According to Professor Artinian in his class Politics of Revolution, the reason America’s racial tension remains so much more dramatically delineated than other countries is because it was crafted and instituted deliberately by the political and economic elite. Since it is not a naturally social phenomenon, our evolving society can’t be assumed to naturally “outgrow” racial differences. He claims that the terms “black” and “white” (as opposed to African and European) only entered public consciousness when the post-Revolutionary War politically powerful tried to fragment the body of poor farmers in Shea’s Rebellion.
They succeeded, and the American poor remains differentiated between the two races (where the Latino and Asian minorities fall is a matter of debate) to this day.
In many ways, Artinian’s theory runs parallel to much of what Foote and Harris have to say regarding the alienation of the African slaves from the developing American society. In essence, the alienation of the African presence in the Americas stemmed from economic sources cloaked in words of religion and superiority(eventually, that justification would be found in the pseudo-science of eugenics).
However, Harris points out in “In the Shadow of Slavery” the recurring attempts of the indentured white laborers and slave owners themselves to underscore differences between themselves and the slaves, for the same economic reasons. Firstly, as was and is the tendency of the white American laborer, many workers felt threatened by the growing presence of cheaper and longer-lived labor. Secondly, and in this he makes his most interesting point, since Manhattan had an overabundancy of slaves which lead to a lack of indentured servants, the whites who lived and owned in Manhattan were largely of a consistently free lifestyle and thus they had zero point of identification with the African slaves. Thus, New York City’s alienation of the African slave class was both deliberate on the part of the laborers and almost circumstantial on the part of the owners.
In general, Foote and Harris point out the prejudices as seemingly necessary to the development of New Amsterdam. Indeed, economists-come-historians have (according again to Professor Artinian) attempted to calculate the total profits/unpaid wages of the slave labor in the Americas and the results have been staggering. As a capitalist profit-making plan, slavery does seem to be the perfect angle. And yet, the clergy had to step in to justify first “enslaving the heathens” (Harris) and later claiming they were too beastly for Christianity, while the politicians claimed the African slaves were dangerous and rebellious inherently. To be sure, as Harris points out, because rebellion is a chief indicator of unhappiness and poor living conditions.
What I find odd is that in grade school, I was taught that when the Europeans began trading African slaves, they found a unsophisticated civilization and warring clans and that led them to assume inferiority of race. However, the judicial, political, and economic maneuvering of those “in-the-know” presented by Harris and Foote indicates that a lot of the inferiority platform was built post-facto by those benefiting by the forced enslavement of an entire race. (A truth upheld by the enslavement of free “Spanish Negroes” on captured ships.)
