Transcription
In the last video, we talked about why the colonial elites on American soil decided to destroy blacks and to use them as permanent slaves. And if you haven't watched that video, then be sure to watch that video before you watch this video because this is part two where we're going to go into how they set up a system to drag the Negro down into the pit by using the tools of institutions and their pawns in the game called white people, right? And to do that, we're going to read from this book here. It's called The Shaping of Black America by historian Lon Bennett Jr.
And so, what we're going to do is turn in here to page 71 where it says, "How was this all done?" That's the question that we finished with at the end of part one, and that's what we're going to go into in this video. We all want to know, how was this done? How was what done? How did they use the institutions and use white people to drag the Negro consciousness down into the dungeons, right? Where there's very little light. Let's find out.
It was done by the creation of a total system of domination. A system that penetrated every corner of colonial life and made use of every colonial institution. And so, what is a system? A system is an organized way to do something that produces a predictable or a somewhat predictable result. And systems are everywhere because what they do is they turn chaos and and confusion into order. And so, for example, there's a system of building residential homes. They make sure that the zoning is right, they buy the land, they clear and they prep the land, they buy the building permits, they install the plumbing, they uh lay the foundations, they build the structure, right? They install the electrical and the roof and so on and so forth. And I'm not too familiar with building homes, so I'm pretty sure that it's done in a more systematic way. But the point here is that they have a system or an orderly way of doing things, right? When it comes to building homes.
Likewise, the colonial elite, they had their own system. But it didn't have anything to do with building a home. Theirs had to do with a system of domination. And who were they looking to dominate? Negroes. And they used institutions and white people as the tools to do that. Here we go. Nothing was left to chance. Meaning that they didn't cut corners or take any shortcuts. They used all the tools that they could get their hands on. Watch this. The assemblies, the courts, the churches, and the press were thrown into the breach. These were the institutions that they used for their system of domination. Their goal was to dominate, right? And the laws, religion, and the press were all tools that they used to do this job.
And so, for instance, if you're a plumber and you have a job that needs to fix a leak in a pipe, what tools do you need to complete that job? You may need PVC pipe cutters, you may need some PVC primer and glue, you may need couplings, right? These are your tools that you need to complete that job. The colonial elite, they had a job to do as well. And the government, the churches, and the press were some of the tools that they needed to implement their system of domination.
Here we go. A massive propaganda campaign confused and demoralized the public, and private vigilante groups supplemented the official campaign of hate and terror. It was all done deliberately, consciously, with malice afterthought, to mold the minds of the whites, to teach them the new ideas, and to let them know who was to be loved and who was to be despised. The planter-merchant aristocracy used every instrument of persuasion and control.
And what does it mean to mold the minds of the whites? That means to change the way that they thought and get them to see things, things in a different way. And one of the new ideas that the colonial elite introduced to them was the idea of being a white person, right? And for very obvious reasons, as we'll see later on. Let's continue.
In every colony, from New York to South Carolina, the same mechanism of separation and subordination were elaborated and imposed. From New York to South Carolina, the same penalties were used to keep blacks and whites apart. The same rewards were developed to make poor whites support a system that penalized them. The same statutes were elaborated to crush and dehumanize blacks. The statutes were designed to instill a sense of superiority in whites and a sense of worthlessness in blacks. And so they created an environment to squeeze out the character trait of self-hate and inferiority in the blacks, and to squeeze out the opposite character trait of superiority in the group that they call called whites. And understand that every human has the potential to express either one of these character traits. But the elites, what they did was created an environment to squeeze these traits out for the purpose of creating two opposing people, right?
And the laws were one of the tools that they used to do this. Let's continue. They were designed to create stereotypes and invidious or harmful images. The language of these statutes, "abominable mixture," "barbarous savage," was instructive. It designated, pointed out, authorized, and it was a legal requirement in many cases for Parsons and politicians to read the language at public meetings and church services. And so the church was a means to access a large number of people on a regular basis. So it made sense for them to use this institution to indoctrinate people.
Let's keep reading. What we are concerned to emphasize here is that the laws were the heart and center of a massive public education campaign. The best evidence in favor of this point is the extraordinary letter Governor William G. wrote to the English government, which had demanded explanation of a Virginia law denying the suffrage to free blacks. Governor G wrote, now this is in 1723, where he wrote this. Here it is.
"The assembly thought it necessary not only to make the meetings of slaves very penal, but to fix a perpetual brand upon free Negroes and mulattoes by excluding them from the great privilege of a freeman, well knowing they always did and ever will adhere to and favor the slaves." And when you read the full letter, you'll see that the governor suspected that the free Negroes and the mulattoes were conspiring with the slaves to rise up against the English and to cut them off. And so this was concerning to him, right? And he decided to use the law to fix a perpetual brand upon them too, right? So they also wouldn't be able to enjoy the privileges of free people.
This is what else he said. "And tie likewise said to have been done with design, which I must think a good one, to make the free negro sensible that a distinction ought to be made between their offspring and the descendants of an Englishman, with whom they never were to be accounted equal." Now examine what he just said. He just said that this was done by design to make the free Negroes sensible, or aware, or understandable in their own mind, that there's supposed to be a difference between their offspring and the offspring of the English. And he wants them to understand and to believe this in their mind, that they were never supposed to be looked at as equal people, right? And so this is clear evidence that he knew what he was doing, right? He knew exactly what he was doing. And this is the process here that I'm talking about of finding a way and creating an atmosphere in an environment to squeeze out this inferiority complex within the Negro, right? To squeeze that thing out, every juice of it, to come out.
Now watch what else he says. "In 1723, this I confess may seem to carry an air of severity to such as are unacquainted with the nature of Negros and pride of a manumitted slave, who looks on himself immediately on his acquiring his freedom to be as good a man as the best of his neighbors, meaning the other white folks, but especially if he is descendant of a white father or mother, let them be of what mean conditions soever." And so the governor noticed that these manumitted, or these freed slaves, walked around with a sense of pride and they thought of themselves as being just as good as the other white folks. And especially if they had a white father or mother, as he said. And he didn't like this one bit, right?
Here we go. "As most of them are the bastards of some of the worst of our imported servants and convicts, it seems no ways impolitic, as well for discouraging that kind of copulation, as to preserve a decent distinction between them and their betters, to leave this mark on them until time and education has changed the indication of their spurious extraction and made some alteration in their moral." And so he was saying that the convicts and the imported servants were the worst, and those people were the ones that were getting together, and they were having some of these children with the Negroes. And he wanted to break that up, right? So he can preserve a distinction, meaning in physical uh characteristics, between the Negro and what he called their betters, or the superiors, or the whites, right? And so you can clearly see that this governor was well aware of what it was that he was doing.
Let's continue going. This is a significant document that has been too often ignored by historians. We don't have to speculate on the motives of the men who created the American race problem. They tell us clearly what they were doing and why they were doing it. And isn't that what the governor just did? Didn't he just tell us exactly what he was doing and exactly why he was doing it? And we can only imagine all of the writings that we don't have access to, and all of the um, the abundance of conversations that took place behind closed doors, right? We don't know about those. But this is what we do know. What we just read.
Here we go. They were passing laws to preserve a decent distinction between blacks and whites. They were passing laws to fix a perpetual brand upon blacks. And people think this stuff is a joke. And the people who were molding the black and white consciousness, they didn't think that this was a joke, right? They weren't laughing and giggling. They were using all of their mental resources to figure out how to set this society up and set it up in a way that benefited them, right? And separating these two people was one of the ways that they were able to do this, right?
Let's continue. They were passing laws with design to make free blacks sensible that a distinction should be made between their children and the children of Englishmen. They were passing laws to break the pride of blacks. They were passing laws to leave this mark on them. That's the mark of inferiority. Let's continue.
It can be said, by inverting this language, that the laws were also passed to leave a mark on whites who were instructed under pain of punishment how to act in relation to blacks. And so it jacked up their minds too. And in a sense, it warped their reality. And it gave a lot of them a lot of psychological issues, right? It put them out of touch with humanity, right? Walking around all day feeling high off of the feeling of superiority, right? And so they crafted the white consciousness too, which is also a consciousness that's in the pit, but it's in a different type of pit than that of the black consciousness. And so let's continue reading.
Under these laws, whites of all classes were penalized for expressing human impulses. It therefore came very expensive for a white person to like black people or to love them. The laws were quite explicit. Symptomatic of this were the laws passed to punish whites who befriended blacks or ran away with them. Masters were also disciplined. The right of the master to free a slave was curbed and finally eliminated. The master was also forbidden to teach his slaves or to permit them to gather in large assemblies. As the years went on, and as the number of slaves multiplied, the laws increased in severity and scope. And so this is the creation of the boundaries of which the blacks were allowed to function. And so these laws were putting this python-like grip on the Negro's ability to function, right? And so from within these types of constraints, black culture began to develop.
Let's continue. The first laws applied only to some blacks, primarily non-Christians. But by the middle of the 18th century, many of the laws applied to all blacks, free and slave, Christian and non-Christian, right? It didn't matter if you had Jesus or not, you're going in the pit. Let's continue.
Behind the legislator and the planter stood the writer, teacher, and priest, all intentionally coming for the Negroes and taking their consciousness all the way down into the soil, right? Let's continue. The perceptions of whites and blacks were organized and manipulated by churches, which were an integral part of the governing mechanism. In some cases, churches were directly involved in carrying out laws relating to indentured and sexual irregularities. In other cases, churches and ministers bought and sold slaves. You see that? Buying and selling slaves on Saturday, then praising the Lord and preaching from the pulpit on Sunday. And it's not as if the church is entirely bad. Neither is it entirely good. Understand, it's just a tool, right? And it depends on how people use this tool. And in this instance, they decided to use it to buy and sell slaves.
Let's keep reading. Other cases, churches led the campaign of vilification, openly identifying blacks with Ham and the Indians with the devil. And like I've said before, you can interpret the Bible to support just about anything. You can make the Negroes and the natives the uh, play the part of the devil, which has been done. You can also find verses to make the white man the devil, which has also been done, right? You can find ways to make the European the chosen people. And likewise, you can also make the natives and the blacks the chosen people, right? Which have all been done before, right? And you can find Bible verses and interpret them in particular ways to justify these things, right? And what matters is if people believe them, right? That's how they become established. And the church attendees, they believed that the Negroes were the descendant of Ham and also that the natives were dealing with the devil, right? And they acted according to those beliefs.
Let's continue reading. Equally important as an adversary was the press. The owners and the writers of many of the first American newspapers had direct or indirect interest in slavery, and their journals were in the front ranks of the white crusade. It is not all surprising, therefore, to learn that editorials and news stories accentuated antagonism in the colonies, and that advertisements for black runaways were to the first American newspapers what advertisements for deodorant and detergent are to the electronic media of the '70s. Because this book was written in the 1970s, that's why he's making this reference here.
Here we go. The Boston Newsletter, the first permanent American newspaper, published slave advertisements almost from the first edition. And so the press had their hands in the cookie jar as well. And I can imagine that this was something that a lot of people absolutely loved to read during that time, and it was something that the press also absolutely loved to capitalize on.
Let's continue. The whole system of separation and subordination rested on official state terror. The exigencies of the situation required men to kill some white people to keep them white, and to kill many blacks to keep them black. And to keep them white, meaning remaining in a state of feeling superior, right? Very pompous, lifted up high. And to keep them black, means the opposite, all the way down, very low, in a state of feeling inferior, right? He's referring to a status here, and not just a name. So understand.
Here we go. In the North and South, men and women were maimed, tortured, and murdered in a comprehensive campaign of mass conditioning. The severed heads of black and white rebels were impaled on poles along the roads as warnings to black people and white people. And opponents of the status quo were starved to death in chains and roasted slowly over open fires. And so this is how far people were willing to go to keep people with a black and white consciousness, right? And the sight of a severed head, that'll make just about anyone think twice about continuing to rebel.
Here we go. Some rebels were branded, others were castrated. This exemplary cruelty, which was carried out as a deliberate process of mass education, was an inherent part of the new system. And remember, in the beginning, he talked about creating this system of domination. This here is part of that system, system, which is the molding of people's minds and to get them to willingly accept and to participate in the system.
Let's continue. The thrust behind the drive for separation and subordination was overwhelming. Separation paid and was paid for. And before long, slavery and the slave trade were the twin fountains of the economic system of New England and the southern colonies. The phenomenal growth of the slave trade, the development of the plantation system, the expanding drive against Indian land, all these factors created iron bands of interest that compelled every colonial institution to support the politics of division.
Despite this fact, there was widespread opposition to the new order in the white community, particularly among poor whites, many of whom were still indentured servants or former indentured servants. What is amazing here and worthy of detailed examination is that so many whites openly defied or scorned the new laws and conspired with blacks to evade them. How explain this? The explanation is simple. Whites, in general, had not been prepared for the new departure. In the words of one white historian, "opinion had not hardened sufficiently against black people," meaning that their minds had not been properly molded or conditioned enough for them to believe and then act in accordance with these laws and with this new system. And so the mind has to be conditioned over time, right? To take on these radically new beliefs and radically new views. And what he's saying is that many of the poor uh whites, they weren't ready to do this yet.
Here we go. In the words of another, meaning another white historian, "many whites had not learned to hold the attitude toward the Negro that the new script demanded." In addition to these purely passive considerations, there were positive and active links between blacks and white indentured servants who continued to run away together and to conspire together. A point of considerable importance here is that slavery did not immediately displace white servitude. For more than 100 years, the two systems existed side by side, mutually influencing one another. For almost as long a period, the white servant and the black slave continued to interact, threatening the stability of this dual system, system of servitude. And guess who was paying attention to this white and black interaction while it was happening? You guessed it. The colonial elite, who had all the time to sit back and think, and they had the tool of law at their disposal.
Watch this. In order to preserve domestic tranquility, the leading groups in the colonies made it a matter of public policy to destroy the solidarity of the laborers. Laws were passed requiring different groups to keep to themselves, and the seeds of dissension were artfully and systematically sown. And here's a sample of how they did it. Watch this. Indians were offered bounties for betraying black runaways. Blacks were given minor rewards for fighting Indians. And poor whites were used as fodder in the disciplining of both reds and blacks. At the same time, masters used Draconian measures to stop the mingling and mating of blacks and white women. From the last quarter of the 17th century (1600s) to the end of the 18th century (1700s), policymakers legislated against these practices. And why did they need to make policies against these practices? Because that's what people were doing at that time, right? They were mingling and they were mating, which the colonial rulers clearly understood to be a hindrance and in the way of the society that they were creating and crafting. And so this is what happened in the process.
White women were whipped, banished, and enslaved to keep them from marrying black men. And a few lashes will quickly stop a lot of people from doing a lot of things. We're not talking about going out there grabbing a switch off the tree to give somebody a whooping. A lash from the whip, that'll make someone start pondering the meaning of life, right? And wondering if life is really worth living, right? And so I bet uh, the whip corrected a lot of people's behavior back then. Let's continue reading.
The increasing number of mulattos through intermarriage and illicit relationships, Lorenzo J. Green writes, "soon caused alarm among Puritan advocates of racial purity and white domination." Sensing a deterioration of slavery if the barriers between master and slaves were dissolved in the equalitarian crucible of sexual intimacy, they sought to stop racial crossing by statute. And so here they go, right? To the laws. They do this every time. Mold the society and then make it shape in the way that benefits the elite. And so understand, laws are great when they're intended to benefit the whole society, but that's entirely different from what these people were doing, which was using the laws to benefit their own interest.
Let's continue. In this instance, as in so many others, it was necessary to teach whites the value of whiteness. Here we go. Under the ground rules of the time, a master could virtually enslave a white woman who married a black man, and could hold in extended servitude all the issue of such marriage. And the issue, meaning all the children of that marriage, they could be held in servitude. In this situation, as might have been expected, Puritan greed triumphed over Puritan morals. And many masters encouraged or forced white women to marry black men. It finally became necessary to pass laws penalizing masters for forcing white women to marry black men.
The Maryland law of 1681 said, "For as much as diverse Freeborn English or white women sometimes by the instigation, procurement, or connivance of their masters, mistresses or dames, and always ways to the satisfaction of their lascivious and lustful desires, and to the disgrace not only of the English, but also of many other Christian nations, do intermarry with Negroes and slaves, by which means diverse inconveniences, controversies and suits may arise. For the prevention whereof for the future, be it enacted that if the marriage of any woman servant with any slave shall take place by procurement or permission of the master, such woman and her issue shall be free." And so this is when Maryland first used the term "white" in their law, as they're constructing the white identity and moving towards that, and uh, more away from the English identity. And so this law was to remove the incentive uh from the master, right? And so the master would no longer receive the benefit of uh placing the child or the children from this union in servitude, right? And so if this incentive was to be removed, the idea was that the master would no longer have a good reason to create these types of unions, right? So let's continue.
Neither statute law nor terror stopped intermarriage and interracial dating, which continued for more than a century. The minutes of the Council of Virginia, May 11th, 1699, contained the petition of George Ivy and others for the repeal of the act of the assembly against English people marrying with Negroes, Indians, or mulattos. In the 1690s and the decades that followed, the central task of the masters was changing and distorting the perception of George Ivy and men and women who shared his view. This was done slowly, methodically, and painfully. It was done with the carrot and the stick. It was done by enticing some with promises and browbeating others into submission by threats and blows. We have already dealt with at some length with the methodology of the stick, and we should note that the carrot was also a powerful and persuasive weapon.
One expression of this was the new state policy of favoring poor white servants, who were systematically given preference over were blacks and Indians. In the last decades of the 17th century (1600s) and the first decades of the 18th (1700s), the laws became increasingly liberal toward white servants, and special efforts were made to accentuate the differences between blacks and whites. As the number of blacks increased, the heavy labor was shifted to blacks. Whites were employed as overseers of the slave population, and sympathetic attention was given to the petition of white artisans. At the end of the 17th century, white workers in New York filed a complaint alleging that black labor had so much impoverished them that they cannot by their labors get a competency for the maintenance of themselves and families. Similar petitions were filed in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and other colonies.
Responding to these fears, the South Carolina assembly voted in 1743 that "no slaves that shall hereafter be brought up to any mechanic trades shall be suffered to be hired out or to work for any other than their own masters." You see that? The elite were systematically chopping down the blacks and they were giving this uh preferential treatment to the poor whites and they were catering to their needs. And for what reason? Because they wanted to eliminate any potential reason that the poor whites would have to unite with these blacks, right? And to ruin the system.
Here we go. A corollary of the strategy of the carrot was the creation of the common white front, which are the pawns in the game. They're on the front line. And if you play chess, you're going to see that there's way more pawns than any other pieces, and they're positioned in the front. Those are the poor whites who were used as the frontline protectors to keep the system going of keeping the blacks down, right? At this time, most of them weren't aligned anymore with the blacks. Their minds had been converted, right? By the elites. This is part of the game.
Now watch this. The planters needed the silence and or support of the poor whites. To get the support, they manipulated symbols and sanctions in such ways as to persuade poor whites to identify with masters instead of their fellow workers. And so they made them believe that they were on the same team as the ruling class, but they didn't understand that they were pawns in the game.
Here we go. The designation of poor whites as a buffer class, class, was a particular expression of this general policy. And what's the buffer class? That's the middleman. And Theodore Allen talks about it in his books, The Invention of the White Race, Volume One and Two. And Allen was very familiar with this book that we're reading right here, because in Volume One, he credits uh, Lon Bennett Jr. as the only historian that was, or at least at that time, that was able to put the pieces together, right? In Allen's work, he builds on many of these principles that we're talking about in here that were laid out by Lon Bennett Jr. But Allen just goes deeper on the subject, right? So we're talking about right now, the poor whites uh, being designated as the buffer class.
Let's continue. In some colonies, deficiency acts were passed to increase the number of poor whites. These acts usually offered bounties to encourage white immigrants and required planters to employ a certain number of poor whites. A 1698 law of South Carolina offered the captains of ships 13 pounds for each white servant imported and required every owner of six black slaves to buy one white servant. This and similar acts said frankly that poor whites were needed not only for labor, but also for protection, right? That's that buffer class, the middleman.
Let's keep reading. In 1711, a South Carolina governor asked the house of assembly to import whites at public expense. He went on to say that the house should consider the large quantities of negroes that are daily brought into this government and the small number of whites that come amongst us, and how many are lately dead or gone off, how insolent and mischievous the negroes are become, and to consider the Negro Act does not reach up to some of the crimes they have lately been guilty of. As this language makes clear, poor whites were deliberately used to ensure the social system against black rebellion. In the words of Abbot Emerson Smith, "poor whites were viewed as a defense against negro menace." A revealing example of this was a South Carolina act for the better securing of this province from negro insurrection and encouraging of poor people by employing them in plantations.
This was, to a great extent, a ruse or a deceiving trick of the planters who bought the cooperation of poor whites by throwing them crumbs from the table. But many, perhaps most, poor whites had neither the space nor consciousness to look gift horses in the mouth. And so many accepted the bait, never noticing, perhaps not even caring, that it was bait, and that it covered a sharp steel hook. And what was the bait? It was whiteness, and thinking that they were on the same team as these colonial rulers.
Let's continue. One of the byproducts of this was that most poor whites were persuaded that they had a stake in the system, and that it was working to their advantage. Steadily and inescapably, a new rhythm was imposed on them. And by the middle of the 18th century, a solid white front was developing. A curious and crucial point here is that concerted action by blacks and whites virtually ceased after the creation of the white front. What is even more interesting is that white revolt against the system almost disappeared. Is because they became comfortable and content. Significantly, Winthrop Jordan said, "The only rebellions by white servants in the continental colonies came before the firm entrenchment of slavery."
The impact of all of this on blacks and whites was disastrous. The development of the slave system and the systematic separation of blacks and whites created a race problem in America, divided the working force, made it impossible to create a single American community, and laid the foundations for an anti-democratic, hierarchical police state, tout with tensions and fears. With the creation of this system, the number of African slaves increased dramatically. On the eve of the Revolution, blacks constituted 60% of the population of South Carolina, 40% of the population of Virginia, and 30% of the population of Maryland. By the first census, there were 750,000 blacks in America, 19.3% of the population.
As it turned out, the emerging slave system had an immediate and disastrous impact on poor whites. Unable to compete with large planters, poor whites retreated to the marginal land in the hills where they eke out a hand-to-mouth existence. To the untutted mind of the poor whites, it seemed that blacks were the cause of their misery. They therefore began to hate black people with a passion. Notice the emphasis in the following passage from the conservative historian T.J. Warden Baker. "While not destroying entirely the little farmer class, it slavery exerted a baneful influence upon it, driving many families out of the colony, making the rich man richer, reducing the poor man to dire poverty. Against this unfortunate development, the Virginia yeoman was helpless. Instinctively, he must have felt the slave was his enemy." And the hatred and rivalry which even today exists between Negro and the lowest class of whites, the so-called poor white trash, dates back to the 17th century. The poor white was wrong. Slavery, not the slave, was his enemy. But it would take time and blood to see this.
It was in this crucible that the white identity in America was forged. American whites developed a sense of personality and nationality in response to the presence of blacks and Indians. They were not black, they were not red, they were white. Black and red, as Jordan has pointed out, rapidly came to serve as two fixed points from which English settlers could triangulate their own position in America. The separate meaning of Indian and Negro helped define the meaning of living in America. What Jordan fails to mention, and what is equally supported by the evidence, is that the white sense of identity developed in response to the forged degradation of blacks.
When the Negro slave had supplanted the indentured servant upon the plantations of the colony, Wen Baker wrote, "A vast change took place in the pride of the middle class. Every white man, no matter how poor he was, no matter how degraded, could now feel a pride in his race. Around him on all sides were those whom he felt to be beneath him. All this alone instilled in him a certain self-respect." And that's that high that I'm talking about, the high off of the feeling of superiority. It produces a similar effect to someone being on drugs, right? It brings people completely out of touch with reality, out of touch with humanity, and out of touch with the human family.
Let's continue. Moreover, the immediate control of Negros fell almost entirely into the hands of white men of humble means, for it was they, acting as overseers upon the large plantations, that directed their labor in the tobacco fields. This also tended to give them an arrogance that was entirely foreign to their nature in the 17th century. What this means, if it means anything, is that white character structure underwent a fundamental transformation in the crucible of slavery. As the 17th century ended and the 18th century began, white arrogance increased, and the yawning chasm opened between blacks and whites.
And so we're going to touch on this subject more in other videos, and we're going to go more into detail on the creation of the white identity and the construction of the white identity as part of this system of domination. And so this information here is very important. It's extremely important because what it does is it fills in many of the gaps that are missing in the public school system, right? The things that we never hear about. And it helps us understand why things are the way they are today, right? And it helps you find your place in the vast story, in this history of mankind, right? And so hopefully this video has given you some extra light to take one more step and find your way on the path. And I want to thank you for watching all the way into the end. My name is Brooklyn St. Michael, and I'll see you in the Free World.