Black History: Labour, Identity and Geography

Alicia Maund (February 2007)

Some of you may know Alicia Maund from seeing her here at the Unitarian Congregation of Guelph. Alicia's combination of a mixed race and class background, has given her a unique dual consciousness. A personal interest in exploring her family's historical experience, led to Alicia's passion in social psychology, history and environmental geography. Her research has focused on how we as humans, consciously and latently, work with our emotions, thoughts and historical memories, to navigate how we have relationships with ourselves and with the world.

BLACK HISTORY: LABOUR, IDENTITY AND GEOGRAPHY

The actor Morgan Freeman said on 60 minutes in 2005 that Black history month is ridiculous! "You are going to relegate my history to a month!" he said "I don't want a Black history month, Black history is"... everyone's..."history".

Black history month has become a month long feel good session of shallow rituals, with no fundamental changes. African ancient history and 400 years of Black history is reduced to the same display of figures and great moments, year after year. There is no attempt to dig deeper or look further.

To look deeper and further, there is a need to shift the lens as we look into the past, and into the present.

Black history is a common history. It is Canadian history. It is White history. Black labour was and is, a central foundation of the development of the West. Blackness is necessary for Whiteness.

Maya Angelou said in I know why the caged bird sings: "I was theirs and they were mine. I sang the race memory, and we were united in centuries of belonging".

Blackness and Whiteness were created as hierarchical opposites, with Blacks located at the bottom rank. A slave owner named Long divided the genus Homo into three categories: Europeans and other humans, Blacks, and orangutans.

In Western culture the human being is dichotomized into the mind and the body. To the body is given such qualities as passion, biology, instinct and a more primitive way of being. To the mind is attributed reason, the self, action, and intelligence, a more developed way of being...or not being.

The contradictory and ambivalent feelings of European's attitudes towards their own humanness and connection with nature was projected onto the Black body.

Any experiences of contradictions and dissociations, of the civilized and the savage, were transferred to Black men and women. These meanings were transferred to race. Racial difference, like gender, is written on the body.

Colonialism was about the seizing of place, draining it of its resources, including draining it of its history and the meanings given to it by its primary occupants. Terms such as First World and Third World, intersect with race, economy and notions of development.

Images of Africa as the Dark Continent and explorer territory persist today in the displays of the Third World, in contrast to the taken for granted First World, extending 'helping' hands to the poor desperate Black people. The explorations into Africa were a source of this myth building. The myth continues.

Fantastic images of European knowledge, daring and triumphs, with Africans portrayed as dumbfounded bystanders and extras in their own continent still flourish, continued with the sponsor a child programs, and the media images of the plight of Africa, portrayed as occurring due to 'hopeless backwardness' in civilization, without a historical and contemporary reference of exploitation and destabilization by the West, that has its first roots in colonialism.

The explorers created the image of the Dark Continent, the churches created the image of the fallen heathen.

Europe's light shone brighter by virtue of the darkening of other continents. This entrenches notions of Western superiority and Third World inferiority. The imperialist as saviour of Third World peoples is an important construct in nation building. Whites define themselves as unimplicated in the genocide of Native peoples or the enslavement of African peoples (Pieterse, 1990), a position of innocence that is especially appealing because it enables Whites to imagine themselves as benevolent, generous, do gooders of the First World. This is a deeply embedded fantasy of the imperialist as saviour (Razack, 1999: 100), pushing through the frontiers of ignorance. The frontiers that were, and are, pushed however, were land, resources and peoples as territory.

In 1800 Europeans controlled 35 percent of the earth's surface. In 1878 this had increased to 67 percent and between 1878 and 1914 the period of the new imperialism, European control extended over 85 percent of the earths' surface. Less than 25 percent of the Western world now own and control more than 85 percent of the world's income.

Colonization transformed the meaning of slave to African slave, and from African slave to Black. Branding was a way of displaying the status of a servile group and creating group solidarity with the dominant group. With Blacks the branding was colour.

The meaning of race as a different human species appeared in the English language at precisely the same time Europe began to colonize other lands. Racism ascended with the rise of modern Western Europe. It grew out of the same historical forces that elevated Western Europe to world domination. These passions emerged out of changes that occurred in Western Europe's economic structure, social organization, culture, and patterns of human interaction.

Black labour gave rise to an enormous increase in world trade. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the centuries of trade and the nineteenth century was the century of production. A slaveholder said: "[Slavery] was the first principle and foundation of all the rest, the mainspring of the machine which set every wheel in motion" (Poslthwayt). Adam Smith said "The discovery of America, the Cape Route to India and slavery are: the greatest [events] in the history of mankind?One of its principal effects was to raise the mercantile system to a degree of splendour and glory which it could never otherwise have attained". The British Board of Trade ruled in 1708 that it was "absolutely necessary that a trade so beneficial to the kingdom should be carried on to the greatest advantage".

Shipping and shipbuilding, the growth of seaport towns, wool, the goods in the triangular trade, cotton, silk, grain, gold, tobacco, sugar, rum, banking, insurance, mass industries." (Williams, 1964: 98) and more, were the benefits of this 'trade' and this labour. In Spain the palace-fortresses of Madrid and Toledo alone were built out of the payment to the Spanish Crown for licenses to transport negroes. The production of these stimulated capitalism, provided employment for European labour, and brought great profits to Europe.

An estimate of 20 million Africans were taken from 1441 to 1870.

The Black body was made to perform as a labouring body, as a working machine, distinct from the mind. There was little division of labour between the sexes. Children as soon as they could walk were given jobs to perform.

As territory, and as expansions of the Black body as property, the land as territory itself has been transformed to recreational adventures and escapes for Whites, and financially and symbolically profiting the West, in addition to being stripped of its mineral, agricultural and labour resources.

As extended from the colonial displays, museums then also became places of manifestations of colonial power. It has only been in 2002 that the body and remains of The Hottentot Venus (Saartjie Baartman) been returned to the Khoi in Africa, from France, after years of dispute and "negotiation". The colonial and racial hierarchies remain intact. This was and still is a powerful means of signalling ownership, contrast, supremacy and identity.

We develop our identities through interaction with living histories. For more than a hundred years all children in the West, and both Blacks and Whites, have been learning to count by reducing non-Western children and making them disappear.

The book "Ten Little Niggers" in North America is now called "Ten Little Monkeys" and still depicts as illustratively suggestive, monkeys as caricatures of Black children. In the book Blacks have to learn to control their lust and brute naturalness, through punishment (Pieterse, 1990: 166).

For Black children it was growing up rhyming and seeing themselves disappear, usually in not so pleasant ways: "Ten little nigger boys went out to dine; one choked his little self, and then there were nine." For Whites, it was learning who they were not, by witnessing Blacks as Others.

There is a collective memory of body and place. Raced bodies, nations, and ideas about places, to continuously define who is the stranger. Ethnicity is part of the construction of history, place and race.

The symbols that define ethnicity, identity and representation are symbols of a specific system of relations.

It is a system that is mythology, and it provides the support for deep seated beliefs which give personal meaning to behaviour.

For Whites, Black slaves were the contrast against which they developed their race identity. Black slavery made White liberty possible. The Whites stood above the slaves economically and socially. To be White is to be free. To be Black is to be a slave.

Sharene Razack describes it as : The habit of his power depends on the absence of her choice.

The relationship that is the habit of his power and the absence of her choice was the context in which the concepts of freedom and choice for Whites were developed.

Current beliefs that provide meanings to behaviours rest on the idea of 'free autonomous individuals acting out their self interests. The ability to act in self interests while standing on the back of someone else.

The origin and ideas of freedom, choice and autonomy grew with the same historical forces that elevated Europe to world economic dominance. They rely on built in relations of domination.

Freedom and choice are all concepts that impose a particular kind of order, a structure that violently suppresses those details that do not fit ? in particular, the details surrounding the persistent domination that allows the freedom of the dominant members, and the domination of men over women, rich over poor, and Whites over Blacks (Razack, 1999).

The milieu of capitalism produced a new form of racism. "With the territorial reach of racism now global. It is now possible to perpetuate racial domination and segregation without making any explicit reference to race at all" (Razack, 1999). Racial and class segregation in employment, housing, education, labour and resource exploitation continue.

The masking of oppression and race, as culture and cultural difference blocks change. This construct maintains that relations between dominant and oppressed groups can be unmarked by legacies of oppression. Without history and without a social context, each encounter between unequal groups becomes a fresh one, where the participants feel they start from zero, as one human being to another, each innocent of the subordination of others (Razack, 1999).
Modern racism works within covert operations and denial. Racism as ideology operates at the level of embodied daily actions and their interpretations, and at another level in the refusal to take responsibility for it.

Power is subsumed under culture, and oppression is reduced to a symbolic construction in which there are no real live oppressors who benefit materially and no real oppressed people to liberate.

Blacks are invited to keep the stereotyped and symbolically non-threatening aspects of their culture (such as entertainment, but not history) and have no greater access to power and resources. This is done as noisily and publicly as possible, as in Black history month, to maintain the belief in a pluralist society and an equal society.

Theories that alienate and denigrate the oppressed from the rest of society, desensitize people to the suffering of the oppressed, and shift blame from the role of capital and systemic processes and forces in determining social and economic exclusion, placing blame on the victims of oppression themselves, through demonizing and pathologizing them, creating crazy-making, flourish.

If a Black person shows his/her discomfort, the White person says that the Black person must be 'sensitive' ? 'paranoid' ? responding not to the present environment, but to something in the past. They want to hear that the White people in this environment (themselves) are fine. It's the Black person who's crazy (Derricotte, 1997: 43, 146).

Racism is not an artifact of the past. It is a process operating in the present.

In any context, oppression becomes a story of 'struggle and submission.' What is made present is made possible by what is absent (Razack, 1999).

History is living. Colonialism is not dead. And it is replayed through embodied identities.

This is the idea of a living history.

There is a mutuality of that experience for both the colonizer and the colonized. As Maya Angelou said "I was theirs and they were mine. I sang the race memory and we were united in centuries of belonging."

The research has shown that trauma is certainly experienced, though differently, by victims and perpetrators. Trauma is usually written from an individual perspective, but it is also a collective phenomenon.

And as most traumas, when one touches a hotspot there is a reaction, the edge of chaos, a painful, fearful, panicked tear, in the fabric of assumptions and personal beliefs. For trauma even if it is not remembered, is lived and re-lived.

Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.

Collectively we participate in the dynamics of trauma by both silencing and cutting off the unspeakable events of our history and continually repeating them. This silencing is Canada's crisis of collective living memory: The memory and acknowledgement of current race, racism, exclusion of bodies, and exclusion of histories.

Trauma begins with an event or series of events, an experience that is beyond the edge of what it is possible to include in our identities, as individuals, and as communities.

The ordinary response is to banish the atrocities from consciousness. While one part of us goes ahead however, the traumatic event remains until it can be witnessed.

What we have learned about Whiteness and Blackness remains embodied.

Silence is a common dynamic of trauma. It is an active ingredient in the planning and carrying out of an atrocity.

Falling into silence is often experienced as feelings of awe, sadness, impotence, hopelessness, disinterest, lending to hardly recognizing its role.

But the nightmare of embodied history does not go away. The silence sustains it. The injustice and trauma remain invisible in the fabric of our collective and personal selves and actions.

As our selves search for manifest truth, we need to include our emotional and traumatic histories to connect emotionally rather than to be numb and disconnected.

As Blacks and Whites, we are bound in the tragedy, and also in the germination of a seed of redemption, if only we can face and tell the whole story, past and present.

An orientation is required that is at first personal and communal. It is essential to have a heart big enough to go deeply into painful issues.

The telling of Africa is a global tale. After all, the human story begins in Africa. World history in Africa places it in the center rather than on historical margins. Reaching back to ancient Africa the world would be completing a global human story, with cultural continuity with the present. Reaching through the myths to the truths of colonialism past and present, we would be germinating the seed, by breaking the silence.

The African diaspora is one of the early sites where capitalist ties simultaneously created systems of exploitation and global economy. And it is also a story of labour, and a celebration of resistance. It is to these silenced and invisible workers and their psychological and personal daily resistance that I would like to honour with this presentation, the mothers, the factory workers, the migrant labourers, the unemployed reserve labourers, the plantation workers, the miners, and the children who witness and experience the daily pain of racism and oppression on their families.

To Maya Angelou's quote I would add, to fellow survivors of dire oppression, and to Whites, bound in humanity:

"I am my beloved and my beloved is mine".

Alicia Maund, 2007