Uprooting Racism and Racists in the United States
Reading by James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs
This essay on the relationship between racism and capitalism is by the Detroit based activist couple, Chinese American Grace Lee Boggs (1915–2015) and African American James Boggs (1919–1993). In addition to reading the essay, we recommend learning more about the Boggs’ decades of organizing and their intellectual impact on the Civil Rights Movement.
The first thing we have to understand is that racism is not a “mental quirk” or a “psychological flaw” on an individual’s part. Racism is the systematized oppression by one race of another. In other words, it is the various forms of oppression within every sphere of social relations — economic exploitation, military subjugation, political subordination, cultural devaluation, psychological violation, sexual degradation, verbal abuse, etc. — that together make up the interacting and developing processes that operate so normally and naturally, and that are so much a part of the existing institutions of the society, that the individuals involved are barely conscious of their operation. As Frantz Fanon says, “The racist in a culture with racism is therefore normal.”
People march near the United States Capitol in 1946 to protest the lynching of four African Americans in Georgia. Associated Press, Library of Congress, 97519566.
This kind of systematic oppression of one race by another was unknown to mankind in the thousands of years of recorded history before the emergence of capitalism 400 years ago — although racial prejudice was not unknown. For example, some Chinese in the third century B.C. considered yellow-haired, green-eyed people in a distant province to be barbarians. In ancient Egypt, the ruling group, which at different times was red or yellow or Black or white, usually regarded the others as inferior.
Slave oppression had also existed in earlier times, but this was usually based on military conquest. For instance, the ancient Greeks and Romans did not develop a theory of racial superiority to rationalize their right to exploit their slaves.
Just as humankind, prior to the rise of capitalism, had not previously experienced an economic system that naturally and normally pursues the expansion of material productive forces at the expense of human forces, so it had never known a society that naturally and normally pursues the systematic exploitation and dehumanization of one race of people by another. An organic link between capitalism and racism is therefore certainly suggested.
The parallel between the rise of capitalism and the rise of racism has been traced by a number of scholars. Their research revealed that the Portuguese, who were the first Europeans to come into contact with Africans at the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th centuries, treated the Africans as natural friends and allies. They found African customs strange and exotic, but also found much to admire in their social and political organization, craftsmanship, architecture, and so on.
At this point the chief technological advantages enjoyed by the Europeans were their navigation skills and firepower, which were both, by the way, originally learned from the Chinese. In the next four centuries these two advantages would be used to plunder four continents of their wealth in minerals and people, and thereby, to increase the technological superiority of Europeans by leaps and bounds. Africa was turned into a hunting ground for people to enslave to work the land of the West Indies and the Southern colonies that had been stolen from the Indians.
As the slave trade expanded, its enormous profits concentrated capital in Europe and America for the expansion of commerce, industry, and invention, while in Africa the social fabric was torn apart. In the Americas, the blood and sweat of enslaved Africans produced the sugar, tobacco, and later, cotton, to feed the refineries, distilleries, and textile mills, first of Western Europe and then of the Northern United States.
The more instrumental the slave trade in destroying African culture, the more those involved directly and indirectly in the traffic of enslaved people tried to convince themselves and others that there had never been any African culture in the first place. The more brutal the methods needed to enforce slavery against rebellious Africans, the more the brutalizers insisted that the submissiveness of slavery was the natural state of Black people.
The more valuable the labor of Black people to Southern agriculture, precisely because of the relatively advanced stage of agriculture in their African homeland, the more white Americans began to insist that they had done the African savage a favor by bringing him to a land where he could be civilized by agricultural labor. Thus, step by step, in order to justify their mutually reinforcing economic exploitation and forceful subjugation of Blacks, living, breathing white Americans created a scientifically cloaked theory of white superiority and Black inferiority.
In order to understand the ease with which racism entrenched itself in Europe and North America, it is important to emphasize that not only the big merchants, manufacturers, and ship owners benefited from the slave trade and slavery. All kinds of little people on both sides of the Atlantic drew blood money directly from the slave traffic. Thus, “though a large part of the Liverpool [England] slave traffic was monopolized by about ten large firms, many of the small vessels in the trade were fitted out by attorneys, drapers, grocers, barbers, and tailors. The shares in the ventures were subdivided, one having one-eighth, another one-fifteenth, a third one-thirty-second part of a share and so on…al- most every order of people [was] interested in a Guinea cargo.”
The middle classes benefited indirectly from the general economic prosperity created by the trade of enslaved people. “Every port to which the slave ships returned saw the rise of manufactures in the 18th century — refineries, cottons, dyeworks, sweetmaking — in increasing numbers that testified to the advance of business and industry.” In the expanding economy the shopkeeper found a grow- ing number of customers for his goods, the farmer for his produce, the doctor and lawyer for their skills.
To white workers at the very bottom of white society, African slavery also brought substantial benefits. First, the expanding industry made possible by the profits of slave trafficking created jobs at an expanding rate. Second, in the Americas, particularly, white indentured servants were able to escape from the dehumanization of plantation servitude only because of the seemingly inexhaustible supply of enslaved Africans to take their place.
Contrary to racist mythology, Black people did not thrive any better in the rice swamps and on the sugar and cotton plantations than whites. Nor were Blacks treated significantly worse than white indentured servants in the early days of colonial settlement when convicts and poor whites, kidnapped off the wharfs of Liverpool and London, had been crowded into dirty transatlantic ships en route to Southern plantations to work as white indentured servants. These whites had been bracketed with Blacks and treated as “white trash.” But they had one advantage denied Blacks: They were of the same color as their masters.
Therefore, when their contracts expired or they were able to escape, they could not be easily detected, and, because there were Black people to take their place, the enslavers did not put out the great effort that would have been needed to capture them. Thus, the ex-indentured servant climbed into the free society as farmer or worker on the backs of enslaved Black people.
It is only when we understand this immediate economic and social stake that not only the enslavers and the capitalist entrepreneurs, but the entire white population — including doctors, lawyers, bakers, candlestick makers (but not, of course, the Indians whose lands were taken for the plantations and farms) — had in the enslavement of Black people that we can understand the realities of racism in this country.
Racism was real because there were real people with a stake in racism — racists — and these real people were ready to resort to force to protect their stake. As Eugene Genovese has pointed out, Black people were often safer on the slave plantation than off it because of the hostile, armed, non-slaveholding whites.
Radical historians have tended to underplay these realities, pointing out how, in the final analysis, slavery impoverished the soil, drove the free farmers farther west, kept down the wages of white workers, etc.
This is because these historians, usually white, have begun their analysis with the plight of white workers in the process of capitalist production and then have tried to fit the grievances and revolt of Black people into this theoretical framework. Hence, they have failed to prepare us for the surfacing of white racist workers. Also, addressing themselves chiefly to white workers and trying to convince these workers of the need to destroy capitalism, they have insisted that Black and white workers are “really” (i.e., according to their theory) allies, kept apart only by a vertical color line which the evil slave owners and capitalists have conspired to draw down the middle between them.
The historical fact is that without African slavery the class struggle between capitalists and workers could not even have been joined in the first place. For the capitalist, it served the functions of primitive accumulation. That is, it provided both the initial capital and the labor force freed from the means of production that is a prerequisite for the process of capitalist accumulation inside the factory.
For the individual white indentured servant or laborer, African slavery meant the opportunity to rise above the status of slave and become a farmer or free laborer. Thus, early in the history of this country a pattern was created that persists to this day: physical and social mobility for white workers into and within increasingly modernized industries, possible only because there is a reserve army of Black labor to scavenge the dirty, unskilled jobs in the fields and sweatshops.
Instead of the vertical color line dreamed up by white radicals, there has actually existed a horizontal platform resting on the backs of Black people and holding them down, while on top white workers have been free to move up the social and economic ladder of advancing capitalism. This horizontal platform, a ceiling for Black people and a floor for white people, has created and maintained a Black labor force serving the economic needs of advancing capitalism. ■
Note that some language is updated. For example, most references to “slave” were changed to “enslaved” and “Blacks” to “Black people.”
© 1970 James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs. Reprinted with permission from James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs, “Uprooting Racism and Racists in the United States,” Rereading America (St. Martin’s Press, 1989).