Racism's Roots and Branches

by Barbara Ransby

Barbara Ransby is a historian, author, and longtime activist. She is the author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement and Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century, a co-founder of the Black Radical Congress in 1998, editor of the journal Souls, and a professor and director of the Social Justice Initiative at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Racism and white supremacy, like everything else, have a history. As ideological frameworks, they have evolved and morphed over time. But we often lose sight of the origins of racism in what is now the United States. In British North American colonies in the 1600s, before the American revolution, settler elites began to differentiate white indentured servants from enslaved people descended from Africa. A subjugated class of workers became essential to the economic system that grew around the Southern plantation.

The foundational crimes of U.S. racial capitalism were the theft of Black labor and indigenous land, and the captivity and genocide that followed. American planters, bankers, and traders became rich on the backs of unpaid Black workers and on land violently stolen from people who were already here. All of these heinous acts of dispossession relied on the ideology of white supremacy and racism. The savagery and inferiority of non-Christian heathens, and later the notion of innate racial difference, were the justification for taking land and bodies and all the political and economic hierarchies put in place thereafter—hierarchies that have endured over 400 years. What we now call the white working class was formed not as a raceless class, but as non-Blacks, distinct from the status of unfree laborers. (These processes of U.S. class formation have been documented by W.E.B. Du Bois, David Roediger, and many other historians.)

Racism is not absolute. And as Barbara J. Fields has argued, attitudes “are promiscuous critters,” meaning there are vast inconsistencies inside of racist narratives, stereotypes, and cultural framings. The most important point about the origins of American racism, however, is that it is structural, systemic, and deep-rooted. It is not based on any scientific or fundamental natural differences among humans; there is indeed human variation, but racialization and racism were meanings imposed on those differences, not something that emerged organically. Moreover, racism in the United States is not mainly about attitudes and individual bias but about divisions that were forged long ago by the super-exploitation and political dispossession of people of African descent and other racialized groups, to the benefit of white capitalists.

U.S. democracy was conceived of not as a democracy for all, but a democracy for propertied white men, to the exclusion and at the expense of others. The Three-Fifths Clause, which deemed enslaved Black people as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation in Congress for the slaveholding class, was baked into the Constitution, co-existing alongside flowery language about liberty and freedom. From the very beginning, those principles were exclusionary. The 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision reaffirmed these distinctions. The court deemed Blacks “inferior” and “unfit”; they “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Even though Dred Scott was later overturned, its imprint remained. The national origin story was a white national story, steeped in racism and inflected by class. And even after chattel slavery and native massacres ended, the Jim Crow system of racial oppression and dispossession, alongside the racist politics of immigrant exclusion, harassment, violence, and exploitation, continued to shape the United States.

Read entire article at Dissent