By Dr, Claud Anderson
The totality of black peoples' existence and condition in America stems directly form a national public designed by white society to control and use black labor to build a new a new nation.
The public policy on the use of blacks developed incrementally until it became like an onion with many layers. It began taking shape in 1619 and evolved into a systematic, mandated social arrangement that dictated the behavior of both blacks and whites.
The policy's core principle stipulated that blacks were to be used as a well-disciplined, uncompensated, subordinated, noncompetitive, permanent labor class that existed on the margins of society.
The national public policy determined black peoples' human worth and status as well as their educational and political opportunities and their cultural and family values.
The dominant white society's national public policy explicitly and implicitly defined how blacks were to be treated and used.
Public policy is important for blacks to study because it gives clear insight into the process and methods that the dominant society used to establish absolute control over millions of blacks as a laboring class.
But equally important, it shows blacks who are seeking to gain power through community organizing the way whites constructed a national black policy and plan. Understanding that plan is essential to the shaping of a new public policy for blacks.
The public policy was formulated from racial dogmas and doctrines that justified the policy. The doctrine of racial superiority legitimized the exclusion and segregation of blacks from mainstream white society.
The doctrine of noninterference dissuaded governments and social institutions from using their resources and power to stop the abuse of black people.
And the doctrine of expendability promoted the belief that black life was non-sacred and that there was nothing wrong with using blacks for the betterment and protection of white life. These policy doctrine and dogmas continue to determine the quality of life for whites and blacks in America today.
How the National Policy on Blacks Developed
European culture set the stage of the exploitative use of black Africans, and the social and physical conditions of life in the New World drove the English to construct an aggressive strategy to enslave them.
No single factor compelled Europeans to seek out blacks to serve as labor class of the New World. Many factors converged simultaneously.
The English people, like most Europeans, harbored racist attitudes towards black people long before the first settlers arrived on the North American continent.
The European traders and explorers to Africa had brought back stories about "The Dark Continent" and its dark-skinned "heathens." The 17th century Anglo-Saxon culture was filled with anti-black terms, and the first English settlers brought their prejudices with them to America.
The first 20 black entered Jamestown in 1619 on Dutch warship. Whether or not these black were slaves in a matter of interpretation, because the records from that period are scant.
But it is reasonable to assume that they were not considered slaves initially. They had been rescued from a Portuguese slave-trade vessel by the Dutch warship. They were brought to Jamestown and the Dutch captain exchange them for food and ship supplies.
If the Dutch captain indebted the blacks in the exchange, it was probably as indentured servants, because records revealed that within five years, these blacks were free to buy land, carry weapons, go to court, attend church and generally socialize with settlers until the late 1630s.
The cycle of black degeneration in the American colonies was well under way by the late 1630s. Labor was critical. No one was available to do the backbreaking work, not even the free blacks.
Word of the terrible work condition had gotten back to Europe and whites refused to come to America as indentured servants. Colonial courts and legislative assemblies had begun to enact punitive legislation or rulings against blacks or any whites who consorted with them.
As discussed earlier in Mr. Anderson's book, the Maryland colony set the stage for black slavery in America by issuing a government policy that singled black out for subordinate and exclusionary treatment.
Based upon available records, scatted incidences of Indian, white and black slavery were appearing in the Maryland colony as early as 1634. But four years later, in 1638, the first public edict or policy against blacks was issued by the Maryland Colonial Assembly.
That edict declared that neither the original 20 free blacks "nor their offspring shall be permitted to enjoy the fruits of white society." This Maryland edict became the founding public policy for the use and treatment of blacks from which white racism, Jim Crowism and segregation later grew.
A Broad Community Need Shapes the Public Policy
An abundance of free land and a shortage of labor made involuntary labor the key to white survival. Those who owned the largest tracts of undeveloped land could not convert the huge tracts into productive, profitable agricultural businesses with out the assistance of a disciplined, strong, expendable and preferably unpaid work force.
Without such a labor force, it was questionable whether the colonies could survive, let alone prosper. Neither Indian nor white indentured servants would do the laborious work. Abound labor force was the logical solution.
The Maryland public edict on blacks took on greater importance as the colonial settlers realized that they possibly had the key to their common labor problem in the use of black people as their uncompensated workers. The labor problem was resolved in 1665, when all of the existing colonies enacted law to enslave blacks.
The Maryland colonies' original edict was expanded into a public policy on blacks, stipulating that "black people shall constitute an available, uncompensated, noncompetitive, well-disciplined, permanently
subordinated work force, which shall be separated from the white society." England supported the colonies’ enactment of slavery laws by establishing a full-scale international slave trading industry to provide them with a dependable supply of black slaves.
The primary purpose of forced black labor was to bring whites' newly acquired land to productivity and value by clearing the forest, building the houses, raising the crops, tending the livestock, preparing the food and raising and comforting the white families. Second, the slaves were to supply England’s industries with valuable cash crops and commodities.
After the 1660s, all of the colonies had written black enslavement into their statutes. England, as the mother country and the overseer of the colonies, was the first to codify the colonies' public policy on black slavery into an act passed in 1667 call the "Act to Regulate the Negroes on British Plantations."
Besides regulating the slave trading industry, this act introduced the concept of black as personal property and advocated strict and severe treatment of slaves. A doctrine of black expendability was explicitly advocated in the Act, which granted white society the right to brand, whip, or actually kill enslaved blacks.
Four years later, in 1671, another Maryland act strengthened the public policy by enacting the doctrine of noninterference. This doctrine notified religious organizations that religious conversions baptisms of slaves, before or after importation to North America, did not entitle the slaves to freedom as some slaves had hoped.
This noninterference doctrine was later expanded under the concept of "personal property rights," which soothed the fears of slave owners, who were concerned about losing their investment in any slaves who converted to Christianity.
The colonies devoted the next 20 years to perfecting a public policy that defined with mathematical precision, what individuals, races or ethnic groups would be slaves and how they were to be treated.
By 1705, Virginia produced a codification of laws applying to slaves call "The Slave Codes," which standardized the public policy on blacks as well as white behavior toward blacks.
The code imbued the public policy on blacks with a new kind of social arrangement of accountability with the white community. I not only established rules of conduct with specified penalties for slaves, but it also implied a code of conduct for all white person
in their relations with blacks. It prohibited any white person from committing any act that elevated the status of blacks or demonstrated leniency in the treatment of slaves. The Slave Codes were premised in the belief that humility and weakness in the treatment of slaves anywhere was a threat to slavery and white privileged life-style everywhere.
The Slave Codes reinforced the public policy. Giving it substance and statutory authority. In the South, the policy gave rise to a unique racial code of etiquette that prescribed the status, role and expected behavior for both blacks and whites.
The new racial etiquette gave respectability to the policy. Law were enacted that required newspapers, businesses and social organizations to be ever mindful of the policy and to publicize the code of etiquette. Often clergymen were required to read both of them to their congregations.
The primary purpose of the code of etiquette was to support the public policy on the use of blacks by requiring that all whites act superior to blacks at all times and that blacks give deference to whites and act inferior to them at all times.
The secondary purpose of the code and public policy was to make it possible for whites to exercise effective control over blacks and to strengthen the sense of white unity.
In 1787, the drafters of the U.S. Constitution incorporated colonial public policy on blacks into the founding documents of the new nation, making it the slave holder's friend by recognizing and legitimizing black enslavement.
The concept of black as proper and the doctrine of noninterference appeared as three interconnected clauses in the Constitution, which of course, served as the legal basis of the nation.
The Constitution declared blacks to be three-fifths of a person prohibited Congress form outlawing the slave trade for 20 years and bound the states to assist in returning fugitive slaves to their masters.
The drafters made it clear that the government was the legal instrument of white society and that it should be powerless to interfere with black enslavement within the states or with foreign slave trading practices. Yet on the other hand, it was also mandated to exercise its full powers to protect the white slave holders' investment in slave properties.
Until the Revolutionary War, the public policy on the use of black labor evolved primarily from the tobacco-growing region supported by commercial interest. The profitability of slavery declined until Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793. In the midst of Europe's Industrial Revolution, the cotton gin increased the popularity of cotton and black slavery. At the time, wool was the primary fabric because cotton was scarce and generally very expensive.
The cotton gin made American-produced cotton the king of agricultural products and the primary fabric of the world. This surge in cotton’s popularity re-shackled blacks to America's plantations.
Businesses and industries associated with and dependent upon black slavery sprang up throughout the North and South.
The renewed economic dependence on black labor demanded support form the public and private sectors. White society became more dependent than ever on black labor for creating wealth an income. Moreover, it became more determined to keep blacks subordinate, unskilled, noncompetitive and excluded from white society
The Civil War Modified the Public Policy
By the mid-1800s, the North insisted on change in the public policy on black labor because Northern workers could not compete with the uncompensated slave labor of the South. The South refused and the nation went to war. The national public policy was in limbo from immediately after the Civil War until the late 1890s.
During this period, the South had no official labor force or public policy on the use of blacks. Emancipation legally said blacks were no longer personal property.
Newly-freed slaves sought to break free of the old public policy. They demanded the 40 acres and a mule that they had been promised as compensation for their years of unpaid labor. Blacks wanted to leave slavery prepared to be self-sufficient and productive.
However, to break free of the old national public would require the government to give millions of black unused public lands or portions of the old Southern plantations for homesteading.
For the newly-freed slaves to be competitive, they needed quality school systems to help them shake off centuries of forced ignorance. And to protect them from the animosities of their old en-slavers and enemies, the newly-freed slaves needed legal and police protection, since they were never permitted to bear arms.
However, blacks received none of these things, because the national public policy on blacks as a labor force was unchanged by the Civil War. Both the North and the South had needs for a low-paid, intellectually noncompetitive labor force.
In reconciling postwar differences, the North adopted the public policy of its Southern brothers on the treatment of blacks. There was never any serious effort to give blacks any measure of economic independence or to compensate them for their generation of unpaid labor.
As a Washington, D.C. newspaper noted in 1868, "It is impossibility to separate the question of color from the question of labor, for the reason that the majority of the laborers…. throughout the southern states are colored people and nearly all of the colored people are at present laborers.
To change blacks’ status as laborers would cause changes in society's political and social ordering of acceptability. Thus, the North and the South collectively agreed to continue, but modify, the basic tenets undergirding the public policy on blacks.
The black freedmen were penniless, uneducated, homeless and friendless in a hostile South. Without land reparation or tools, they had little choice except to offer the market their only resource themselves.
As an available, trained, cheap labor force, blacks stepped into a predictable future. The Southern states enacted the Black Codes, which revised the national public policy on blacks, forcing them into sharecropping on Southern farms under the control of former slaveholders.
The Black Codes effectively modified the public policy by substituting sharecropping for slavery. It also fixed black people in a subordinate place in the social order and provided white society with a manageable and inexpensive labor force. The principle behind the national public policy remain intact and survives to this day.
The Public Policy During the Civil Rights Era
The latest great change in the national public police came in the early 1960s and coincided with the Civil Rights Movement, which championed the awakening of black America during what became known as the "decade of progress" between 1955 and 1965.
Black won the battle to attend white schools, sit at white lunchroom counters and sit in bus seats that had historically been reserved for whites only. Little notice was given amidst the celebrating, to the fact that the income gap between black and whites was widening, the two societies were growing more segregated than ever,
black were losing their few businesses and disposable incomes to white suburban stores and black unemployment was beginning to skyrocket.
The integration accomplishments of blacks had coincided with the new phase of the public policy on blacks obsolescence.
For the first time in the history of the nation, blacks were "free: from white society's prescribed labor role. Major advances in technology became the magic bullet that freed the larger white society dependence on black labor.
The two groups' newfound freedoms caused major adjustments in black-white relations. White society's shift away from its dependence on black labor noted by Alvin Toffler in his book, Powershif.
Toffler asserted, "The most important economic development of this lifetime was the use of a new system of creating wealth based no longer on muscles, but on minds."
Whites began moving toward a color blind society, where new labor-saving machine replaced the need for black muscles and sweat. Machines were less offensive and threatening.
It was unlikely that new labor-saving machines would champion equality, integration or civil rights. Instead, new technology provided a bridge from the Old World to the
New World and freed the dominate white society from its old ways of thinking about race relations, its old ideologies and its public policies.
New World technology pushed white society into a new public policy for blacks. Few unskilled jobs were left in white businesses and industries.
Simultaneously, conservative and liberal white politicians alike claimed that since the Civil Rights Movement had succeeded in giving black their social and legal Rights, there was nothing else anyone could do for blacks. Blacks were therefore, finally free, but obsolete.
Implementing the public Policy
Eight major factors appear to have driven the public policy on the use and treatment of blacks across the centuries.
1. The European colonies were predisposed by their native culture to have negative feelings about blackness and black people;
2. They established a public edict that was based around a common need, that, if resolved, would be beneficial to all members of white society;
3. White society refined and vigorously supported a coherent public policy on black that was transmitted form generation to generation, through laws and social customs;
4. The policy was codified by official governmental acts;
5. It was concertedly supported by all levels of government, schools, churches, business and the larger general society;
6. A sense of community accountability for supporting the public policy was establish;
7. The public policy received total commitment from all segment of the community;
8. The public policy was continuously promoted and coordinated by institutions and other entities.
As a result of these factors, a consensus was reached on how blacks were to be treated. The public policy was expanded and modified incrementally.
The adjustment continued over the centuries based upon the broad labor needs of white society. The nature of the modifications can be tracked to some extent by the historical developments of the nation.
When new opportunities and challenges demanded human labor in agricultural fields of the South, the range lands of the West, the factories of the
North or the military battle fronts all around the globe, the appropriate government or white institution made sure that black labor force was available and in the forefront.
Role of Societal Institutions
All of the societal institutions supported the established public policy for the use of blacks. The churches, schools, businesses and governments joined in the alliance against blacks.
They were parts of a larger social network that systematically concentrated power, wealth, authority and resources in the hands of white society and consigned blacks to a subordinate and exploited status.
The churches offered biblical justification for black enslavement, denouncing blacks as heathens and bearing the mark of Ham.
They preached the doctrines of white superiority and black inferiority and excluded blacks from or segregated them within the congregations.
Within the churches founded by blacks, ministers internalized their conditions, taught blacks meekness and resignation and a nonviolent strategy for gaining access to their rights and white-owned and white controlled resources.
Educational institutions carried out their essential purpose of servicing the economic ends of white society. They prepared white children to be leaders and masters of their own fate. White youths were taught academic skills, cultural values and the pragmatic responsibilities of leadership.
The schools passed on the doctrine of white superiority and black inferiority to both races. Black children suffered centuries of planned ignorance. During slavery, it was illegal to teach black to read; today they attend inferior, ill-equipped schools.
American businesses played a role in tailoring the national policy on blacks to their wealth-building interests. They formulated new economic principle of capitalism that defined blacks as human commodities and their labor as cheap tools to produce great wealth.
American government functioned as a guardian of white wealth and power. White society used government power to enhance or maintain their own privileged positions and to reduce the social and economic status and potential of blacks.
Government guaranteed white control over the fruits of black labor and control over the work process. Government later sustained the inequities by perpetuating the myth of equal opportunity.
Once the public policy for black was established, all members of the alliance were committed to vigorously supporting it, whatever the cost. A sense of commitment to the policy was part of the broad sense of white community cohesiveness.
Attacks on or violations of the policy anywhere were an offense against the policy everywhere. The South was so committed that its members preferred to secede from the Union and engage in a Civil War before altering the policy.
Psychological and Social Conditioning Process
The national public policy on black was structured to incorporate the psychological and social conditioning process for blacks and whites that evolved over the course of American history.
Slave holders' absolute power over black allowed them to operate an efficient and effective slavery conditioning system.
Slaveholders constructed internal control on slaves that minimized the external force necessary to control them. The government provided the environment for the legal framework that allowed the conditioning process to exist and operate for 250 years.
The slaveholders conditioned black to serve as good slaves. The effects carried over into the freed black society and affect the general behavior of black as a race of people. In
Mr. Anderson’s book, you will find a Table 10 in chapter 7 which will indicate some of the major goals, techniques and strategies employed in the conditioning process that forged a helpless, submissive and manageable labor force.
The process was designed to instill in blacks strict discipline, a sense of inferiority, belief in the slave owners' superior power, acceptance of the owners' standards and a deep sense of a slave's helplessness and dependence.
The slave owners strove to cut blacks off from their own history, culture, language and community, and to inculcate white society’s value system. That blacks are still burdened by the legacies of such conditioning speaks to its effectiveness.
Though some slaves resisted, the system worked because the majority of slaves gave passive approval and cooperation to the slaveholder. That in turn made slavery more profitable and permanent.
Had slaves been determined not to cooperate and to sabotage production regardless of the cost to themselves and their families, they undoubtedly would have changed the course of history, and perhaps spared their descendants centuries of suffering.
Meritorious Manumission
Meritorious Manumission was the legal act of freeing a slave for a good deeds as defined by the national public policy. Meritorious Manumission could be granted to a slave who distinguished himself by saving the life of a white master,
inventing a new medicine or snitching on fellow slaves. This was a destructive weapon in the slave holder's arsenal, and a powerful component of the public policy.
The importance that whites placed on black informants is emphatically demonstrated by a rare monument that the town of Harper's Ferry erected to honor Hayward Sheppard, a black man, who was killed by a totally committed abolitionist John Brown and his raiding partly shortly before the beginning of the Civil War.
There is more to in this chapter, however I would like to get the next insert in
Keeping Blacks in Minority Status
While society has always placed a great deal of importance in maintaining power and control through numerical dominance. Since the public policy stressed keeping blacks in a controlled subordinate state, the national immigration laws, beginning with the first on in 1790, were used as control tools.
Immigration policies and laws kept the black population below the white comfort level usually less than eight percent.
During the 20 year preceding the Revolutionary War, the colonial settlers were extremely fearful of the uncontrolled number of black slaves being shipped into the country. By 1750, the percentage of the total national population that black had reached nearly a third.
Black slave revolts were on the increase and British military officers encouraged slaves to rise up against the slave owners. Ironically, none did, though they had good opportunities during the Revolutionary War.
In Congress to enact a law that mandated taking a population census and publishing the results every 10 years. Census data monitored social, economic and political changes according to race and provided the government with a database for designing public policies.
In Mr. Anderson's book you will see Table 11 outlining the legal means that were used by whites during the past 200 years to skillfully manipulate social circumstance to maintain the population status quo between them and blacks.
Mr. Anderson goes on to say. "There never has been and never will be a black refugee program, no matter how desperate or life-threatening the circumstances are that they are fleeing.
The nation's total black population has climbed to 12.4 percent, which is above whites' eight percent comfort range and dangerously close to their take action 15 percent tipping point. If history is any indicator, the majority society will initiate measures to reduce or increase their control over
America's black population at their whim. Ironically black Africa constitutes 12.4 percent of the world population.
In order to develop a plan for self-empowerment, complete with goals and policies, blacks must understand the public policy model and doctrines that were used against them in order to empower white society.
The model used by white America was very successful. Just as whites have done, black must now unashamedly protect their self-interest, pursue real power and wealth and shape themselves into a politically and economically competitive group in America.
The greatest challenge to black America is to do what blacks have never been permitted to do in the past. Through centuries of slave insurrections, civil rights demonstrations and urban riots, blacks have never had a public policy or clearly identifiable goal.
They have not developed a public policy on how they are going to deal with racism, where they intend to go as a people and how best to get there. This public policy ought to be broadly disseminated to all blacks and inter-linked with all levels of black communities across America.
All segments should be involve in designing strategies and supporting the pubic policy. Rather than reinventing the wheel, blacks should use white society’s model for establishing public policy, because it was very successful.
Conclusion
Black Americans have always been a compassionate and caring people. They should continue to do so. But it is now time for them to put their own interests first, if they are to have any chance of changing their negative living conditions.
Black America must develop strategies and programs that serve their interest and allow them to both develop and protest themselves within a society that historically committed harmful acts against them. Until black obsolescence was reached about 20 years ago, black had limited ability to organize,
because they lacked capitol, leadership and resources and they were restrained by an economic system that still had a use for them. Now that black labor is nonessential and expendable, blacks as a group are vulnerable and expendable.
A national plan for black empowerment should focus on blacks' becoming politically and economically competitive by acquiring increased wealth and resource power. The greatest challenge to black America is to do what it has never done before.
Through the centuries of slavery, Jim Crowism, the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power period, blacks have never had a public policy or racial goals to effectively deal with racism.
Instead of an empowerment plan, new generations of black have inherited the vestiges of failed 1960s strategy. Three major failings deserve highlighting;
- First, black leadership mistakenly believed that by removing Jim Crow symbols that racism would effectively die;
- Second they thought integration would make them equal and give them control of resources and power;
- Third they failed to construct long-term institutions, with long-term goals that could transcend generational lines and produce and produce a never-ending flow of competent, well-informed new talent. Young blacks must have a public policy and a plan for direction. All segments of the community churches, schools, businesses and community organizations – must be coordinated nationally by an institute with an intellectual infrastructure.
Modeling the methods used by whites, black must develop an accountability system to make sure that all blacks support the goals of the plan.
Blacks will have to be equally as determined and committed to public policy on black self-empowerment as white society has been to public policy on the use of blacks. Black must willing to apply social sanctions and other penalties against those who violate the public policy for blacks.
The black empowerment plan must be based upon a vision of vigorously competing in a changing world. The plan must go beyond the dream of equality and integration, which hangs before them like a carrot on a stick
Posted By: Sylvainy R
Tuesday, June 2nd 2015 at 3:26PM
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