A Selected History of the Political and Economic Development of the United States (which is the Development of White Supremacy in the United States )

The history of the United States has, unfortunately, not always reflected its noblest ideals. Our history has been marred by legislation, business practices, and outright wars to protect white interests. The United States is the rich country it is today, in large part, because of these racist - and often brutal - economic and political policies. These policies have operated to support the exploitation of people of color in part by failing to compensate them for their stolen property, land and labor.

A few historical examples follow.

America became white-the people who, as they claim ‘settled' the country became white-because of the necessity of denying the Black presence and justifying the Black subjugation.

James Baldwin, “On Being White and Other Lies”

1492 – Columbus arrives and subsequently rapes and murders the indigenous people and steals their land.

1670s – Virginia passes legislation in reaction to Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, a multiracial rebellion in which African slaves and white indentured servants rose up together against their upper class oppressors. This legislation marks the first time the political concept of “white people” exists. The Virginia assembly passed a law stating that even if a slave converted to Christianity, they would still remain a slave (Segrest, p. 195). Previously, a major rationale for slavery was that it was acceptable to enslave non-Christians, and those who converted would win their freedom. Eventually, however, in order to maintain an enslaved labor force, “wealthy planters…changed their rationale for enslaving people to something permanent, to skin color (Jordan, 1974; Wood, 1996 in Brown, p.10). Historian Winthrop Jordan traces the shift from the term Christian to (at mid-century) English and free to (after about 1680) the new term white (Segrest, p. 195).

1705 – Virginia consolidated many statutes into a “ slave code ” (Segrest, p. 195). The slave codes made it possible for white people to own property, vote, own guns, testify, own people, to have freedom of movement, political power and to inherit goods. These were the very things that black people could not do by law. The slave codes also stated that only white people could marry (and only to other white people) and that children born to slaves were slaves, thus further ensuring a source of labor. (Thanks to Antiracism for Global Justice for my understanding here).

Mid 1700s – Slave ships left New England for Africa with rum to trade for slaves, “then sailed to the Caribbean and traded slaves for molasses, bringing that back to Massachusetts to distill into rum, with big profits made from each transaction. This slave trade helped develop the northern naval industry and distilleries and created a market for agricultural and manufacturing exports” (Segrest, p. 194)

1787 – Racism wrote into the United States Constitution with the “3/5 Compromise" which counted slaves as 3/5 of a person for the sake of representation in the House of Representatives. This tactic increased white slaveowners' votes.

1845 – Mexico cedes California, New Mexico, Nevada, parts of Colorado, Arizona and Utah for only $15 million after war provoked by United States. Rights for former Mexican citizens (included in Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo) not respected (Segrest, p.205).

1862 – The Homestead Act divided up 40 million acres of Native Americans' land for white people. Many poor white people got free land, making the act a divide and conquer strategy, not unlike the Virginia slave codes. (Thanks to Antiracism for Global Justice for my understanding here).

1882 – Chinese Exclusion Act passed by Congress “barring the entry of Chinese laborers into the country and denying them the vote and citizenship.” This after the Chinese built the western section of the transcontinental railroads (hard work that whites refused to do), and were subjected to work “in mining camps, back-breaking agricultural production and manufacturing in western cities” (Segrest, p. 210).

1887 – Dawes Severalty Act “intended to break up communally owned reservation land and allow for purchase of ‘surplus' by white settlers, leading to a decline in reservation land from 138 million acres in 1887 to seventy-eight million in 1900” (Segrest, p. 211).

Late 1800s – Cotton was the product being sold on the international market for extra capital, thus “the entire economy depended for its growth on the cotton trade, which depended on stolen Indian land and unpaid African labor” (Segrest, p.203).

The development of capitalism is inextricably linked with the development of racism and vice versa. Click here to read some voices of white antiracists on capitalism.

References________________________________________________________________

Antiracism for Global Justice, a project of the Challenging White Supremacy workshops. (April 2003). Confronting Racism for White Anti-war Activists. Workshop conducted in San Francisco, CA .

Brown, Cynthia Stokes. (2002). Refusing Racism White Allies and the Struggle for Civil Rights. New York: Teachers College Press.

Segrest, Mab. (1994). Memoir of a Race Traitor. Boston: South End Press.