![]() ![]() No one says and no one believes that there was a Garden of Eden in Colonial America. They conspired together and waged a common struggle against their common enemy-the big planter apparatus and a social system that legalized terror against' black and white bondsmen. They had essentially the same interests, the same aspirations, and the same grievances. Curiously unconcerned about their color, these people worked together and relaxed together. Back there, before Jim Crow, before the invention of the Negro or the white man or the words and concepts to describe them, the Colonial population consisted largely of a great mass of white and black bondsmen, who occupied roughly the same economic category and were treated with equal contempt by the lords of the plantations and legislatures. The use of slaves in southern agriculture was a deliberate choice (among several alternatives) made by men who sought greater returns than they could obtain from their own labor alone, and who found other types of labor more expensive. Slavery, he said, "cannot be attributed to some deadly atmospheric miasma or some irresistible force in the South's economic evolution. This was, as Kenneth Stampp so cogently observed, a deliberate choice among several alternatives. The race problem in America 'was a deliberate invention of men 'who systematically separated blacks and whites in order to make money. There was another road-but that road wasn't taken In the beginning, as we have seen, there was no race problem in America. What makes this all the more mournful is that it didn't have to happen that way. And that decision, which was made in the 1660s and elaborated over a two-hundred-year period, foreclosed certain possibilities in America-perhaps forever-and set off depth charges that are still echoing and re-echoing in the commonwealth. For the decision, once made, engraves itself into the landscape, engraves itself into things, into institutions, nerves, muscles, tendons and the first decision requires a second decision, and the second decision requires a third, and it goes on and on, spiralling in an inexorable process which distorts everything and alienates everybody.įork by fork, step by step, option by option, America or, to be more precise, the men who spoke in the name of America decided that it was going to be a white place defined negatively by the bodies and the blood of the reds and the blacks. And ever afterwards, the nation and the people who make up the nation are defined by the fork and by the decision that was made there, as well as by the decision that was not made there. It chooses itself at fateful forks in the road by turning left or right, by giving up something or taking something-and in the giving up and the taking, in the deciding and not deciding, the nation becomes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |