Racism and exclusion have been a structural part of the American project since its founding, and this legacy continues to cast a shadow over the political and social divide in the United States today.
Afrasianet - An article on Counterpunch by Walden Bello discusses the historical and intellectual roots of the contradictions that accompanied the founding of the United States, linking the legacy of colonialism, slavery and racism to current political transitions leading up to the rise of the populist right under U.S. President Donald Trump.
The text of the article is as follows:
When 56 delegates from 13 colonies signed the Declaration of Independence from Britain in 1776, it had been nearly 300 years since the first European arrival in America in 1492, when some 2.6 million poor European peasants flocked to the "New World" like locusts, fleeing Europe's feudal systems or agricultural capitalism that was dispossessing them of their land.
In the first 200 years of that time, most of the devastating events occurred in Central America and the Southern Hemisphere, when the Spanish crushed, oppressed, and enslaved the indigenous empires of the Aztecs, Incas, and smaller groups, which, along with the diseases that Europeans brought with them, led to the extermination of millions of landowners across the Americas.
Establishment as a disaster
The indigenous peoples of North America proved more resilient in the face of land-seeking Europeans. Along with fierce resistance, they learned to pressure the colonial regime against the new settlers, and succeeded in negotiating with the British crown and reaching the 1763 Declaration, which forced white settlers to move to the lands west of the Appalachians.
But the success of the American Revolution was a tragedy for the Native Americans: one of their most important hopes was spent in curbing the advance of the settlers on their lands, and with it all the treaties they had agreed to with the British Crown were lost, while the consequences of the Declaration of Independence began to emerge, and the genocide was quickly ignited, when General George Washington, under the pretext of their alliance with Britain, ordered the complete destruction of the Iroquois communities in what is now the center of New York State, an act that earned the future president the nickname "city destroyer" of the indigenous people.
The founding of the United States had serious consequences for blacks as well, who had been arriving as slaves in the English colonies since the early 17th century. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the slave-based plantation economy first took hold in the late 16th and 17th centuries, when millions of people were kidnapped from Africa and forced to work on the other side of the Atlantic in arduous and dangerous tasks, including growing and harvesting sugar cane.
But the founding of the Republic and its first seven decades saw the full flourishing of the plantation economy of the American South, an economy that was ruthlessly efficient in exploiting African labor. Thanks to its integration into the global capitalist economy through cotton production, the South was far richer than the North, and this prosperity made possible by slave labor was accompanied by the control of the presidency, the two houses of Congress, and the judiciary of the fledgling republic.
The extermination of Native Americans and the intensification of the exploitation of enslaved labor in the South coincided with the passage of the Indian Removal Act, promulgated by President Andrew Jackson, forcing five Native tribes, the Choctaw, the Seminole, the Cherokee, the Chickasaw, and the Muskogee, to move off their lands in the Southeast between 1830 and 1850 to make way for cotton plantations.
John Locke's twisted legacy
Marxists believe that ideas have a dialectical relationship to material interests, and they reflect and contribute relatively independently to the direction of the pursuit of the goal.
As I mentioned in a previous article, the dynamic interplay between revolution and expansion, genocide, and racism in the American project cannot be understood without taking into account the enormous influence of the ideas of the English philosopher John Locke, who lived in the 17th century, and is the thinker most associated with the American Revolution and the founding of the state and its constitution, who justified the right to rebel if the ruler or government violated the terms of the "social contract" With the people.
But Locke's theory of the origins of private property had a similar effect on the settlers in America, and he said that what transformed the individual's relationship with land from non-possession to ownership was the blending of his work with it.
This is the basic social relationship, formed in the state of nature before the emergence of political society through the social contract, when in fact the defense of this primitive relationship is the cornerstone of the contract between the ruler and society.
Locke's analysis of the origins of private property embodied the psychology of the white settler. Having escaped the rigid structures of Europe's agricultural classes, the settler, like any small peasant, wanted to acquire some plots of land that were considered virgin land.
As the well-known liberal scholar Louis Hartz observed, the settler had a petty-bourgeois mentality, anxious to secure ownership of land rather than accumulate it, and that "the smallholder settler, who lives as close as possible to Locke's state of nature, fears loss economically more than it likes to profit.
This attachment to individual ownership of small property is so deeply ingrained in America's collective cultural consciousness that Hartz asserted that the ideology of Americans can be described as "Lockheed," i.e., irrational, and in the United States it "swallowed up both the peasantry and the proletariat in the scheme of petty bourgeoisie," and this led to consequences for the development of Americans' class consciousness during the period of rapid industrialization in the late last two centuries.
But Locke's influence went beyond being the basis for capitalism and a system of private property that intertwined with Locke's other, equally entrenched legacy: racial inequality in access to property and freedom.
In his famous phrase, Locke wrote, "In the beginning, the whole world was America," imagining what he called the "state of nature" before the emergence of political society.
Putting forward his theory that it was the mixing of labor with land that gave rise to private property, Locke argued that the native people of America could not be considered landowners, because they inhabited the land and forests without cultivating them.
In fact, John Locke's theory holds that Native Americans can be likened to "ferocious beasts with which humans cannot live in a society or feel safe, and can therefore be exterminated like a species of animal."
Although Locke may not have foreseen the consequences of his words, they provided a strong moral justification for genocide, in which whites broke through the head of the eastern shore where Native Americans tried to confine them, and invaded the west of the country.
Similarly, slavery had "Luke" roots in distinguishing between the relationship between the master and the servant and the relationship between the servant, and he argued that the former was a free contract between the master and the contracted servant from Europe, while the relationship of a slave from Africa to the master was one in which the former was subject to the "absolute sovereignty" of the latter. In short, Locke's liberalism was full of fundamental contradiction.
On the one hand, he advocated "the natural liberty of man, freedom from any supreme power on earth, and not being subject to human will or legislative authority, but that the law of nature alone should govern," and on the other hand, he considered Native Americans to be outside the scope of civilized society, the "Negro" inferior to human beings, and denied him the right to rebel against his enslavement.
Locke's theoretical contradiction was reflected in his practice. As secretary to the Earl of Shaftesbury, a pivotal figure in the transatlantic slave trade, Locke helped write the Carolina Constitution, a blueprint for absolutism that not only contradicted his theory of sovereignty as the property of the people, but also sentenced blacks to hereditary slavery.
The worm in the apple
John Locke's intellectual ambivalence in celebrating human freedom and then legitimizing racial exclusion has been a deeply ingrained obsession with the American project since its inception, when prominent leaders such as Washington and Jefferson defended the right of whites to rebel against tyranny and "human rights," while denying these rights to their black slaves and Native Americans.
This contradiction was not lost on the British, as evidenced by the famous writer Samuel Johnson's question, "How do we hear the loudest cries for freedom from the exploiters of the blacks?".
Of the 56 signatories to the Declaration of Independence, only 15 were non-slaveholders, and of those, a recent study revealed, 7 of them "directly benefited from the slave trade, the buying and selling of slave-produced goods, or the supply of food and other supplies to slave camps across the Atlantic world."
Historian Robert Parkinson argues that the document was as expressive of racial fear and exclusion as it was an expression of inalienable rights, while the crux of the declaration lies in the 27 accusations made against King George III, the most serious of which is the latter, that he "incited internal strife among us, and sought to co-opt the inhabitants of our frontiers, the savage and ruthless Indians, who make no distinction in their war between age, sex, or social status."
In the context of the 18th century, Parkinson wrote, " The phrase internal strife refers to rebellious slaves." The phrase "ruthless savages of the Indians" needs no further clarification.
As the late black political philosopher Charles Mills argued, "To the extent that the modern world is shaped by European expansion, imperialist colonialism, white settler states, and racial slavery, Locke's social contract can be seen as based on an exclusionary racist contract within white society, which denies people of color equal moral, legal, and political standing.
Class, Race, and the Civil War
The American Civil War had many overlapping causes. While many in the North were motivated by the moral obligation to abolish slavery, the threat posed by the expansion of the slave-based plantation economy was far more significant: it threatened the settlers' aspirations to own offshore land, cultivated by free laborers.
This explains the contradiction that northern whites felt toward blacks. On the one hand, they were seen as a threat, because they worked without pay or compensation, and on the other hand, they were They are treated as allies against the land-hungry and insatiable Southern system of slavery.
As the eminent historian of the rise of American democracy in the first half of the 19th century Sidney Wilentz observed, the primary difference between the South and the North in the run-up to the Civil War was between "the South, largely committed to slavery-based racism, and the North, committed to white man-led democracy and contradictory about black man's participation, while claiming to be anti-slavery." Both were divergent forms of what some called "the democracy of the superior race."
Class consciousness vs. ethnic solidarity
Racial democracy of the second type prevailed after the American Civil War. Although it abolished slavery, it was completely imbued with white supremacy, informal denial of political rights, state terrorism, and anti-black civil society were the norm in the post-Reconstruction South, and the fragile tolerance of black suffrage in the North was accompanied by systematic social and economic discrimination.
The rapid industrial revolution also attracted some 16 million immigrants from Europe in the second half of the 19th century, leading to sharp tensions between a predominantly Anglo-Saxon white capitalist class and a multinational and multiracial working class.
However, the basic "Loki" psychology, which has been passed down through the generations, has had a dual effect by weakening the petty-bourgeois consciousness of class-based solidarity, while its implicit, highly realistic assumption grants whites freedom and democracy as their exclusive rights, and fosters race-based solidarity.
As usual, the country's rising capitalist economy adapted to white dominance, dividing the labor force by race, and organizing trade unions largely along racial lines. Apartheid was the norm in the armed forces until just before the Korean War, although since the War of Independence, blacks have shown that they can fight and die for their country like whites, as Japanese Americans did when they made enormous sacrifices for the country during World War II.
Thus, weak class solidarity and strong racial solidarity were the poles between which the story of the American working class in turmoil between the Civil War and the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s would unfold.
During this period, the United States expanded its influence outside North America, accompanied by its fundamental contradictions, and led to its involvement in imperialist expansionist wars in the Philippines, the Pacific during World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, and was fierce and somewhat touched on genocide.
Despite their racial bias, U.S. policymakers saw no contradiction between genocide that was covered with the phrase "technologically intensive war," claiming that the task was to export American-style democracy, with the implicit assumption that only whites could exercise and enjoy democratic rights to the fullest.
"Southern Strategy"
The civil rights movement of the 1960s was a direct attack on racial democracy. After retreating for a while, in the 1970s and 1980s it came back strongly to question the trajectory of American politics through the infamous "Southern Strategy," in which the Republican Party, using overt racism and veiled racist rhetoric, reshaped its image and character to appeal to white Southerners who felt betrayed by the Democratic Party's alliance with the civil rights movement.
Right-wing Republican fanatics have also subtly exploited the economic instability experienced by Northern workers as a result of the Democratic leadership's adoption of neoliberal policies, blaming their job losses and stagnant incomes on the party's "leniency" of minorities and immigrants. By the turn of the last century, the Republican Party had come a long way toward becoming a white supremacist.
This process culminated under Donald Trump, who secured himself a strong majority of white voters, with 54 to 55 percent of them voting for him in the 2016, 2020, and 2024 elections.
As with the Republican Party, the social counterrevolution has led to other political institutions in the United States becoming so racist that, as Mills put it, there is "a persistent system of white supremacy in the absence of an explicit white supremacist ideology and explicit rules of de jure subordination."
Ignition Accelerators
In recent years, white fears have been fueled by 3 incitement elements: The election of Barack Obama as president of the United States in 2008 was perhaps the biggest factor in exacerbating white nationalism.
A critical factor was also the feeling of many white men being lost in a world where traditional gender hierarchies are being shaken, gender bisexuality is being abandoned, women are gaining more control over their bodies, and the traditional "patriarchal family" norm is called into question under new domestic arrangements.
Immigrants have long been treated with suspicion and suspicion, but the arrival of large numbers of people of color in recent decades has made many whites vulnerable to the "Great Replacement" theory, promoted by the far-right French thinker Renaud Camus, that immigration from the Global South is a conspiracy by liberal elites to make the white majority a minority by 2040.
All of this paved the way for the rise of Donald Trump, whom CIA political analyst Barbara Walter has described as "the greatest racist businessman of all time." According to her, "No Republican president in the past five decades has ever pursued a more racist and discriminatory program, or championed white evangelical Americans at the expense of everyone.
Fighting for the future
I was in San Francisco when the United States celebrated its bicentennial in 1976, and there was a sense of relief as the nation moved beyond the divisions of the civil rights era, the Vietnam War, and the Watergate scandal.
Today, as the United States celebrates its 505th anniversary, pessimism and anger reign. According to a Gallup poll, only 31 percent said they were "very or very proud to be American," down from 78 percent in 2015.
Many citizens, starting with Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut and actor Robert De Niro, are deeply skeptical that Trump and the Republicans will peacefully relinquish power if they lose the election in 2028. Others, such as artists Ellen DeGeneres and Rosie O'Donnell, did not wait to find out, choosing to flee to other countries, though disgust with Trump in many cases was happily coupled with a desire to evade paying taxes.
The liberal consensus about the nature of the United States as a melting pot that, despite its flaws, has provided the world with a model of democratic governance that has not withstood academic criticism from the left.
On the right, diversity, the word that Donald Trump so desperately hates, is being ignored in retelling and renewing America's history as the exclusive product of whites, the narrative of the 1950s, when Trump was young.
This narrative was clearly evident in Trump's acceptance speech for the Republican presidential nomination at the 2020 Republican National Convention, where he said that "what characterizes America is the spirit of conquest of the land and the West by ranchers, miners, cowboys, cops, farmers, and settlers," a triumphant project that would not have been realized without "the likes of Wyatt Earp, Ann Oakley, Davy Crockett, and Buffalo Bill," but Trump did not explicitly refer to the word "white," but his implicit hints are enough to excite his supporters From his supporters.
But it is not the threat of the far right taking over the American historical narrative that is the greatest crisis facing the American republic as it turns 250, but rather the deliberate subversion of what every student is taught as the jewel of the "American experience," in which the separation of power has been separated in the hands of a man who has made no secret of his desire for absolute power, with little opposition from the Republican-dominated Congress, with the support and complicity of the Supreme Court, and the enthusiasm of the "Make America Great Again" rule that is happily marching with him toward fascism.
However, the republic is not without hope. This hope is embodied in progressives like New York Mayor Zahran Mamadani and the radical youth who swept the primaries in late June, who do not look to the past for "the wisdom of the Founding Fathers," but rather to a democratic, socialist, egalitarian and truly multiracial future.
Source: Counterpunch
