite, the great planters, right? The governors, the ones that were in positions of power. They were the ones who were defining what a Negro was, right? But guess who was not involved in this process of creating these definitions? Negroes, right? This is going into the creation of a Negro and how they redefined the Negro on multiple occasions. And the Negro had no involvement in it, right? The one-drop rule and all these types of things, these are their ideas, right? Coming from their mind. And guess who today is the number one promoter of this type of thinking? Negroes, right? They have bought into many of these colonial ideas without knowing why they were created, right? Right. You'll never hear me walking around today calling myself a black person or a Negro, right? Like I said, these are the things that are coming from these people's minds, and they're meant to destroy, and don't have anything to do with me.
Let's continue reading. In this manner, Virginia and America crossed a great divide, a divide that requires some elaboration. For what was involved here was the idea of racism, which is not an individual idea or peculiarity, but an institutionalized ideology that commits the institution of a society to the destruction of a people because of race, and eventually leads the most targeted people, Negroes in this case, as becoming full participants in their own destruction as well, right? That's part of the system.
Let's continue. The idea developed by Virginians and Americans was simple and profitable. The idea was that all whites were biologically superior to all blacks, who were infidels and heathens, a dangerous and accursed people who embodied an evil principle that made them dangerous to the morals and politics of the community. And that's the idea that they took from their imagination and made into a reality into the eyes of the society, right? When people look out in society, that's how they interpret their reality. And this is including black people, who began to believe in this idea of their own inferiority, just like Dr. E. Franklin Frazier said in his book.
Let's continue reading. The truth or falsity of this idea disturbed few men then or now. The only thing that mattered was that this idea, or something like it, was necessary to justify past, present, and future aggression against blacks. With the institutionalization of this idea, the structure of slavery was almost complete. There remained only the fourth phase, a phase that continued for 200 years and involved the destruction of the legal personality of the slave. The first step in this direction was the declaration that the slave was the property of the master. And such, the slave could not hold property, or engage in trade or commerce, nor could the slave, as a piece of property, move without the express consent of his master. He could not leave the plantation without a pass. He could not gather in large groups. He could not commit himself to a marriage vow. More ominously, he could not even defend himself.
And this is going into the creation of black people, right? Or the shaping of Black America, which first started out as an idea in the mind of these colonizers, right? Who then created an environment for this idea to manifest. And in their minds, a black person was a piece of personal property, something that was to be owned and used, right? And a permanent member of the pits of society. But here we go. In the words of the codes, he was in the condition of a natural person in which, by the operation of law, the application of his physical and mental powers depended upon the will of another. Meaning that Negroes were not supposed to think and move based on their own will, right? And their own desires. And that someone else was supposed to do that for them. This was the creation of the Negro consciousness. Understand.
Let's continue reading. By these words and acts, in these stages, the masters of colonial America committed themselves in America to the institution of human slavery. Having made that decision, the masters had to make another decision, for neither the master nor the servants had been prepared for the new script of roles. In the statutes, nature does not create masters or slaves, nor does it create blacks or whites. And that's right, because humans do that. In order to make masters and slaves, in order to make blacks and whites, it is necessary to kill them. It is necessary to separate them by rivers of blood. But terror alone is not enough. One must condition the mind, and the eye, and the heart. And the conditioning of one generation must be repeated in the next generation, and on and on, ad infinitum. The men who ran colonial America did not shrink from these exercises. And he's right, because they knew it was a big job, but they also knew that it was a big job that was worth doing, which is why they used so much mental power in constructing the society the way that they did.
Here we go. Moving swiftly and ruthlessly, they began in the middle of the 17th century to separate blacks and whites and to create a race problem in America. Most historians avoid the subject by positioning a natural or cultural bias in the European psyche. But this maneuver fails to explain why this natural or cultural bias manifested itself in one way in 1619 and another way in 1819, or why it developed in one way in Maryland, another way in Massachusetts, and a third way in Brazil. Nor is it possible from the traditional standpoint to explain why laws against blacks became progressively worse and differed significantly in different demographic and economic situations from time to time. Some historians admit, in so many words, that the traditional view is untenable. Stanley Elkins, for example, who has advanced a fanciful theory of slavery, said that the interests of white servants and blacks were systematically driven apart. After reading the same evidence, the Handlins said that the emerging difference in treatment of blacks and whites was calculated to create a real division of interest between Negroes on the one hand and whites on the other. No one reading the evidence can doubt this. Nor can it be doubted that blacks and whites had to be taught the meaning of blackness and whiteness. And blackness obviously meant all the things that were bad, and whiteness meant the opposite, right? Everything that was good. And you have to rise above this so you don't find yourself continuously stuck in this polarity.
Here we go. This is not to deny differences in color and hair formation, etc. It is only to say that perceptions had to be organized to recognize the differences, and that men had to be organized to take advantage of them. The so-called differences were not the cause of racism. On the contrary, men seized on the differences and interpreted them in a certain way in order to create racism. And which men did this? The people in the position of power, the ones that are sitting back and have all the time to do all the thinking, right? They're the ones who seize upon these differences for their own self-interest, right? And today, people are still caught up playing this very game that these people created, right?
Let's continue. Not only did they exploit differences, but they also created differences and preserved them by force and violence. The differences, in other words, were rationalizations and excuses, not the cause of racism. Once established, however, the ideology of rationalizations assumed calamitous autonomy and influenced the interests from which they derived. Who is responsible for this policy? The white founding fathers, the Birches, the Mathers, the Winthrops, the Jeffersons, the Washingtons, the heroes of all the Fourth of Julys. They divided blacks and whites. They sold the seeds of division and hate and blood in an attempt to evade the implication of this fact. Some men blame the English or colonial public opinion. But colonial public opinion was the public opinion of the planter merchant aristocracy, or the elite class, right? That's what the aristocracy is. As T.J. Wen Baker, Philip A. Bruce, James Hugo Johnson, and scores of other scholars have pointed out, the colonies were run by a closed set of men who monopolized political, ecclesiastical, and economic power. The system of life built up in the agricultural colonies, James Hugo Johnson writes, resulted in planter control. And the planters are the ones who own the plantations, right? They were the ones who were running the society. Both social and governmental institutions were devices wrought by the planters or tools used by the planters. The system of Negro slavery may have been thrust upon them by England, but the problems arising from it were first of all the planters' problems. And on the governing class is the responsibility for the system of slave institutions worked out in the colonies. There is a cooperation on this point from another authority, Philip A. Bruce, who says that "the whole power of the Virginia Society, even in the times when universal suffrage prevailed, was directed by the landowners. That society was composed entirely of the landed proprietors and their dependents. The public sentiment was exclusively the sentiment of men who, like the landowners of England, looked to agriculture for the income which went to the support of their families, and whose only material interests were those associated directly with the soil." Not only did the planters have the power, they also had vested interest in black exploitation. It was on their plantations that the new system of black servitude was tried out for the first time. And by midcentury, as Elkins noted, blacks had accumulated in large enough parcels in the hands of the colony's big planters to develop in those men a vested interest in the new system. The advantages of slave labor, Wen Burrer says, were manifest to the planters of the type of William Byrd, who was one of the people using their government position to allocate thousands of acres to himself, or William Fitzhugh, men who had built up fortunes by their business ability. It is but natural that they should have turned early from the indentured servants to stock their plantations with the cheaper and rarer African workers. Herbert S. Clan adds, "The Virginia planter, in his drive for a more economic system of labor, was the first to reduce the Negro to the status of a servant for life." But the judiciary and legislature, which were uniquely representative of and in fact entirely composed of the members of the planter class, were not far behind in taking cognizance of this growing customary law governing the Negro's condition, and they early gave recognition to this whole body of practice. In the face of these testimonies, one can hardly escape the impression that it was the big planters and their allies who reduced the vulnerable and powerless black servants to slavery and enacted legislation that committed every white person in every white institution to support of the new order.
How was this all done? That's what we're going to find out on part two in the next video, right? How they got the poor European servants to buy into this idea of whiteness, right? And how they used them as the pawns in the game to help foster in the destruction of the Negro, right? And help pull the Negro consciousness down into the pit. But until then, I want to thank you for watching all the way into the end. And, um, I'm going to see you on part two. So, my name is Brooklyn St. Michael, and I'll see you in the free world.