Shut Up and Dribble

 In Search of the Truth

One ever feels his twoness, —an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The History of the American Negro is the history of this strive-this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. (Du Bois 1903/2009: 6-7)

 
Our journey into the truth starts with the musings of W.E.B. Dubois as he struggled to explain the contradictory place Blacks found themselves.  Being at once at odds with themselves a creature of two worlds.  To be African and American, to be both object and subject.  To exist in a space of “double-consciousness” of being and not being, of reacting and acting, of being the constant shadow always on the verge of becoming.  Herein lies the truth of race as it is experienced and lived.  It is both external and internally defined, yet always problematized for those who have been minoritized, racialized, and scrutinized for the act of being and becoming. 

In this chapter, we shall travel both roads.  One charted by imperialist theorists whose primary job was to justify, explain, and buttress racial imperialism that came into being.  The other charted by those subject populations that refused to be subjugated, sublimated, and subjected to externally defined identities.  Their writings challenge the myth of otherness, inferiority, and racialized realities.
The racial construction of the other - Liberalism, Conservatism, and Race
 
“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”
          -- Samuel Johnson^[1]
 
Classical European philosophers were central to developing the concept of race and racial ideologies and defining and characterizing human groups through these differences.  (Valls, 2005; Lott and Ward, 2002) Classical philosophers (from about 1600 to 1900), while in partial agreement regarding the origins, characteristics, types, or mutability associated with each race, were nevertheless consistent in their recognition of the existence of such groups.  (See, for example, Kant 1796/2006; Boxill 2005)
 
Racial categories originated in imperialism and justifications for colonial racial policies and practices.  Colonies were controlled directly through settlements or indirectly through exploitative outposts under the military’s and merchants’ authority.
 
Each colonial form provided a different ideological justification for developing racial designations and constructions.  These colonial models gave rise to two various ideological reasons: classical liberalism and classical conservatism.
 
·        Classical liberalism was a product of unique political and religious traditions that fostered specific institutional structures.  (Parry 2009) Famous liberals included such intellectuals as Adam Smith, John Locke, and Thomas Jefferson. 
 
·        Classical conservatism, as Greiffenhagen (2009) pointed out, unlike either liberalism or socialism^[2], was a product of multiple political traditions, religious patterns, or unique institutional structures.  Foremost classical conservative intellectuals included Thomas Hobbes, Joseph de Maistre, and James Madison.  (Fawcett 2020) These three produced interesting alternative justifications for identifying people by race. 
 
Consequently, the conservatism that developed in Britain focused on natural law, while French and German conservatism developed in opposition to natural law.  Ironically, the U.S. represents a particular case and a blend of French liberalism and English conservatism.
 
But in each case, imperialism, colonialism, the genocide of Indigenous populations, forced slavery, and racial hierarchies were justified.  More recently, conservative variants occurring in Germany, Italy, and later Japan were fundamental to the rise of fascism.
 
This chapter will explore the origins of classical liberalism, while the next will investigate classical conservatism.  In the process, we shall discover how race, racial imperialism, and racial nations were created.
 
The Origins of Classical Liberalism
The ideas associated with liberalism date back to at least the Middle Ages, as various intellectuals began to consider the rights and responsibilities of being a citizen of a nation.  For example, such requests during the Middle Ages were derived from birth and determined one’s place in the hierarchical social system.
In the 16^th century, as commercialization, industrialization, and urbanization intensified across Europe, traditional power structures such as the church, the divine right of kings, and the fixed hierarchies determined at birth, began to be challenged and gradually dissolved.
As the ruling elite tried to preserve and expand their power, more regressive policies were instituted, which resulted in ever-increasing wars among the European royal families.
During this same period, merchants and industrialists ascended as a newly- emerging middle class.  All of this led to the significant revolutions that radically transformed England and France in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, most notably, the English Civil Wars (1642-51), the Glorious Revolution (1688), the American Revolution (1775-83) and the French Revolution (1790).  With the various “revolutions” taking place across Europe, existing proto-racial identities and biases were transformed as they became reinterpreted and imbued into the newly forming nation-states.
The conflict between these significant forces defined the new racial realities, starting with the “Jewish Question.” Hostility toward Jews, prevalent in both major ideological streams, produced reactionary political elements.  The results almost splintered the major ideological movements -- with some embracing Jewish emancipation and others provoking opposition.
Strangely, the most contentious battles were within the so-called liberal movements.  As we approached the end of the 18^th century, political fractures had occurred, and a novel word and action came into being: antisemitism.
But unlike historical anti-Jewish hatred based primarily on religion, the modern version was political and targeted people.  The new victims and conflicts were directly associated with Europe’s transformation from a static agrarian world into an increasingly industrial and urban one.  The release of peasants from feudal estates served to pit them against the Jews.
Nation-building, made possible by imperial expansion, intensified these conflicts, as diverse peoples from different regions were now racialized.  (Steiman 2012)  Classical liberalism and conservatism provided competing ideological frameworks that were both antecedents to and products of the various revolutions. 

 Source: File: World empires and colonies around World War I.png - Wikimedia Commons

Every prominent classical liberal theorist, from John Locke and Adam Smith to Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill, was explicitly racist.  Locke, often considered the father of liberalism, was a significant investor in the African slave trade.  (Buccus 2020) One of the influential architects of English colonial policy, he proposed enacting legislation that would guarantee that “every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves.” (Locke 1823: vol x, 196)  

Liberalism provided sanctuary for the ideas of European Imperialism and the ideological justification and lynchpin by which racism, genocide, and Western expansion found expression.  The genocide was quick, as deliberate policies strove to eliminate Indigenous peoples and cultures from the Americas to the Pacific Islands, the Horn of Africa to the Pacific Rim, and the Middle East to Asia.

Charles Mills critiques liberalism with racism in what he terms the “racial contract.” Enlightenment, from which liberalism derives, also produced slavery, colonialism, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and racial oppression targeting all non-Europeans.  The racial contract that included racism, racial identities, racial ideas/ideologies, and systems was ironically part of the argument for European appropriation of the world.  (Mills 1997:122)

Locke was not alone in his sentiments.  The racial “othering” and denigration of all those not European was also evident in the work of Adam Smith.

Smith, famous for The Wealth of Nations (Smith 1776:2000), explains the foundations of the modern capitalist state.  He distinguishes the current capitalist state as being “civilized,” while all others are “savage.”

From the beginning of his treatise, he notes:

Among the savage nations of hunters and anglers, every individual who can work is more or less employed in valuable labour and endeavours to provide, as well as he can, the necessaries and conveniences of life for himself and such of his family or tribe as are either too old, or too young, or too infirm, to go a-hunting and fishing.

Such nations, however, are so miserably poor that from mere want, they are frequently reduced, or at least think themselves reduced, to the necessity sometimes of directly destroying, and sometimes of abandoning their infants, their old people, and those afflicted with lingering diseases, to perish with hunger, or to be devoured by wild beasts.

Among civilized and thriving nations, on the contrary, though a significant number of people do not include labour at all, many of whom consume the produce of ten times, frequently of a hundred times, more sweat than the greater part of those who work; yet the produce of the whole labour of the society is so great, that all are often abundantly supplied; and a workman, even of the lowest and poorest order, if he is frugal and industrious, may enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and conveniencies of life than it is possible for any savage to acquire...(Smith 1776:2000)

Smith compares Peruvians and Mexicans as more ignorant than the lowest group in Europe, the Tartars of Ukraine.  Added are those from Turkey, Indonesia, Egypt, Arabia, Africa, the West Indies, Persia, Bengal, Siam, China, and all the Indigenous groups in North America.  These groups were racialized and accorded the spot of the “lowest and rudest state of society.” In sum, every country outside of Europe was brutal, savage, and, by implication, ripe for subjugation.

Immanuel Kant viewed “Whites,” more specifically White men, as naturally superior to all other “races” and women.  And as such, they should rule the rest of the world.  (Kleingeld 2019) Kleingeld demonstrates that for most of Kant’s writings, until the mid-1790s, he distinguished various racial groups as deficient. 

These groups, such as the “yellows,” “Negroes,” and the “copper-red” races, when compared to Whites, were distinctively lacking in terms of self-government.  Colonial rule in Northern Africa and much of Asia, and the enslavement and exploitation of non-Whites by White Europeans, were thus justified.

The Africans were only suited to be enslaved because they could not govern themselves, be educated, or be civilized.  Although Indigenous peoples in India could be educated, they were still limited and had to be under the leadership of Europeans.  In the middle 1790s, Kant did recant his more racist views.

Gone were racial hierarchies and White superiority; native Americans ceased being weak and became courageous.  Former savages became moral and civilized.  Kant would also condemned both colonialism and slavery.  All humans, covered by what he referred to as “cosmopolitan rights,” were entitled to self-determination, autonomy, and sovereignty.  Only through legitimate treaties could European powers inhabit and settle land owned by others.  Slavery, the forced exploitation of people by Europeans, was thus morally indefensible. (Kleingeld 2019, see also Flikscuh and Ypi 2014.)

John Stuart Mills, a staunch supporter of toleration, liberty, and legal rights, was one of the fiercest apologists for British imperialism, colonialism, and racism.  He believed that the civilized people of Europe had a moral obligation to “help” and govern the uncivilized societies.  Looking at the colonization of India, he marveled at the improvements, specifically in education and health care, that the East India Company had introduced into the country (Tunick 2006)

It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say that this doctrine is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties…For the same reason, we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered in its nonage.

The early difficulties in the way of spontaneous progress are so great, that there is seldom any choice of means for overcoming them; and a ruler full of the spirit of improvement is warranted in the use of any expedients that will attain an end, perhaps otherwise unattainable.

Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.  Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind has become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion.  Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one.

But as soon as mankind have attained the capacity of being guided to their own improvement by conviction or persuasion (a period long since reached in all nations with whom we need here concern ourselves), compulsion, either in the direct form or in that of pains and penalties for non-compliance, is no longer admissible as a means to their own good, and justifiable only for the security of others.  (Mills 1869)

Mills believed that only by maintaining ethnically homogeneous states could representative democracy work.  Freedom, he argued, could not be extended to the “uncivilized” and the “barbarians.” Such groups had to be controlled and civilized by force, if necessary, by the civilized.  Thus, truth and right are standards that only apply to the civilized.  They alone can be free and enjoy the privileges attendant to their position.  Racial hierarchies, racial imperialism, and the racial state were necessary while creating, reinforcing, and perpetuating status and power disparities favoring Europeans.

Classical liberalism served as a foundation for the English Revolution.  In defining the “rights of men,” England explained the rights of “White men,” the oppression of non-Whites, and the creation of White supremacy.

These were the core principles in “The Rights of Men and Citizens.” (Koyama 2018) The French Revolution, advocating liberal democracy and phrases such as liberté, égalité, and fraternité, also gave rise to Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau. (1853). Gobineau, the architect of Social Darwinism, argued that human development was the outcome of the survival of the higher races.

Relying upon German archaeology, philology, and French anthropology, he stated that racial hierarchies, dominated by the White races, with lower Black and Asian ethnicities, were the driving force of human history.  The dominance of the White or European race over all others resulted from this constant struggle.  The battle would be eternal, with no clear victor.

But the White race had to be constantly vigilant as the lesser races continually tried to move up the human ladder by interbreeding with the dominant White races.  Such interbreeding would produce a weaker version, as declared by Gobineau, as witnessed by the European peasantry and the urban working classes.

Social Darwinism, later biological racism, would become the lynchpin whereby the new positivist sciences of physical anthropology, psychology, and ethnology would come into being.  These scientists’ original research aims were to demonstrate the hypothesized biological link between racial hierarchies, intelligence, and civilization.  Using head shapes, cranial capacity, and other measures, racial identity was established, and science proved the ineptitude and weaker status of the lower races.

It is Gobineau who gives us the concept of Aryanism. Aryans were the source of ancient civilizations in Africa (Egypt and Ethiopia) and Asia (Elam, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley).  The idea of Aryan superiority, genus, creativity, and blood all stem from the work of Gobineau. (Moore 1974/75) We shall return to this in the section below on Hitler and Nazi Germany; for now, this also provided the impetus for European colonialism, imperialism, White supremacy, and the rise of racial nation-states. 

 

 

Liberal thinkers such as Kant and Diderot, critical of the barbarity of colonialism, challenged the idea that Europeans had a right to “civilize” others.  They believed the central use of violence, slavery, forced labor, and exploitation of land and resources was just the opposite of “Enlightenment.”

 

Kant argued that The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling  (Die Negers von Afrika haben von der Natur kein Geföhl, welches über das Läppische stiege) (quoted by Judy 1991). Ultimately, for Kant, Hume, and other Imperial theorists, not only were the Negro, but all indigenous people were reduced to a color, savagery and stupidity.  At least, this is what we conclude from the racialized lens of whiteness.  But let us consider another view, that from the subject.

Kant would stress an almost biological necessity for colonialism.  From the liberal tradition, Kant argues that India was deserving and happier under European sovereignty.  He identified three major racial groups, hierarchically arranged as:

 

1.     Whites, a superior “non-deficient race…with all the incentives and talents.” 

2.     Black people were suitable to be bonded people but not freemen, incapable of leading themselves.

3.     Hindus were superior to the Black people because they were at least educated, but only in the arts, not the sciences or anything requiring abstract thinking.

 

Kant, by 1795, would revise these views and begin arguing for the humanity and rights of all racial groups, along with the inhumanity of colonialism.  Asserting these rights, termed cosmopolitan rights, he argued that informed consent of Indigenous peoples (including Native Americans, Africans, and Asians) was a fundamental right that should constrain the imperial ambitions of Europeans.

 

He went further by condemning slavery and paternalism (Kleingeld 2014), Mahmud (1999), explaining how during the Saint Dominique Rebellion, Creoles and enslaved Black people in Haiti asserted their rights as articulated in “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789)” and challenged French sovereignty” their pleas were not only rebuked but evoked the wrath of the colonizer.  The rebels, both in Europe and after in the U.S., were backward and dangerous, as they threatened the natural orders of private property, racial hierarchies, and civilization itself.  (Mahmud, ibid 1219)

 

As we have seen above, the contradictions were central to the “clarifications” by scholars such as Hegel and the creation of a dichotomy between human and subhuman.  History and civilization belonged to mature nations, whereas, according to Hegel, immature nations, or “non-nations,” could not make any claims to reason, progress, or science. (Pradella 2014)    

  

The European colonization of Africa is instructive in its so-called “Civilizing Mission.” As a civilizing force of modernity, the West was there to rescue the reluctant Africans from their tribal, brutal existence.  African tribal units, with their common languages, culture, kinship, hereditary membership, and tribal laws, were detrimental to progress.

 

European imperialism disrupted, distorted, and destroyed these centuries-old systems, dismantling African cultural institutions and forcibly replacing “original” cultures with ones modeled on Europe.  An educated and empowered African population was seen as a “threat to colonial rule.” Race consciousness and adopting European values established and kept White political rule.

 

Therefore, the European model encouraged tribal and ethnic divisions by pitting various tribal groups against each other to ensure colonial control.  (Numerous examples exist; see Nikuze 2014) Similar conservative discourses in the 1820s and 1830s argued that colonial slavery in the West Indies had to be maintained, as the formerly enslaved people would not work.  “Unless guided and directed by the intelligence and capital of White men, the Black people never would produce anything.  (Cited by Taylor 2014) 

 

Diderot, alternatively, questioned if the Indigenous people benefited from European civilization and whether the European colonists were the “civilized ones.” He argued that culture, or a “national character” that served to socialize others into morality and norms of respect, tended to diminish the further the colonizer was from the country of origin.  Therefore, according to Diderot, Colonial empires became frequent sites for abuse, violence, and brutality because the colonists were far from the normative structures that would sanction (legally or informally) or otherwise restrain natural human instincts toward violence.  (Muthu 2003)

 

Not Object but Subject:  Black and Indigenous Peoples

 

Indigeneity for far too many only comes through the racialized lens of imperialism.  Questions abound regarding the actuality of such realities.  Is there a place called Africa and people called Africans? Who are these original peoples of the Americas? How can they exist?  Even granting such an existence, we are left with the racialized frame of asking, as Du Bois did, “What is it like to be a problem?” Can we identify humanity, as Franz Fanon and Kwame Nkrumah in the ideas of W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey throughout the diaspora in places like the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East, Africa does not constitute a meaningful political or cultural unity.  They are regions and continents but not cohesive entities.  How can there be an African, a Latin American, an Asian, and a Middle Easterner, much less diasporas?   

Our journey starts with Du Bois's assertion that Blacks and other distinct groups are fundamentally characterized by a specific spirituality.  This spirituality is causally constructed by both historical and social factors.  These historical and social factors include laws, religions, habits of thought, and their conscious strivings that produce a cohesive, spiritually distinct subjective identity.  (Du Bois 1897) These stories were guided by the community and their humanity based on economic, social, political, and educational freedom.  The spiritual strivings, therefore, constituted a “self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect.”  Thus emerged the “revelation of his power, of his mission,” A truer, better self.  (Du Bois 1903\2009: 8)

It is not coincidental; Kendi (2016) points out that Du Bois chose to call his book The Souls of Black Folk.  The one thing that distinguishes humans from beasts is their souls. Being Black, in America was often objectified and vilified by racist structures.  Such an object only reacts, but Du Bois asserted the active agency of Blacks as he called for “The Talented Tenth” to forge a new path and create a “New Negro”.  The Soul of black folks are captured in their gift to America-“the spiritual heritage of the nation” found in the spirituals and folk songs that emerged from slavery. 

Franz Fanon would describe this as a kind of non-being, for it is not recognized by the racialized, anti-Black World.  But rather than being anon-being, this is a being that reflects the subjective “yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies (1952 {2008: 2}). This existential reality is the cumulative essence of rejecting colonial objectivity, as Blacks in the Caribbean purposefully created Creole and pidgin.  The racist structure would characterize these dictions as imperfect and conclude that the Caribbean Blacks were inferior.  The creation of these imperfections was indeed a deliberate attempt to assert one’s subjective control of their objective realities.  Talking properly alienates and assigns a fundamental pathology to the speaker.  We might today call this code-switching, where in one setting, the Black speaker demonstrates their ability to articulate perfect “English,” yet among one’s peers to perform “Black Speak.” (See for, e.g., Luu 2020)  

 

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[1] Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. By G.B. Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934), vol. 111, 201.

[2] We will discuss socialism in the next chapter.