Thank Capitalism for Racists
How to talk about race when your family owned slaves—for realz!
Y’all, I’ve been tripping that last week, after finding out my great to the fourth granz was a slaveholder who thought it was cool to leave her Negro hostages to her grandkids in her will. The levels of fucked-up-ed-ness keeps gaining by the day. My family was in Alabama and South Carolina, mind y’all, and those was some of the worst states when it came to making slavery seem normal. Like 40-50% of households in S.C. had kidnapped Africans forced into labor. I don’t have that many slaveholders in my family, but the ones I did, went big!
Even if I didn’t have White ancestors, there was that tiny less than one percent of Black people who also “owned” people. It was what you did for the first three centuries and the first 100 years that the United States of America officially existed. There was a certain amount of White Supremacy at work in that, but I really don’t think slavery was about racism. White Supremacy was invented to pacify poor people—dubbed “White.” Poor people didn’t own “slaves.” This is why, unfortunately, the image that comes to mind when we think of racists is the toothless “red neck.” It took a violent coercion to get poor Whites onboarded with racism.
Rich people may not be racist, at least not like you imagine your KKK member dreaming of the good old days. Rich people sure did and sure continue to benefit from racism. Hell, I benefit from the fact it’s acceptable for brown people (mostly women and children) in poor countries to be exploited for they labor, in pseudo-slave conditions. As long as capitalism continues to run on everybody being a little bit racist, there’s never going to be the political will to do anything about racism.
It’s become easy for people to conflate racism with slavery, and then let themselves off the hook, ‘cause no one in their family—and sure as fuck they—never owned any Black people. Black people let themselves off the hook for racism ‘cause they Black. White people of culture and breeding, who benefit the most from racism—even today—let themselves off the hook, because they don’t carry internalized bias against Black people. At least, they don’t think they do. That’s how clever the system was designed: Everybody thinks the problem is “them.” Everyone also seems to accept their part as unavoidable, like the world will fall apart without it. More on that another day.
For now, maybe we need to take our minds off racism (which has too easily become the central idea in social unrest these days) and get our eyes back on the ball of slowing the destruction of the planet (which, by the way, impacts way more Black lives than renegade policing). Tell me, if I’ve got this wrong.
Peace
