Conversation Of The Week XX: Understanding And Eliminating Discrimination Against Blacks In The United States

Abstract. This paper discusses the US history of discrimination against blacks, which should be understood by students and others who are concerned with human rights and who want to participate in some form of civic engagement for the realization of these rights. The first part of this paper examines slavery, an extreme form of racial discrimination, and its repetition as involuntary servitude in earlier historical periods in the US. The second part of the paper examines recent and current severe, though not extreme, forms of racial discrimination such as residential segregation and the workfare and imprisonment imposed by the emerging US neoliberal state. The final part of the paper discusses proposals for change made more than a century ago as well as what can be learned from the planning and organization of a city in southern California.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) which was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948 proclaims in Article 1 that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” and in Article 7 that “All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law” (Blau and Moncada, 2005, pp. 35, 36). Earlier the U.S. Declaration of Independence in 1776 also contained some statements that recognized human rights as did the similar French Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 (Blau and Moncada, 2006, pp. 1-3; Hunt, 2007, pp. 15-17). But the realization of human rights has not been accomplished in many nations including the United States. Declarations express aspirations and establish common standards for achievement but they have no legally binding force until they become part of the constitutions or domestic laws and practices of individual nations.

In 1965, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations but it was only ratified by the United States in 1994. Article 1 defines racial discrimination as “any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, color, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other area of public life” (United Nations 1965, p. 2) The CERD, which as a convention rather than as a declaration is supposed to become part of U.S. law upon its ratification, has not been adequately implemented and enforced. Although an extreme form of racial discrimination against blacks was abolished in the U.S. long before the ratification of CERD, severe forms of discrimination against blacks still exist and should be eliminated. It will take our efforts individually and collectively to accomplish this.

Understanding Slavery and its Repetition in Involuntary Servitude

For sociologists, racial discrimination is behavior by one group that dehumanizes another group by oppression or domination involving slavery, isolation, rejection, segregation, or incarceration. The worst form of dehumanizing discrimination is slavery, which was quite prevalent in the United States in one extreme form or another until the middle of the twentieth century even though it was legally abolished by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1865.

Slavery in the United States was part of a much broader practice in the Americas. By 1770, the slave trade from Africa had been transporting five Africans across the Atlantic for each European immigrant to both American continents. There were black slaves in colonies from Canada and New England in the northern continent to Peru and Chile in the southern continent. West Africa as well the maritime nations in western Europe and the colonies of the Americas played roles in establishing “a market for slave-produced sugar, tobacco, coffee, chocolate, dye-stuffs, rice, hemp, and cotton” (Davis, 2006, pp. 1-2).

In the United States prior to its civil war in the early 1860s, some Native Indians, and many Blacks had been treated as chattel like horses and cows that could be bought and sold. Sometimes in the southern states, blacks were rented out for breeding purposes or for sexual exploitation in addition to their day labor on a farm or plantation. Southern states had laws that the status of children produced by sexual unions between black slave women and their free white masters would be determined by their mothers so that the children would be slaves (Horton and Horton, 2005, p. 30, 32). An example of this kind of extreme discrimination is described by Frederick Douglass who was born into slavery in 1818 in the southern state of Maryland and later escaped to New England and became an advocate of the abolition of slavery and the rights of women.

Douglass and Tocqueville on Slavery in America. In his first autobiography, Frederick Douglass reports that his mother was a black slave and his father was a white master in Maryland and that his mother was rented out to another plantation or farm when he was an infant. Douglass states that it was “a common custom” to separate slave mothers from their children at an early age. Douglass also tells us that a white master frequently is compelled to sell his own children “out of deference to the feelings of his white wife” and because “unless he does this, he must not only whip them himself, but must stand by and see one white son tie up his brother, of but a few shades darker than himself, and ply the gory lash to his naked back . .” (2003, p. 43-44).

Douglass experienced the whip himself many times but on one occasion, he fought back against a man who had rented Douglass and who had a “reputation for breaking young slaves.” On that occasion, Douglass successfully defended himself and he recalls that “It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood. It recalled the departed self-confidence, and inspired me again with a determination to be free” (2003, pp. 79, 89).

Alexis de Tocqueville, a member of the French nobility and born in 1805 after the American and French Revolutions, could have been describing the experience of Frederick Douglass in his Democracy in America. Tocqueville had traveled in the eastern United States and in the province of Quebec in Canada, from May 9, 1831 to February 20, 1832. Tocqueville learned early in his travel, in Boston, that slavery was a serious issue in the United States. Former President John Quincy Adams explained to him in fluent French at a dinner that in southern society “Whites there make up a class which has all the passions and prejudices of an aristocracy… In the South, every white man is an equally privileged being, whose destiny is to make Negroes work without working himself” (Brogan, 2006, p. 187).

Tocqueville would later write that “the white, or European, the MAN” is in a superior position and that “below him appear the Negro and the Indian. . . . Both of them occupy an inferior position in the country they inhabit; both suffer from tyranny, and if their wrongs are not the same, they originate from the same authors.” Tocqueville also suggested that “the European is to the other races of mankind what man himself is to the lower animals: he makes them subservient to his use, and when he cannot subdue he destroys them. Oppression has, at one stroke, deprived the descendants of the Africans of almost all of the privileges of humanity. The Negro of the United States has lost even the remembrance of his country; the language which his forefathers spoke is never heard around him; he abjured their religion and forgot their customs when he ceased to belong to Africa, without acquiring any claim to European privileges” (1954, p. 344).

The Core Components of Slavery. Orlando Patterson has formulated a definition of slavery that captures some of the experiences of black slaves in the United States that Douglass and Tocqueville describe. He asserts that “slavery is the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons” (1982, p. 13). Although Patterson has omitted chattel property from his definition as Davis has noted (2006, p. 30), the three core components he includes in his definition are important for understanding not only extreme racial discrimination but also the severe forms of discrimination discussed later in this paper.

The first component is the master-slave relationship, which relies upon violence in initiating and sustaining the relationship. Force has to be used to transform people who are free into slaves. This has to be done on a continuing basis because eventually all slaves have to be replaced. Patterson notes that in the southern states before the U.S. civil war, it was not necessary to forcibly acquire new slaves to replace the older ones who died out or were set free because there was a low rate of manumission and a high rate of reproduction (1982, p. 3).

In relation to the master, the slave is usually powerless. Historically this powerlessness arose as a substitute for death in war or for a capital offense or for starvation. It also could have originated because of kidnapping or piracy. Patterson asserts that “The condition of slavery did not absolve or erase the prospect of death. Slavery was not a pardon; it was, peculiarly, a conditional commutation. The execution was suspended only as long as the slave acquiesced in his powerlessness” (1982, p. 5).

The second component is the status of the slave as a “socially dead person.” He is not allowed to make claims on or have obligations to a partner in a sexual union, children, parents or other relatives. The others in his life can be separated from him at any time without his consent. The slave was genealogically isolated. Patterson states that “Alienated from all ‘rights’ or claims of birth, he ceased to belong in his own right to any legitimate social order.” Each slave experienced natal alienation, “at the very least, a secular excommunication” (1982, p. 5).
The third component of slavery is the reality that slaves are persons who have been “dishonored.” The slave has no honor because of the origin of his status, his indebtedness, his absence of any independent social relationships or support, and his lack of power (1982, p. 10). Patterson suggests that this could lead to an outward acceptance of blame and self-hatred. This is a consequence that can be arrested by an exceptional act such as that by Frederick Douglas in fighting against a person brought in to break him (1982, pp. 12-13).

“Born Free” or “Created Equal.” In 1772, a British judge ruled that an African slave who had been given the name “Somerset” and who had left his European owner in London had to be released because “the state of slavery is of such a nature” that only a parliamentary law would enable its consideration by the court and no such law exists. According to lawyers Alfred Blumrosen and Ruth Blumrosen, the Somerset decision combined with the earlier 1766 Declaratory Act which asserted that the English Parliament had the authority to govern the colonies in America in all cases, may have led to the American Revolution when southerners realized that the Somerset decision and the Declaratory Act would enable a future English Parliament to abolish slavery in the colonies. They had to demand that the Parliament not have any control over internal policies in the colonies which increased the chances of a revolution (2005, pp. 11, 110).

The Blumrosens argue that at the time Thomas Jefferson was preparing his draft of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, he took into account George Mason’s earlier draft of a declaration of rights and principles for the government of Virginia, which stated that “all men are born equally free and independent.” The Mason draft which Jefferson had seconded would have repudiated the principle that “children born of slave women ‘belonged’ to their master.” The Virginia convention modified Mason’s language by adding the phrase “when they enter a state of society” which would have allowed the British to accuse Americans of seeking independence in order to maintain slavery. Jefferson, the Blumrosens contend, also understood that if he included the term “property” in his draft of the Declaration of Independence, it would have preserved the institution of slavery (2005, pp. 125, 127, 130, 133-136). Jefferson who was a lawyer had to use language in the Declaration of Independence which avoided these possibilities.

The Blumrosens insist that Jefferson in 1776 “opposed the existing concept of slave property” and substituted the word “created” for “born” which did not specify whether a woman was involved in the process of birth and thus allowed god or nature to be the source of rights. Jefferson also deleted the word “property” and replaced it with the “pursuit of happiness” which did not install slave property in the Declaration. In a separate section of his draft, Jefferson criticized the English king for enslaving African people and transporting them to the colonies and then for inciting the slaves to rise up in arms and murder their masters in order to obtain their freedom from the king. Southerners objected to this section because it implied a condemnation of them for continuing slavery and it was removed (2005, pp. 137-140; Horton and Horton, p. 55).

The South depended economically on the exploitation of blacks. According to William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, the planter class had an interest in consumption rather than in production: “They exploited labor in order that they themselves should live more grandly and not mainly for increasing production [of cotton, tobacco, and sugar]. Their taste went to elaborate households, well furnished and hospitable; they had much to eat and drink," and they had black slave women sexually available to them in addition to white women. Du Bois reports that in the decades that followed, the Southern planter was in a position to prevent Northern and European industries from setting prices for Southern cotton and other goods but the planter “was too lazy and self-indulgent to do this and he would not apply his intelligence to the problem” (Du Bois, 2002, pp. 35, 37).

As Davis points out, the South which exploited the blacks developed a racial defense of it: “Racial doctrine — the supposed innate inferiority of blacks — became the primary instrument for justifying the persistence of slavery, for rallying the support of non-slaveholding whites, for underscoring the dangers of freeing a people allegedly ‘unprepared’ for freedom, and for defining the limits of dissent” (p. 272). The racial doctrine would last for a long time after slavery which only could continue as long as the Congress of the United States could divide the expanding nation into free and slave states and territories. But in the Dred Scott decision of 1857, the Supreme Court held that Congress did not have the power to designate some states as free and others as slave states. The Dred Scott decision meant that there would no longer be a chance for compromise between the free and slave states (Blumrosen and Blumrosen, 2005, p. 250).

In 1861, the US Civil War began in South Carolina as state forces fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor which was occupied by federal forces. The South tried for a second time to prolong slavery by seceding from a government that threatened it. Secession from Britain had worked and extended slavery for almost a century. But this time the South was defeated by federal forces from the Northern states and territories (Blumrosen and Blumrosen, 2005, p. 251). The civil war in the sense of military forces from the North fighting those from the South effectively ended in 1865 when Southern General Robert E. Lee surrendered his forces at Appomattox, Virginia. Later in the same year slavery was formally abolished with the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution but the wording in the amendment permitted involuntary servitude “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted” (US Thirteenth Amendment, 2010). This wording allowed the South to resurrect slavery under another name after the Reconstruction period from l865-1877 when Republicans of that period controlled the South, blacks enjoyed some civil and political rights, and there were federal troops there to protect them.

Even during the period of reconstruction, though, the civil war continued albeit in a different way. The military defeat of the South and the emancipation of the black slaves, “left the planters poor, and with no method of earning a living, except by exploiting black labor on their only remaining capital — their land.” There was a determined effort by the planters “to put the Negro to work” and to reduce the wage of the black worker “to the level of bare subsistence by taxation, peonage, caste, and every method of discrimination.” In a separate but “equally determined effort,” poor whites tried to drive black workers away “from work which competed with them or threatened their future work or income.” Whites also armed themselves and carried out violent attacks which “killed thousands of Negroes” (Du Bois, 2002, pp. 670-671, 673-674).

Du Bois asks why it was that some white men turned to a mob such as the Klu Klux Klan “who break, destroy, maim and lynch and burn at the stake.” Du Bois responds that these men were “desperately afraid . . . of losing their jobs, being declassed, degraded, or actually disgraced; of losing their hopes, their savings, [and] their plans for their children; of the actual pangs of hunger, of dirt, of crime.” Du Bois also asks why it was not possible for the poor whites in the South to form an alliance with the poor blacks in order to oppose the Southern planters and industrialists who wanted very cheap labor. Dubois answers that “The race element was emphasized in order that property-holders could get the support of the majority of white laborers and make it more possible to exploit Negro labor. . . . So long as the Southern white laborers could be induced to prefer poverty to equality with the Negro, just so long was a labor movement in the South made impossible” (Du Bois, 2002, pp. 678-680). Put another way, in the Southern states, what happened to blacks was about more than just class.

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Originally published: D. Parker/Societies Without Borders 6:3 (2011) 123-156 Received March 2011; Accepted July 2011
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BIO: Douglas Parker
Douglas Parker, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, California State University, Long Beach, previously taught in the Department of Political Studies in Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario and in Sociology at Colorado College, and conducted research at the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism as well as at another National Institute of Health. He has published numerous articles and book chapters. His current research is on the experiences of racial and ethnic minorities, on the conditions which are associated with greater consumption of alcohol, and on the limitations of post-colonial theory as disclosed by a close reading of texts from literature and popular culture.