The Ancestors Rationale for Using Race as an Identifier in America “So then, the African and his progeny reviewed the facts as they knew them. They examined the role of the European and the white American and weighed them in the balance with that of their African colleagues. The African and his enslaved descendants considered all the evidence carefully and over the decades worked through all of the inconsistencies and contradictions. Versions were compared and edited by the “committee of the whole.” Accounts passed from mouth to ear all the way from Virginia to Texas. White southerners, so engaged in managing the machinery of plantation agriculture and slavery as the principal means of social control (at least from 1830 on), were quite unaware that right beneath their noses their supposed chattel were engaged in a complicated process of analyzing, debating, and collating their experiences. It was a mammoth undertaking, this business of arriving at an evaluation that was truthful as well didactic [intended to instruct]. From the waters along the Carolina coast, the call would go forth, containing in it the collective experiences of Africans taken to Charleston; and from the swamps and plantations of the lower Mississippi, the response would eventually come, having absorbed the vantage points of the Carolinas and merged them with their own. By way of the domestic trade here, through the pathways of escape there, slaves throughout the South exchanged data and created syntheses. Eventually, consensus was reached. A verdict was rendered. The white man was found guilty of guile [insidious, treacherous cunning], guilty of violence, guilty of horrors unimaginable. This is the fundamental truth that the African-born wanted their offspring to understand about the initial capture. This, the red cloth tales teach, is the underlying significance of the slave trade.” “And in the process of collation and revision, something transformative took place. The collective perspective of the African-based population made a conscious decision concerning the question of group identity. They took a decisive step toward embracing race over ethnicity. Not that the decision was universally adopted everywhere, or that everyone gravitated to it with similar speed. But to the degree that African Americans concluded that white folks bore responsibility for the evils of slavery, and to the extent that African Americans agreed to leave out the slave trader’s African analogue in the equation of culpability, African Americans were essentially saying that they saw white people, whether from America or Europe, whether French-or Spanish-or English-speaking, as one and the same. African Americans were saying that although there were differences in the details, the experiences of Africans of all backgrounds and regions were sufficiently similar to cast them all as a common ordeal. African Americans, whether their parents were Igbo or Akan, had begun to see the world in like manner. To the degree that all of the above is true, African Americans had taken a definitive turn toward viewing race as the great American divide.” “To be sure, continuities that hearkened back to very specific ethnic heritages remained within the community. Without question, certain policies adopted by the slaveocracy that either used or exacerbated ethnic distinctions resulted in class and caste distinctions within the community. It is precisely the argument here that the reformulation of an African American identity was not at all thoroughgoing. Africans brought to North America did not conceive of human society in terms of race; however, by the end of legalized slavery, the concept of race had crystallized in the community. The transition was therefore made during slavery, notwithstanding its incomplete or unfinished quality. And this transition is implicit in the African American version of the initial capture.” Michael A. Gomez “Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South” Page 208
Posted on: Sun, 07 Jul 2013 17:11:57 +0000