When I was growing up my father was what you might call the strong, silent type. He spoke to be listened to, not just to be heard. And I remember one day going to work with him – he was a master builder who would run construction sites – and he was the same there, too. But if something needed saying on the job, if something wasn’t right or someone had stepped out of line, boy, did you hear him. I have grown up to be very much like my father. You step on me, I have something to say. Otherwise I can keep my counsel.
I have similar traits to my father because of what is known as learned behaviour. And you do too because of the relationship with your parents. That learning process begins as soon as a baby is born. One of the first developmental stages for infants is mimicking the faces cooing back at them in the cot. And, throughout those early developmental years, human beings are copying what they see from their parents or the significant people in their lives. We copy everything – speech intonation, facial expressions, the way we sit or stand or walk, eat our food. We react to situations in the same way, raising our voice in the same manner, throwing our arms in the air or showing delight. Our personality traits, ideologies and knowledge are borrowed, passed down from generation to generation.
Give or take, we become our parents. I have a friend who is terrified of becoming his father. He has exactly the same facial expression when he is about to lose his temper. And, much to his dismay, his 6-year-old daughter does the same. Learned behaviour keeps those psychotherapists in business. Hell, when I was running away from racism for so long that was learned behaviour, too. My family liked to pretend that there had been no fallout when my mom married my dad. Didn’t talk about it. Kept it a secret.
For the family set-up, read society. One reflects the other. And learned behaviour is one term. It could also be called indoctrination or brainwashing. It has been handed down from governments to populace, historians to scholars, teachers to pupils, parent to child. Like a nasty habit, for hundreds of years. When people are told something over and over again, when they see it and when they hear it, it becomes as natural as the passing of the seasons. ‘That’s the way it’s always been.’ Like a tradition or a recipe. ‘Well, we always do it like that.’
And it affects all races. As I’ve said, my mother’s family didn’t want her marrying my father because his skin was ‘too dark’. Once you understand and accept the idea and ‘knowledge’ that Black people are inferior, then you can begin to see how the dehumanisation of Black people has thrived for centuries.
Two psychologists conducted a powerful study in 1939 and 1940 to show the impact of that feeling. Kenneth and Mamie Clark, a husband and wife, showed two dolls – one white and one black – to African-American children at a segregated school in Washington, DC. They were asked which was nicest, which would you like to play with. There was an overwhelming preference for the white doll in the study. Some Black children ran out crying when they saw the black doll. This experiment was actually used to help end school segregation laws in the US in the 1950s.
Many people think that slavery was the start of dehumanisation. But it wasn’t. It was a symptom. You don’t just wake up one morning and think: ‘Let’s try to enslave an entire race.’ The idea that Black people were lesser beings needed to be planted and it needed to grow. It did not happen overnight.
In fact, there was a time when the pasty-faced Europeans were thought to be inferior to Black people, according to PhD historian Joe Hopkinson. This was a belief held in the medieval period and grounded on the difference in climates. Europe, cold and wet, as opposed to warm and dry Africa, produced the ‘slow-witted and unathletic’. African people were thought to be keen and vital. Obviously, this stereotype did not last.
What was important was difference. Human beings are naturally inclined to think that anyone or anything that is different, or other, is inferior. This was the jumping-off point for racist ideology. ‘Black otherness’ was demonised in religious imagery and literature, particularly after the invention of the printing press in Europe. This coincided with the ‘discovery’ of the New World and later gave rise to the pseudo-science of ‘racial hierarchy’. This justified and strengthened the slave trade. Or, to put it another way, race and racism allowed Europeans to distribute power to different human groups. They chose to bestow power on their own and take from those who did not look like them.
The indoctrination, the brainwashing and the learned behaviour was happening before the slave trade. During and after, however, it would gather pace, proliferate, become so unstoppable – use any term you like – that it became ingrained in society and culture. The slave trade was a symptom, but it was such a potent disease that it would mutate and grow into the illness that we see today.
It wasn’t just Black people who suffered, of course. In medieval times, Jews and Muslims were persecuted and treated as ‘unhuman’. And it is inarguable that both today continue to suffer dehumanisation. In the 1275 ‘Statute of the Jewry’ in England, Jews were segregated from Christians, and there was a mass expulsion of the Jewish population in 1290. In Europe in the medieval era, Muslims were not considered human. The Crusades – the supposed ‘Holy Wars’ which attempted to rid Europe of Islamic influence – followed. Historians will point to these Crusades as a foundation for colonialism.
Religion has much to do with planting the seed that white was good and Christian but Black was bad and evil. Africans would be portrayed in medieval art as the killers of John the Baptist and torturers of Jesus Christ. Religion is always a, shall we say, tricky topic to broach so I don’t want to get too bogged down in it aside to say that the Church has quite a bit to answer for when it comes to brainwashing.
Jesus Christ, to this day, is depicted with blue eyes and blond hair. Really? Tell me who in that part of the world in that era in history had blue eyes and blond hair? Jesus was a brown-skinned Middle Eastern Jewish man. It might sound shocking to you but that’s okay, you’ve not been told any differently. Who hasn’t gone into a church or art gallery and seen the depiction of Jesus as white? Very few of us. In television and film, Jesus is also white. In The Passion of the Christ, probably the biggest ever Hollywood biblical drama, Jesus was played by a white man. The film was made in 2004. And don’t get me started on the fondness of casting agents to pick a Black man to play Judas.
There is a long history of white Europeans creating and distributing pictures of Jesus in their image. Back it goes – and probably further – to the Renaissance era. When colonisation occurred, white Jesus went on his travels to reinforce the stereotypes – Europeans at the top of the tree and those with darker shades of skin lower down.
While we’re on the subject of creating someone in your own image, don’t forget that God was supposed to have done that with his son. He was created in his image, right? I am not a highly religious person, one to start preaching about religion or quoting the Bible, but its pages are pretty clear. If Jesus was a person of colour, so was God. That is probably too much of a stretch for some to imagine or even contemplate but I’ll tell you one thing, the Big Man (or Woman!) in the sky sure as hell wasn’t – and isn’t – white.
Why does it even matter how Jesus was portrayed? you might ask. Well, in Africa and India Jesus has also been shown to look like the indigenous population. And this makes it easier for those populations to identify with Christianity. Spreading the word of God and all that. But, on the flip side, does a white Jesus create another disconnect between white people and people of colour, the former being less likely to feel empathy for the latter? It shouldn’t be much of a leap. Jesus as a brown-skinned person suffering violence, oppression and discrimination?
These are not just my views. A Stanford University study from 2020 found that when people imagine God as white, they are more likely to consider white males for jobs than Black females. It is surely the most obvious and least surprising study ever conducted. If a white man rules the heavens, then why wouldn’t you believe that white men rule on earth? A Google search on the word ‘God’ showed that 72 per cent of the images returned were of white men. Six per cent were of Morgan Freeman, who played God in the film Bruce Almighty. The only winner there, I think, is Mr Freeman.
The Stanford study also asked 176 Christian children to draw a picture of God. They had all the available colours to draw with. And, of course, they drew a God who could be identified as white. This is the brainwashing on a large scale that has been taking place since at least the fifteenth century.
That timeframe is important because, at the same time as the printing press was being invented by white Europeans, they were also ‘discovering’ the Americas. So you have a situation where Europeans are meeting indigenous people, or people of colour. They are interacting across the world. The Europeans are able to send back what is essentially propaganda about these new people. The idea of white supremacy begins to spread and it is why we have that example of children depicting God as white hundreds of years later.
The Spanish and Portuguese were the first colonisers. Spain took captives from Africa to the Americas as early as 1503. Fifteen years later they were shipping them directly from Africa to America. Most came from Benin, Nigeria and Cameroon. The Portuguese captured Black people from Africa and took them back to Europe – as much as 10 per cent of the population of Lisbon, the capital, was believed to be of African descent by the early sixteenth century. With this expansion by these two countries, and the growth of the publishing world, myths and falsehoods flew around the entire continent of Europe.
It would eventually go beyond telling stories or false imagery, though. Hugely significant was the rise of the pseudo-scientist, who presented ludicrous theories as fact about the white European’s supremacy in mind, body and spirit. It was racial hierarchy in order to justify colonisers’ expansion and the money-making machine that was the transatlantic slave trade. Let’s take a look at some examples.
First up we have Carolus Linnaeus, a botanist, physician and zoologist from Sweden. In 1735 he defined the concept of race, categorising humans: Americanus, Asiaticus, Africanus and Europeaus. Each race was given characteristics.
‘Yellow’ Asians were melancholic, greedy, inflexible and governed by superstition; red Americans were hot-tempered, stubborn, free and governed by tradition; and the Black Africans were ‘of Black complexion, phlegmatic temperament and relaxed fibre… Of crafty, indolent, and careless disposition and are governed in their actions by caprice.’ White Europeans? Well, knock me down with a feather, they were just perfection. They were ‘of fair complexion, sanguine temperament, and brawny form… of gentle manners, acute in judgment, of quick invention, and governed by fixed laws and their mother’. Behold the master race.
‘So what?’ you might say, ‘this was 1735! We’ve moved on!’ Have we? Can you honestly say that those descriptions are not still used today? And why wouldn’t they be? Linnaeus’s nonsense was being used to support ethnic cleansing in 1930s Europe, let alone its past use to enforce slavery in the colonies.
Next, we have Petrus Camper, a Dutch professor of anatomy from the eighteenth century, who produced works claiming that the ancient Greeks were human perfection. He did this by using Greek statues to rank the beauty of human faces. Laughable, of course, but taken seriously and repeated all around Europe.
Then there’s Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the German scientist who invented the term ‘Caucasian’ to describe the species of man found along Europe’s eastern border in 1795. He claimed it was the ‘original’ race and therefore the most ‘beautiful’. For balance, Blumenbach also insisted that there was nothing inferior about Black people.
Finally, there’s Samuel George Morton, an American anthropologist. In the mid-1800s he was the guy who reckoned intelligence was linked to brain size. After measuring a vast number of skulls from around the world, he concluded that whites have larger skulls than other races and were therefore ‘superior’.
All of this is gibberish, of course. But it was science then. And you can’t argue with science, right? With such supposedly intelligent and learned men espousing such theories, and the masses taking them as fact, we had the legitimisation of racism. Instead of racism being something that had been invented by man to justify its worst side, it had suddenly become rooted in scientific theory.
Renowned philosophers had their say too. Immanuel Kant said in 1781: ‘The white race possesses all incentives and talents in itself… The race of Negroes can be educated, but only as slaves… The [indigenous] Americans cannot be educated, they care about nothing and are lazy.’
The enlightened historian and philosopher François-Marie Arouet, otherwise known as Voltaire? Not so much. The Frenchman believed that all creatures should be graded and that Black people were at the bottom, just above monkeys. He wrote that Africans were ‘animals’ with a ‘flat Black nose with little or no intelligence!’ He also invested personally in slave-trading companies, like the French East India Company.
Celebrated Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote that Blacks were ‘naturally inferior to the whites’. He also advised his patron, Lord Hertford, to invest in slave-trading companies. These views were taken seriously then. Kant-Hume-Voltaire reads like an all-star cast of the world’s great thinkers.
The influencers of the day were lining up to say, ‘It’s okay to treat Blacks badly.’ Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, was another. He may well have written in the Declaration of Independence that ‘all men are equal’, but it’s been said that his desire for emancipation weakened when he realised the damage to his own wealth. He also demanded all Black people be sent back to Africa or the West Indies because he didn’t think Americans and Blacks could live together.
Jefferson was rich off the back of his slaves, owning more than 600 during his lifetime. Boys aged ten to sixteen were whipped to work in his nail factory. He said that slaves smelled bad and were lazy. He also fathered six children with a teenage slave, Sally Hemings. He must have held his nose when he was copulating.
Religious ideology was in play, too. The Africans were heathens and a bit of slavery would give them some much-needed rigour and discipline to prepare them for European ‘civilisation’.
By the end of the nineteenth century, with Europeans dominating the world, it would stand to reason that the people from those countries who were powerful believed absolutely, that they were superior in every sense. Just because of the colour of their skin. Those who were not white were sub-human. They had no rights, no spirit, no physical or emotional feeling, no hopes, no dreams. They were cargo.
Without this dehumanisation, slavery could not have started, survived and prospered. It is estimated that more than 11 million Africans were forcibly transported – stolen from their homes and families – to the Americas over four centuries. Fewer than 9.6 million would survive the passage across the Atlantic in ships not fit for cattle, let alone humans. Africans were kept below deck, crammed in with barely an inch between them. The number of Africans enslaved by the Arab world would be more than nine million in a trade from AD 650 to the nineteenth century. In total up to 25 million Africans were taken, but some historians, notably from Africa, estimate the figure to be double that.
The horrors of slavery are clear for all of us to see now. But when they were actually happening in real time at the zenith of the trade, there were few prepared to protest.
Consider the story of the slave ship Zong, which departed Africa in September 1781 with 470 slaves on board – more than it could actually hold, by the way, but many captains overloaded their human cargo to maximise profits.
When the Zong got stuck mid-Atlantic in a part of the sea called the ‘doldrums’, where little or no wind could leave ships stranded, the crew and slaves began to die of illness. The captain, a Luke Collingwood, thought the answer was to ‘jettison’ the slaves to their deaths so the ship’s owners could make an insurance claim. He threw 132 slaves overboard. Cue outrage at this mass murder? Not really.
Criminal charges against the company, Collingwood and the crew were thrown out. A flabbergasted Justice John Lee, Britain’s solicitor general, said: ‘What is this claim that human people have been thrown overboard? This is a case of chattels or goods. Blacks are goods and property; it is madness to accuse these well-serving honourable men of murder. The case is the same as if wood had been thrown overboard.’ The insurance company paid out.
If slaves were ‘lucky’ enough to survive the journey across the Atlantic, nothing improved. They would be greeted by men like Edward Long, a British-Jamaican slave owner, who justified his money-making plantation on the grounds that Black people were not only inferior but not human. ‘An orangutan husband would not disgrace a negro woman,’ he wrote. This was not an attempt at humour.
Such views meant that barbaric conditions for slaves on Caribbean plantations were not given a second thought. If a slave was not sold at auction they were often just left to die. The cheapest slaves were bought with the sole intention of working them to death. Families were separated. Usually they were branded with their master’s initials. Malnourishment was so common that women’s menstrual cycles stopped. Slaves that displayed ‘difficult’ behaviour were sent to ‘seasoning camps’ where half of them would die.
The working hours were from dawn until dusk. At harvest time it meant eighteen hours in the fields. Beatings, murder and rape were all everyday occurrences. Other punishments included having iron hooks hung around their necks with iron chains added to them. Olaudah Equiano, a former slave who published his own life story in 1789, wrote: ‘I have seen a negro beaten till some of his bones were broken for even letting a pot boil over.’
In the American south, Black people’s status as inhuman was enshrined in law. For example, no Black woman could be raped by a white person because they were considered to be promiscuous. Masters would use sexual violence as a weapon to remind women of their enslavement.
In Virginia it was written into the statute books that it was not a crime to kill a slave. This was known as the Casual Killing Act, a law required because of the sheer number of slaves dying as a result of, shall we say, the ‘overenthusiasm’ of owners meting out punishments for minor offences. There was also a spate of killings of Black children by white women. This was how the law book read in 1669, as reproduced in the 1975 work American Slavery, American Freedom by Edmund Morgan:
If any slave resist his master (or other by his master’s order correcting him) and by the extremity of the correction should chance to die, that his death shall not be accompted felony.
And if a slave should run away? Virginia law sorted that problem out three years later. The ‘act for the apprehension and suppression of runaways, Negroes and slaves’ stated:
If any Negroe, mulatto, Indian slave, or servant for life, runaway and shall be pursued by the warrant or hue and cry, it shall and may be lawful for any person who shall endeavour to take them, upon the resistance of such Negroe, mulatto, Indian slave, or servant for life, to kill or wound him or them so resisting… And if it happen that such Negroe, mulatto, Indian slave, or servant for life doe dye of any wound in such their resistance received the master or owner of such shall receive satisfaction from the public.
Why were such laws required? Well, it wasn’t just to compound slaves’ status as sub-human. There also needed to be some sort of protection if, Lord forbid, any of these people felt some guilt for what they had done. They would be able to say, ‘I was just trying to teach them a lesson… the law says that’s okay.’ And the key phrase protecting whites beating Blacks to death in the first instance is ‘should chance to die’. So you are also covered if you beat them to death by accident. How hard is it to beat someone to death by accident, do you think?
In an era where one race was considered not human, it was inevitable they would be used for medical experiments. James Marion Sims, a gynaecologist, operated on Black slaves without anaesthetic – or any form of pain relief – because, he said, they felt less pain than white people. He was also reported to have ideas (perfectly normal for the time) about developmental differences between Africans and white people, including that African ‘skulls grew too quickly around their brain’, making them less intelligent.
Sims operated on at least ten women, one of them up to thirty times. There was no question of these women providing consent. They had no rights, so they suffered. And they suffered for profit. Sims would open a practice and offer the technique he perfected on white women – with anaesthetic and for a fee.
Unfortunately, Sims also experimented on enslaved babies who suffered with neo-natal tetanus. This was a disease that he liked to blame on Black people for being stupid and work-shy.
‘Whenever there is poverty, and filth, and laziness, or where the intellectual capacity is cramped, the moral and social feelings blunted, there it will be oftener found,’ he wrote. ‘Wealth, a cultivated intellect, a refined mind, an affectionate heart, are comparatively exempt from the ravages of this unmercifully fatal malady. But expose this class to the same physical causes, and they become equal sufferers with the first.’
In an attempt to find a remedy, Sims would use a shoemaker’s awl to prise open the baby’s skull and move bones apart. While the baby was alive. This had a 100 per cent fatality rate. Not that it was his fault. He blamed the deaths on ‘the sloth and ignorance of their mothers and the Black midwives who attended them’.
Sims is remembered as the father of modern gynaecology. And, indeed, lionised. There were six statues of him dotted around America. One of them could be found in Central Park, New York City, before protestors demanded its removal in 2018. Yes, 2018 for those who keep talking about ‘a long time ago’.
Another nineteenth-century American physician, Samuel A. Cartwright, ‘discovered’ that slaves suffered from a significant mental disorder which he called ‘drapetomania’. This was an uncontrollable urge to escape from slavery. So slaves who wanted their freedom were labelled mentally ill. The cure was to make running a physical impossibility. So doctors prescribed the removal of the big toe on each foot. Cartwright’s medicine was ‘whip the devil out of them’.
I make no apologies for the, no doubt, uncomfortable nature of this section. I did say there would be some parts of this book that would be a disturbing read. To fix the present and future, we have to confront the past.
Maybe you knew some of this already, maybe you didn’t. I suspect it is the latter because the true nature of slavery is largely glossed over to save the feelings of the perpetrators.
I don’t think history should be ignored just because it makes folks feel uncomfortable. Indeed, it is far, far easier not to deal with it. And, by and large, that is exactly what has happened. People turned the other cheek. They pretended it wasn’t happening, that what was happening didn’t matter or the people to whom it was happening did not matter. When women were crying out in agony because of what Sims was doing to them, did he not think, Huh, I thought they didn’t feel pain? That’s called cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance has allowed the dehumanisation of Black people to go unchecked. It created slavery. It created the colonial conquest of Africa by the European powers. It created the economic gulf between the West and Africa today. It caused the murder of George Floyd and thousands of others, the abuse and discrimination that Black people suffer every single day.
People say that Black people should ‘get over slavery’ because it was a long time ago. But its impact has touched every single one of us. And that is learned behaviour. Black people still suffer the mental scars of that era. It has been passed down through generations that they are worth less, that they are bottom of the pile and should just be grateful that they now have their freedom. It is a post-traumatic stress disorder. Internationally renowned researcher and educator Dr Joy DeGruy, whose brilliant talks you can find on YouTube (or you can buy her books) and encompass much of what we’ve discussed here, has termed it ‘post-traumatic slave disorder’.
White people are suffering from it, too. How else do you explain the disease of white supremacy that still exists? Donald Trump in the White House, for goodness sake? Black people in America financially unable to improve their lot in life because they can’t get a bank loan because of the colour of their skin? Slavery was a horrific, brutal and chilling part of the dehumanisation. But it was just the opening act. We are watching it unfold still.
On 1 January 1863, US President Abraham Lincoln made it official that ‘slaves within any State, or designated part of a State… in rebellion… shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free’. The Americans were a little late to the party – the British freed more than 800,000 enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and other colonies twenty-nine years earlier.
So, all over then. Done and dusted. Nothing to worry about. The trade in Black people was over and slavery was finished. Black people could, finally, live a life of freedom and be afforded the same opportunities as their former masters. If only it were that simple.
At a stroke of a pen, a politician can amend a constitution or tweak a bill to receive assent. But laws do not change attitudes. And the hatred and dehumanisation of Black people in America and the colonies was so deep-seated that the notion that emancipation in America, or abolishment by Britain, would suddenly and dramatically improve the lives of Black people proved unsurprisingly false. After all, the American constitution, in black and white, declared that any person who was not free (it did not use the term ‘slaves’) was only three-fifths human. All the pseudo-science, racist philosophy and hatred of otherness that we have discussed can be seen in that entry.
It can also be seen in the way that the slave trade came to an end. In short, the traders had to be paid off with vast sums of money to stop their human trafficking, rape, murder and abuse. This was called reparations. For the misery they inflicted they were paid compensation. That’s right. The slave owners were paid. Not the slaves. The British bill, in today’s money, was £300 billion. The French demanded 90 million gold francs (£14.7 or €17 billion today) in 1825 from Haiti, which had won a bitter war for independence from its masters. This was ten times the country’s annual revenue and was only paid off in 1947. Haiti has still not recovered from bearing that burden and probably never will. David Michael Rudder, the Trinidadian calypsonian, refers to this in one of his songs, ‘Haiti I’m Sorry’. (Every now and again I will draw reference to some of our great musicians of the Caribbean whose music many listen to but don’t really hear.)
Britain’s bill was not paid off until 2015. That basically means, all people paying taxes in the UK were helping to pay off the former slave owners who were being compensated for their ‘loss’. How ironic it is, then, that descendants of the slaves, now working in Britain, were still helping to pay the descendants of their former masters through their taxes paid to the government. Think about that.
In America compensation was rejected by slave owners in the South as the nation became bitterly divided. The factions who argued against slavery and for it would clash in the bloody Civil War, with the abolitionist North versus the ‘slavery is a positive good’ South.
America was divided. Thomas Jefferson was at least half right when he said that slaves should be returned to where they came from because white and Black couldn’t live together. But only because Black people feared they could never truly be free and would continue to be oppressed and victimised. When they were asked what they wanted post-slavery many said they wanted to live separately from white people. Freedom meant being left alone by the white man in their own enclaves.
And they were absolutely right. America was divided post-slavery and it is divided now. The entrenched attitudes remain because they have been continually reinforced. From the Jim Crow era of segregation in the South, to domestic government policy and the encouragement of racism in institutions like banking, housing, education and the police force to keep the Black man down.
America’s story post-slavery is hugely important. As the saying goes, ‘If America sneezes, the world catches a cold.’ As the dominant global power, America’s persistent failure to tackle systemic racism has informed the world’s view of Black people and, you might say, encouraged racism.
But I want to go back to that post-slave era in America. To dwell on it. Attitudes did not change overnight. A slave didn’t go to bed on Monday and wake up a free man on Tuesday with all the trappings of a white man. It was impossible. Slavery continued, just in a different form.
This was, of course, because the American economy relied on this free labour. Although the African slave trade – the continued trafficking of Black people from the continent – had been banned in the US in 1808, domestically people were still traded. And the enslaved population would nearly triple in the next fifty years, so that by 1860 there were almost 4 million slaves. Half of them were surviving in the South. And after the Civil War the South was flat broke.
So the Black man couldn’t simply walk out of the plantation on that Tuesday morning to a new life. No way. The ‘former’ slave owners in the South and the lawmakers needed to come up with a new way to subjugate.
Laws were introduced to make it illegal for a former slave to be without work. And how would a slave, often illiterate (because it was illegal to teach a slave how to read and write) and with skills only suited to slave work, get a job? If a Black man was found on the street he could be arrested and beaten. So they stayed on the plantations.
Those who stayed, called sharecroppers, had to earn their freedom, and those who didn’t suffered a worse fate, which we will get to later.
Sharecropping was when the masters gave the slaves the tools and the seeds to work the land and plant the crops. These were given in the form of a grant. Harvest a certain amount and your grant – or debt – is paid. Of course, the slave owners made sure the terms of this deal were grossly unfair to the slave and his or her family. Rarely was the debt ever paid.
There were other laws, too, which were called ‘Pig Laws’. An example was that if somebody stole a pig worth $1, they would go to jail for five years. Strangely, a lot of Black people were convicted of such crimes and barely any whites. Black people were also arrested for looking at a white woman, vagrancy and loitering, with up to twelve years in prison the punishment. And, as you can imagine, with the ‘freed slaves’ unable to get jobs as they couldn’t read or write, there was a lot of ‘loitering’. Sound familiar? England in the 1980s comes to mind. So basically, if you didn’t stay on the plantation, you were almost certain to end up in jail. The Black prison population swelled disproportionately in relation to the numbers of white criminals (nothing has changed on that score).
So, what to do with all these Black prisoners? thought the powers that be in the South. Put them to work. It’s almost as if they had planned to convict Blacks on made-up crimes so they could get free labour again. It was called ‘convict leasing’. From county courthouses and jails, men were leased to local plantations, factories and railroads. And it was so successful that, by 1894, three quarters of the state revenue of Alabama came from convict leasing.
Convict leasing was not much different to slavery. Businessmen bought convict leases and the prisoner would only be free again once that fee had been paid off through work. But when prisoners were working to pay off those debts the paperwork that showed how much they owed was often ‘lost’, meaning they were never freed. Prisoners were often separated from their families and conditions were as bad – if not worse – in prison, with illness, malnutrition and torture rife.
‘Peonage’ was another barbaric ruse to continue slavery in the South. The 13th Amendment of the US constitution said that slavery was illegal. But there was a loophole which read: ‘except as a punishment for crime’. The old slave owners would pay to prevent a Black man from going to jail for one of the many concocted crimes. And that man would then work, for free, until the debt was paid off.
It wasn’t until 1928 that Alabama became the last state to ban convict leasing. Unfortunately, in its place came the chain gang. Same forced, free labour but instead of for individuals, it was for the state, or community. Chain gangs might build roads or repair them and, once again, it was the masters who benefited: better transport access meant it was easier to get their crops to market. This time it’s the American, Sam Cooke, who sang about the men working so hard trying to get back to their women in his song, ‘Chain Gang’. Peonage was still taking place in pockets of the South in the early 1940s.
So much, then, for the end of slavery. And so much for the end of a Black people being dehumanised. That is important because history books will record emancipation on the date above and people might think, Phew! Glad that’s over… long time ago, why are Black people still going on about it? We are still going on about it because the truth is never taught. And we’re still going on about it because it has not darn well stopped. Blacks were dehumanised before slavery. They were dehumanised during slavery. They were dehumanised after slavery.
There was never even a flicker of hope for the African-American to start to have a feeling of self-worth or for the brainwashing and indoctrination to stop. It was repeated but with different names or terms used. That desire to dominate, punish, exploit and dehumanise the Black man could not just be turned off like a tap. Black people cannot forget about the past until society forgets about the past, and there is evidence of society still having those hang-ups. Cue the Amy Cooper story in Central Park, New York, in May 2020. I will get back to that. But what happened, also, to that desire to inflict pain, to murder, to rape? This was when lynching began. After the proclamation of emancipation.
Between 1877 and 1950, there were at least 4,384 lynchings by white people of people of colour in America. Most of them were in the South but they occurred all over the country. Why did these occur? We know why, of course. Because Black people were not human. But with ‘freedom’, that otherness threatened white people’s way of life, their power. They didn’t want Black people taking their money, their jobs, their women. The ‘contamination’ of the white race was a not insignificant factor for their ire. But it is something of a myth that lynchings happened because Black people had been accused of raping white women, touching them, looking at them the wrong way, murders or assaults. Research by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a non-profit organisation set up to end mass imprisonment and excessive punishment in the US, says that only a quarter involved an alleged sex ‘crime’ and less than a third were due to claims of violence.
Most often people were lynched because their crime was to be Black, like Jack Turner, who was organising Black voters in Alabama in 1882. Lynched. Bud Spears complained about the lynching of a Black man in Mississippi in 1888. Lynched. Robert E. Lee, who heartbreakingly changed his name to that of the Confederate general thinking it would spare him, knocked on the door of a white woman in South Carolina in 1904. Lynched.
Going to watch a lynching was a day out, like a family outing to a cricket or soccer match. Moms, dads and children. Thousands would turn up. Seventeen-year-old Henry Smith was tortured and burned on a 10-foot-high stage in Texas in 1893 with 10,000 spectating. Almost 20,000 watched Will Brown burned alive in Omaha in 1919. Photos were taken with white folk standing in front of the bodies smiling, laughing, pointing. Postcards of the event were sold. Like the lynching of Laura Nelson and her teenage son, LW, in Oklahoma, 1911. Both were ‘kidnapped’ from the county jail by a white mob, who raped Ms Nelson and then hung them both from a bridge over a river, deliberately close to the Black part of town as a warning message. Postcards of the hanging, with the mob standing proudly on the bridge, could be bought in novelty stores.
What is noticeable when reading about such stories is the consistent complicity of the police. The white mob did not need to force their way into courthouses or jails to ‘kidnap’ their victim. They were rarely met with any resistance whatsoever. They just walked in and dragged them off to be murdered. Is it at all surprising, in the context of learned behaviour and ideology passing down from generation to generation, that in America the cops are hated so much by Black people?
Rarer still than any objection by police or law enforcement was any conviction for the lynchings. Case after case is concluded with ‘no charges were brought against the murderers’. That was because the police were as racist as the mob itself, and also due to the peculiar condition of all the hundreds and thousands of white people who had been involved, or attended the spectacle, to suddenly be struck down with a bout of amnesia. No one ever saw anything.
Sometimes law enforcement actively encouraged the violence. This is how the EJI recorded one of the more notorious incidents of racial terror:
On May 31, 1921, Dick Rowland, a Black 19-year-old shoe shiner, was jailed in the Tulsa County Courthouse after a white woman reported he assaulted her. The charges were dropped, but police kept him in the courthouse to protect him from a growing white mob that sought to lynch him. Members of the Black community also stationed themselves in the courthouse to protect Mr Rowland from a potential lynching.
Thousands of white people joined the mob. Reports show that local authorities provided firearms and ammunition to the white rioters, who began to shoot at the men protecting Mr Rowland, forcing them to retreat to Greenwood, a Black neighbourhood anchored by a thriving Black business district. The white mob, including city-appointed deputies, followed and terrorized Greenwood, shooting indiscriminately at any Black person they saw and burning homes and buildings. Numerous survivors reported that planes from a nearby airfield dropped firebombs on Greenwood. The Oklahoma National Guard was dispatched the next day to suppress the violence, but they treated the attack as a ‘Negro uprising’ and arrested hundreds of Black survivors. No members of the white mob, local government, or national guard were prosecuted or punished.
Over 10,000 Black people were displaced from their community. Several hundred Black people were likely killed, but there is no reliable account of the casualties because public officials did not keep a record of Black people who had been hospitalized, wounded, or killed.
This was known as the Tulsa Massacre. At least thirty-six Black people died and the Black community was destroyed. This incident and the thousands of others researched by the EJI were, plain and simple, terrorism. The attacks were designed to enforce white supremacy and normalise the dehumanisation of Blacks. No excuse was in fact needed for the violence. And that’s the way the mob wanted it, to terrorise African-Americans into thinking that if they stepped foot out of the door, a misplaced word here, or accidental bumping of shoulders in a shop there, it could happen to them. Speaking disrespectfully, refusing to step off the pavement when a white person approached, using bad language, using an improper title for a white person, suing a white man, arguing with a white man, bumping into a white woman and insulting a white person were all enough to get a Black person killed.
The lynch mobs were emboldened and backed by racist leaders, politicians and authorities of the day, of course. US President Woodrow Wilson had refused to support an anti-lynching bill despite at least a lynching a week in the southern states. He had also screened at the White House the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Ku Klux Klan for ‘protecting’ white women from the ‘sexual aggression’ of Black men. Wilson said the film was like ‘writing history with lightning and its perceptions were all so terribly true’.
In the American South the Jim Crow era of segregation was in full swing. If slavery was a second act in the story of dehumanisation, the seeds of ‘otherness’ being the first, this was the third. Jim Crow was not a person. He was a stage character played by a white man in blackface in minstrel shows. The character, who was dressed in rags, would sing and dance and was portrayed as lazy, stupid and worthless. Jim Crow was used as an insult. Hence its use in the laws that ensured Blacks were third-class citizens. The Jim Crow laws era spanned from the ‘abolishment’ of slavery until the signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Most historians recognise that it was slavery by another name. Folks, I was born in 1954. It’s not that long ago.
The laws differed state by state. Segregated schools, transport facilities and restaurants are the most well-known. But in many states Black people were denied the opportunity to own property, to own a business, and were prevented from freedom of movement. They were also often denied the right to vote by ‘literacy tests’. These took the form of questions like, ‘how many bubbles in a bar of soap?’, ‘how many windows in city hall?’ and ‘how many seeds in a watermelon?’ Although laws like that were supposed to have been illegal, according to the post-Civil War Reconstruction Amendments to the constitution, the reality was that the US government had little appetite to challenge the South. Hardly surprising when you had racist presidents like Wilson in the White House. And it was easy for the southern states to do as they wished. They had murderous groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the lynch mobs to terrify any dissenters and impose laws that were designed to deny Black people their rights and ensure the status quo remained – Blacks at the bottom.
Thank goodness, then, for the Civil Rights Act, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, who called it ‘the nigger act’. The Jim Crow laws were smashed. Segregation on the grounds of race, religion or national origin was banned and employment discrimination was made illegal. Martin Luther King called it ‘the second emancipation’. Literacy tests were banned in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 banned discrimination in the sale, rental and financing of property. So, what has an African-American got to complain about today?
Old habits die hard. History repeats. And why wouldn’t they and why wouldn’t it? I have tried to show that racism in America (and America is being named here because in my opinion it seems a bit more acute there. Many other countries could be substituted, including Britain) is entrenched learned behaviour, passed on from generation to generation. And if that wasn’t the case, I wouldn’t be writing this book because George Floyd and the many others would not have been murdered. The police brutality and discrimination, so evident in the southern states during the Jim Crow era, is still with us. American leaders and politicians, post-Civil Rights Act and to this very day (Trump, anyone?), continued and continue to embolden and rationalise racists and racism.
It is tempting to say that the racism and hatred are not as overt as the lynch mob days. And of course that is true. But then I think about George Floyd, his murder caught on camera. There are many others but, to get an idea, remember Naomi Osaka in the US Open wearing the names of murdered Black people on her face masks. Seven masks for her seven games. If there had been more games scheduled, she would not have run out of names to use. And then I think about the murders that were not caught on camera by bystanders. How many more do we not know about?
Examples of police brutality are plot lines in the third act, if you will. The story is far from over. Black people in America generally remain economically and educationally inferior. Their lives matter less. A point unequivocally proven when a virus showed up and locked down much of the world. Viruses don’t discriminate, we were told. Yes they do. It was people of colour, who are poorer, less healthy, less valued and kept at the bottom of the pile, who bore the brunt.
Maybe we could call the racism covert. But it’s only covert if you refuse to look. From the first two acts of dehumanisation and the deep-seated impact of centuries of brainwashing was born a system: institutional racism was designed to retain the racial hierarchy and make Black lives harder. It isn’t about segregation or lynching any more. And, of course, that’s a huge positive, but are we supposed to be grateful for that, say, ‘Thank you, sir’ and suck up the rest?
David T. Wellman, the author of Portraits of White Racism, a 1977 book which argued that racism was a strategy to defend social advantage, described the system like this:
Culturally sanctioned beliefs which, regardless of intentions involved, defend the advantages whites have because of the subordinated position of racial minorities.
It is a vicious cycle which stops and obstructs people of colour getting the opportunities to better themselves. America is that wheel but it is happening all over the world, too. Housing, education, the criminal justice system, employment and the media are the establishments, or sectors, that keep the system spinning and they are all linked to keeping Black people at first base.
Let’s break this down. If you are Black and living in America you are more likely to be living in sheltered, or cheap, housing. This means that taxes in your area are lower. Since taxes are used for social services, this means that educational provision in your area is poorer. This obviously leads to lower standards of education, and when kids do badly at school because they are denied resources? The criminal justice system comes calling. This is where the media gets involved, fond of portraying Black people as dangerous or feckless.
The media is powerful and influential in how they report and cover stories. I remember seeing in 2020 in one British newspaper, just two pages apart, a Black kid who kicked a policewoman termed ‘a thug’ but a white kid who killed a Black 14-year-old was a ‘teen’. During the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans in 2005, I saw a picture in a newspaper of Black people wading through water with belongings held above their heads; the headline read: ‘Looters’. A similar picture of white folks wading through water with stuff held above their heads had the caption: ‘families saving their belongings’.
So this negativity influences judges handing Black people longer sentences. Which again leads to one-parent families, low employment opportunities, poverty, impoverished communities and… housing disparity. We’re back where we started. And that’s not a list of complaints. These are statistical facts in America today.
A study by Brandeis University found that the average white family owns 700 per cent more wealth than the average Black family. Now, is that because Black people are lazy, stupid, more likely to commit a crime or any of the other slavery-era, before, during or after, tropes that were so enthusiastically encouraged? No. Of course not. It’s because of that vicious cycle.
Why can’t Black people get better housing? That’s because from 1934 to 1968 the Federal Housing Authority would not give mortgages to people of colour. Neighbourhoods would be rated according to how suitable the people living in them were to receive a loan, big or small. Predominantly Black neighbourhoods were marked red and assigned the lowest ranking. Just for a second, cast your mind back to the pseudo-scientific theories of how the human race was ranked. You see, there is nothing new under the sun.
The same ranking system was used by the banks to deny loans to prospective Black homeowners and Black businesses. This was called redlining. African-Americans were also blocked from buying property in white areas because the banks said this would devalue white property, despite all evidence to the contrary. At the same time the government was subsidising builders to build homes, the requirement for getting the investment being that they could not be sold to Black people. It is estimated that Black families have lost out on at least $212,000 in personal wealth over the past forty years because their home was redlined. Such practices, like redlining, were supposed to have been made illegal in 1968. But the debate rages about whether it is still going on. What the governments were doing was segregating whites and Blacks through housing law.
And, as you would expect, the effects are still being felt. Without access to those loans, Black communities have suffered. Homes could not be improved, businesses could not grow or expand. Children could not go to college to further their education so that they could help themselves and their families going forward. The result is ghettos. Black people kept in their place, segregated from whites. Or, to use the term from earlier, a housing disparity which leads to low taxes, poor education… and round and round we go. Let me just pause again here and address those who may still be saying, ‘That’s in the past.’
In September 2020, a biracial family in Florida decided they needed a valuation on their home because they wanted to remortgage. Their first valuation was for $330,000. They figured that was a bit low considering what other homes in the neighbourhood were being valued at. The wife, who is Black, thought to herself that racism was at play, and I can just hear the usual cry from the non-believers: ‘Playing the race card!’ or, ‘She has a chip on her shoulder!’ Anyway, the couple decided to remove all signs of anyone Black being associated with the house. They removed wedding pictures, photographs of their son, pictures of Barack Obama, pictures of Black family members. In fact, all the photographs that were not just of her white husband and his family were removed. They removed books from the shelves by Black authors like Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston.
Another valuation was sought and this time around the wife was not in the house when the surveyor arrived, neither was her son. They made sure of that. Lo and behold, this time the valuation was for $465,000, a full $135,000 more than when there was evidence of ‘Blackness’ in the house. The date of this story again? September 2020, not September 1920. And, as I said on television, these types of stories can be found quite easily on the internet by doing a simple search; they are not figments of the imagination.
Anyway, let’s continue. An unfortunate consequence of those low taxes in poorer communities we were talking about is that they guarantee a lower standard of education. That’s because 45 per cent of the education budget comes from local taxes. If the taxes are low, the school has less money. Less money for teachers, specialised tuition, class sizes are bigger. What can follow poor education? An introduction to the criminal justice system.
That criminal justice system, which has earned America the dubious crown of the largest prison population in the world and the highest imprisonment rate per capita, is biased against Black people. The number of Black convictions for the same crime is higher than white people. Black people account for 40 per cent of the US prison population but only 13 per cent of the country’s population is Black. Surely history isn’t repeating itself from when Black people were imprisoned in huge numbers post ‘abolition’? I’m afraid so.
And we know that the cops who do the arresting are historically racist. Examples abound (as we have already discussed) and entire books have been written about it, notably one by a former policeman, Norm Stamper, who worked in the Seattle and San Diego forces. It’s called Breaking Rank, and exposes the everyday racism that dehumanises, like the language used on radio calls. Officers would use the call sign ‘NHI’, which stood for ‘No Human Involved’, when radioing in a Black death. Or, ‘It’s just an 11-13 nigger.’ The code 11-13 was actually supposed to refer to an injured animal.
It continues. In January 2021 a police chief and patrol man in Georgia were forced to resign for making racist comments on their body cameras. They used the n-word and the police chief, a Gene Allmond, had this disgusting, ignorant take on slavery: ‘For the most part it seems to me like they furnished them a house to live in, they furnished them clothes to put on their back, they furnished them food to put on their table and all they had to do was fucking work. And now we give them all those things and they don’t have to fucking work.’
The UK is the same. Who can forget the tragic murder of Stephen Lawrence in south-east London in 1993? Stabbed to death at the age of eighteen while waiting for a bus, his killers went free because the Metropolitan Police were institutionally racist. Only after an inquiry (the Macpherson Report) years later, which found that investigations into the murder were ‘marred by a combination of professional incompetence, institutional racism and a failure of leadership’, did the family receive some justice. And I say ‘some’ because only two men were eventually convicted.
Did that report change anything in policing and justice? Well, a 2017 government report found that the colour of your skin is the most important factor in how you are treated by the justice system. It proved that if you put a white man and Black man in a courtroom on the same charge with similar evidence, the Black man was more likely to be denied bail, convicted and sent to prison. And when he was there, he was more likely to reoffend and more likely to die in custody. The UK’s Sentencing Council found in 2021 that ethnic minorities have up to a 50 per cent greater chance of skin colour being a factor in sentencing. Unsurprisingly, the number of prisoners of colour has gone up – from 25 per cent in 2006 to 41 per cent today. Lots of reports happening but no real action, eh?
The US prison population went through the roof after President Richard Nixon launched a ‘war on drugs’ in 1971. Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, said Black people and so-called ‘hippies’, who were protesting the Vietnam War, were deliberately targeted. ‘We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black,’ he said. ‘But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin… and then criminalizing both heavily we could disrupt those communities.’
By the way, whites and Blacks use drugs in similar numbers in America but guess which group is more likely to receive prison sentences for drug-related crimes? Well, 13 per cent of drug users are Black but 36 per cent of arrests for drug-related offences are people of colour and 46 per cent are convicted. One out of three Black males in the US will currently go to prison at some point in their lives. Remember convict leasing? You don’t need to because it is still happening.
If cleared by a doctor, an inmate is put to work, often earning as little as two cents an hour. There are convict-leasing partnerships with mining and agriculture companies. Some prisons make military weapons, others sew underwear for Victoria’s Secret, or man call centres.
When people of colour are released from prison they will, on average, earn 21 per cent less than white people if they are lucky enough to get a job. And so the cycle begins again. As you would expect, the awareness of this cycle, this system, this institutional racism differs depending on the colour of your skin. More than half of Black people think racism is built into the laws, structures and foundations of American life compared to 30 per cent of white people.
Stepping away from domestic America for a moment, on the world stage the US was trying to keep the African man down. The 1974 Kissinger Report openly stated that US foreign policy was to slow population growth in Africa, specifically Nigeria, Ethiopia and Egypt, because it would lead to political, economic and military power. And that just wouldn’t do, would it? So the US employed several measures to keep the worldwide status quo with America at the top and Africa at the bottom. They influenced birth-control programmes and threatened curtailing food supplies to states that did not comply. Those other states included India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Turkey, Mexico, Brazil and Colombia. I wonder what the common denominator between these peoples was?
In another echo of the past, the pseudo-scientists, or race scientists, made a comeback and, once again, Black people were experimented on. Between 1932 and 1972, 399 Black sharecroppers from Tuskegee, Alabama, who were suffering from syphilis, were offered treatment by the US Public Health Service. Initially, this study was to last six months. As the dates confirm, it lasted forty years. They received no treatment and instead were monitored for the purpose of studying the disease. When penicillin became available in 1945 as a treatment, the men were denied the antibiotic by researchers who lied about their conditions, preferring to continue to observe the effects of the illness. By the end of the study, only seventy-four were still alive – 100 were dead of related complications, forty of their wives had been infected and nineteen children had been born with congenital syphilis. No one was charged.
An entire book, Medical Apartheid by Harriet Washington, has been written about medical experiments on Black people. And people remember. The Tuskegee Experiment has been blamed for African-American scepticism about Covid-19 vaccines. The Guardian reported in February 2021 that only 5.4 per cent of vaccination recipients in the US were Black. The same month in the UK, figures were released that showed Black people and those of mixed heritage aged 70–79 were 31 per cent less likely to get the jab than white people in the same age bracket. Politicians keep on saying, ‘The Black community doesn’t trust the vaccine.’ Perhaps more appropriately they should be saying, ‘We have a history of abusing Black people, thus we violated their trust.’
Ah. Covid. How tragic that the illness has proven to be just another example of history repeating. The exposed, vulnerable, exhausted, maltreated, broken and malnourished slaves hundreds of years ago were more prone to disease. And in 2020 it was Black and ethnic minorities, the exposed and the vulnerable, who suffered most.
It is no coincidence that those groups, who have been kept at the bottom of the pile by institutional racism, are the ones who have suffered most. The American Public Media Research Lab found that Covid-19 had killed one out of every 1,000 African-Americans at the time of writing, a truly shocking statistic. Data through to July 2020 showed that Black people aged 35–44 were dying at nine times the rate of white people the same age. Also, Blacks were three times more likely to be infected in the first place. That vicious cycle would prove to be lethal.
And, worst of all, they had died in greater numbers because they were trying to escape that cycle. Research has shown that young Black men were particularly vulnerable to Covid because of stress. The stress of two jobs, trying to work twice as hard (the rule of two, which Hope Powell spoke about), to provide for their families and to raise themselves up. Low-paid jobs in sectors like transport, the food industry and healthcare, which were often not protected by government bailouts, under-resourced neighbourhoods, poor diet caused by low incomes and the chronic underlying health issues which so often went hand in hand, meant Covid ravaged the community.
This wasn’t just in the US. People of colour were disproportionately affected the world over because they are disproportionately worse off in life. In the UK, those of an African background had the highest chance of death, with a rate 2.7 times higher than that of white males; while for females the highest rate was among those of Black Caribbean ethnic background, at almost twice that of white females. The US healthcare system is, of course, infamously unequal, and because Black people are towards the bottom of the pile, they suffer poorer medical care. In the UK there is a health gap which means people of colour have more long-term illness.
Governments then have the gall to turn round and say, ‘We need more research to find out why this is.’ Give me a break. It has happened because of the racist system they have upheld. And now Covid will start that vicious cycle all over again for so many families of colour, all over the world. Because they will, more than likely, be last in line to get the economic help they will so desperately need because of job losses.
Forgive me, but sometimes it’s hard not to think that very little has changed.