'Deskundigen' 77

Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison recently endorsed White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America (NYU Press 2008), by Michael Walsh and Don Jordan. On NPR’s All Things Considered, Prof. Morrison called White Cargo an 'extraordinary book.'

From NPR’s Website:
Morrison says she wrote the novel in an effort to 'remove race from slavery.' She notes that in researching the book, she read White Cargo by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, and was surprised to learn that many white Americans are descended from slaves.

'Every civilization in the world relied on [slavery],' says Morrison. 'The notion was that there was a difference between black slaves and white slaves, but there wasn’t.'

Amerikanen zagen zichzelf als uitverkoren volk dat na veel ontberingen eindelijk het ‘beloofde land’ had bereikt.

Geert Mak. Pagina 97. Reizen zonder John.

In tegenstelling tot veel Europese staten is Amerika niet rondom een bestaand machtssysteem gevormd...

Geert Mak. Pagina 237. Reizen zonder John.

Mak’s mainstream optiek sluit niet alleen de Amerikaanse zwarte slaven uit, maar ook de arme blanken die naar de VS werden gedeporteerd. Zij worden door hem niet als ‘Amerikanen’ gezien, en toch vormen ze een niet te verwaarlozen groep. Zo bestond rond 1800 eenvijfde van de Amerikaanse bevolking uit zwarten, van wie 900.000 nog steeds slaaf was. De auteurs Don Jordan en Michael Walsh beginnen hun boek White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America met de volgende beschrijving:

While the Spanish slaughtered in America for gold, the English in America had to plant for their wealth. Failing to find the expected mineral riches along the eastern seabord, they turned to farming, hoping to make gold from tabacco. They needed a compliant, subservient… laborforce and since the indigenous peoples of America were difficulet to enslave they turned to their own homeland to provide. They imported Britons deemed to be ‘surplus’ people – the rootless, the unemployed, the criminal and the dissident – and held them in the Americas in various forms of bondage for anything from three years to life.

This book tells the story of these victims of empire. They were all supposed to gain their freedom eventually. For many, it didn’t work out that way. In the early decades, half of them died in bondage. This book tracks the evolution of the system in which tens of thousands of whites were held as chattels, marketed like cattle, punished brutally and in some cases literally worked to death. For decades, this underclass was treated as savagely as black slaves and, indeed, toiled, suffered and rebelled alongside them. Eventually, a racial wedge was thrust between white and black, leaving blacks officially enslaved and whites apparantly upgraded but in reality just as enslaved as they were before. According to contemporaries, some whites were treated with less humanity than the blacks working alongside them.

Among the first to be sent were children. Some were dispatched by impoverished parents seeking a better life for them. But others were forcibly deported. In 1618 the authorities in London began to sweep up hundreds of troublesome urchins from the slums, and ignoring protests from the children and their families. shipped them to Virginia. England’s richest man was behind this mass expulsion. It was presented as an act of charity: the ‘starving children’ were to be given a new start as apprentices in America. In fact, they were sold to planters to work in the fields and half of them were dead within a year. Shipments of children continued from England and then from Ireland for decades. Many of these migrants were little more than toddlers. 

A second group of forced migrants from the mother country were those, such as vagrants and petty criminals, whom England’s rulers wished to be rid of. The legal ground was prepared for their relocation by a highwayman turned Lord Chief Justice who argued for England’s goals to be emptied in America. Thanks to men like him, 50,000 to 70,000 convicts (or maybe more) were transported to Virginia, Maryland, Barbados and England’s other American possessions before 1776. All manner of others considered undesirable by the British Crown were also dispatched across the Atlantic to be sold into servitude. They ranged from beggars to prostitutes, Quakers to Cavaliers.

A third group were the Irisch. For centuries, Ireland had been something of a special case in English colonial history. From the Anglo-Normans onwards, the Irish were dehumanised, described as savages, so making their murder and displacement appear all the more justified. The colonisation of Ireland provided experience and drive for experiments further afield, not to mention large numbers of workers, coerced, transported or persuaded. Under Oliver Cromwell’s ethnic-cleansing policy in Ireland, unknown numbers of Catholic men, women and children were forcibly transported to the colonies. And it did not end with Cromwell; for at least another hundred years, forced transportation continued as a fact of life in Ireland.

The other unwilling participants in the colonial labour force were the kidnapped. Astounding numbers are reported to have been snatched from the streets and countryside by gangs of kidnappers or ‘spirits’ working to satisfy the colonial hunger for labour. Base at every sizeble port in the British isles, spirtis conned or coerced the unwary onto ships bound for America.                    

De bewering dat ‘in tegenstelling tot veel Europese staten Amerika niet rondom een bestaand machtssysteem [is] gevormd’ en dat alle ‘Amerikanen zichzelf [zagen] als uitverkoren volk dat na veel ontberingen eindelijk het ‘beloofde land’ had bereikt’ is een fabel, goed voor de Amerikaanse markt maar niet voor een serieuze kijk op de werkelijkheid. Vanaf het begin, zelfs nog voordat de VS onafhankelijk werd, bestond er al een rijke koopmansklasse en een even gefortuneerde kaste van plantage-eigenaren en speculanten in land, onder wie politici als de slaveneigenaar George Washington. En na de onafhankelijkheid zorgde deze rijke elite ervoor dat hun belangen niet door de Grondwet zouden worden bedreigd. In een recensie in de New York Times was de conclusie over White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America

‘White Cargo,’ which was first published in Britain last year, has a refreshing sense of distance and neutrality… If anything, Jordan and Walsh offer an explanation of how the structures of slavery — black or white — were entwined in the roots of American society.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/books/review/Lau-t.html?_r=0

In hoofdstuk negen van White Cargo, beschrijven de auteurs hoe de Ieren ‘Foreigners in their own land’ werden en hoe:

Ethnic and religious cleansing in Ireland became a model for Native Americans being cleared from the Chesapeake. During the Cromwell era, still more were displaced and Ireland became a major source of slaves for the New World.

Daarover zwijgt de mainstream. In plaats daarvan schrijft bijvoorbeeld Geert Mak in zijn Reizen zonder John over een ‘overvloed,’ die ‘mede, bepalend [zou] worden voor de Amerikaanse mentaliteit,’ zonder dat het hun

verging als in de klassieke cyclus, waarin de toenemende rijkdom van een land uiteindelijk leidt tot luiheid, slapte, decadentie en ondergang. In Amerika resulteerde de ontginning en exploitatie van die overvloed, in combinatie met almaar toestromende immigranten, eerder in het tegendeel: een mentaliteit van aanpakken, beschikbaarheid, rusteloosheid ook, want achter de horizon kon het gras altijd nog groener zijn. Individualisme was de norm, iedereen moest in die nieuwe wereld zijn eigen plek vinden, afbakenen en cultiveren. Vooruitgang, vernieuwing, inclusief de bijbehoren risico’s, waren vanzelfsprekend: in zo’n overvloedig land wordt ondernemingslust maar al te vaak rijkelijk beloond.

Kennelijk zijn meer dan 40 miljoen Amerikanen die onder de armoedegrens leven ‘tot luiheid, slapte, decadentie en ondergang’ gedoemd doordat ze geen ‘mentaliteit van aanpakken, beschikbaarheid’ bezitten en dus bij gebrek aan ‘ondernemingslust’ niet ‘rijkelijk beloond,’ worden. Dit is de rechtse- mainstream visie. De luie ‘losers’ hebben het aan zichzelf te danken, terwijl de ijverige ‘winners' vanzelfsprekend ‘rijkelijk' worden 'beloond.’ Deze versie van de werkelijkheid is al een eeuw geleden door deskundigen weerlegd door gewoon de feiten te checken. In tegenstelling tot het propaganda-verhaal dat ‘iedereen in die nieuwe wereld zijn eigen plek [moest] vinden, afbakenen en cultiveren,’ was de realiteit veel meedogenlozer en werd elke nieuwe groep immigranten gewantrouwd en zelfs gehaat ‘in die nieuwe wereld.’ In Barbarian Virtues. The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 schreef de Amerikaaanse historicus Matthew Frye Jacobson, hoogleraar American Studies & History aan Yale University:

What room does a clever metaphor like ‘melting pot’ or ‘mosaic’ leave to reckon seriously with the animosities marshaled under the banner of racialism or nativism?

Gedocumenteerd toont Jacobson aan dat van een ware ‘melting pot’ geen sprake is omdat de bovenlaag van de White Anglo-Saxon Protestants vanaf het begin op de immigrant neerkeek, en zeker op de gekleurde die naar de VS was gedeporteerd. Een echte  ‘melting pot’ is het nauwelijks geworden, niet in de zin van klassen en rassen. Enkele voorbeelden uit Barbarian Virtues:

The Massachusetts State Board of Charities, for example, identified the immigrants’ ‘inherited organic imperfection, vitiated constitution, or poor stock’ as the chief cause of their pauperism and public decency.’

Zij werden ‘losers’ beschouwd die hun kans niet hadden gegrepen en niet de juiste ‘mentaliteit van aanpakken’ bezaten door een of ander genetisch defect of wat dan ook. 

Nativism in this period increasingly relied upon the language and logic of biology, from the racialized republicanism that characterized the anti-Chinese campaign in the 1870s, to that cult of Anglo-Saxonism called the Immigration Restriction League in the 1890s, to the frank eugenic program of the American Breeders’ Asssociation and the Galton Society in the early decades of the twentieth century. The convergence of radicalism and republicanism, governing the immigration debate was expressed most starkly in an exchange on the floor of Congress in the early 1920s, as that body debated a racialist immigration restriction bill that was soon to become law. ‘Is it the gentleman’s idea,’ one congressman asked another, ‘that the primary object of this bill is to discriminate against certain people?’ Mr. O’Connor of New York: 'I believe that the committee and the proponents of this bill believe that, in order to preserve the ideals of this country, it is necessary to discriminate against certain races.’ Mr. MacLafferty: ‘That is fairly put. Would you dioscriminate against Asiatic races?’ Mr. O’Connor of New York: ‘I believe it is a well-founded tradition of America.’

Er was sprake van een diepgewortelde minachting voor als inferieur beschouwde mensen, van joden tot Italianen, van Polen tot Chinezen. En de achterstelling bleef niet beperkt tot deze groepen, ook de naar schatting 2,5 miljoen Amerikanen die in de jaren dertig uit het Mid-Westen verdreven werden als gevolg van de Dust Bowl, en met hun families uitgehongerd in onder andere Californie aankwamen werden gediscrimineerd. John Steinbeck schrijft over hen in The Harvest Gypsies. On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath:

The migrants are needed, and they are hated. Arriving in a district they find the dislike always meted out by the resident to the foreigner, the outlander. This hatred of the stranger occurs in the whole range of human history, from the most primitive village form to our own highly organized industrial farming. The migrants are hated for the follwing reasons, that they are ignorant and dirty people, that they are carriers of disease, that they increase the necessity for police and the tax bill for schooling in a community, and that if they are allowed to organize they can, simply by refusing to work, wipe out the season’s crops. They are never received into a community nor into the life of the community. Wanderers in fact, they are never allowed to feel at home in the communities that demand their services.

De mainstream-voorstelling van zaken dat ‘iedereen in die nieuwe wereld zijn eigen plek [moest] vinden, afbakenen en cultiveren’ is bedrieglijk, omdat men verzwijgt dat de nieuwkomer zijn ‘plek moest’ bevechten, soms met gevaar voor eigen leven, zoals Steinbeck zijn lezers toont. En had de immigrant eenmaal een ‘plek’ veroverd dan waren er altijd nog de rijken en machtigen die hem zowel minachtten als vreesden. ‘Cultiveren’ en ‘afbakenen’ was onvoldoende. Tijdens de crisis in de jaren dertig verloren ze hun land en hun onderkomen, net zoals vandaag de dag in de huidige crisis de gedupeerden hun woning en werk verliezen. Steinbeck in De Druiven der Gramschap:

‘Sure, cried the tenant men, but it’s our land… We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it’s no good, it’s still ours…. That’s what makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.’



‘We’re sorry. It’s not us. It’s the monster. The bank isn’t like a man.’



’Yes, but the bank is only made of men.’



‘No, you’re wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.’

De bank heeft geen ziel, en ook de machine die met het van de bank geleende geld is gekocht heeft geen ziel. Het is deze ontzieling van zijn samenleving die Steinbeck in zijn werk Travels With Charley beschrijft.

The tractors came over the roads and into the fields, great crawlers moving like insects, having the incredible strength of insects … Snub-nosed monsters, raising the dust and sticking their snouts into it, straight down the country, across the country, through fences, through dooryards, in and out of gullies in straight lines. They did not run on the ground, but on their own roadbeds. They ignored hills and gulches, water courses, fences, houses.

 That man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was a part of the monster, a robot in the seat … The driver could not control it – straight across country it went, cutting through a dozen farms and straight back. A twitch at the controls could swerve the cat, but the driver’s hands could not twitch because the monster that built the tractor, the monster that sent the tractor out, had somehow gotten into the driver’s hands, into his brain and muscle, had goggled him and muzzled him – goggled his mind, muzzled his speech, goggled his perception, muzzled his protest. He could not see the land as it was, he could not smell the land as it smelled; his feet did not stamp the clods or feel the warmth and power of the earth. He sat in an iron seat and stepped on iron pedals. He could not cheer or beat or curse or encourage the extension of his power, and because of this he could not cheer or whip or curse or encourage himself. He did not know or own or trust or beseech the land. If a seed dropped did not germinate, it was no skin off his ass. If the young thrusting plant withered in drought or drowned in a flood of rain, it was no more to the driver than to the tractor.

He loved the land no more than the bank loved the land. He could admire the tractor – its machined surfaces, its surge of power, the roar of its detonating cylinders; but it was not his tractor. Behind the tractor rolled the shining disks, cutting the earth with blades – not plowing but surgery … The driver sat in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control. And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, had no connection with the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses.

― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Maar omdat deze kijk op de vervreemding door Mak wordt afgewezen probeert hij de integriteit van Steinbeck als schrijver te ondermijnen:

Tijdens zijn reis met Charley werd hij voor het eerst ongenadig geconfronteerd met degene die hij in werkelijkheid was: een oudere man die zichzelf overschreeuwde, die zijn leeftijd niet kon accepteren, zijn jeugd niet kon loslaten. Daarmee bereikte hij het tegendeel van wat hij wilde: de gedeeltelijke mislukking van zijn Charley-expeditie liet juist zien hoever hij heen was.

Geert Mak. Pagina 532 van Reizen zonder John.

Al eerder probeerde Mak tegenover mij de integriteit van de Duitse auteur Hans Magnus Enzensberger aan te tasten door hem te betitelen als een ‘grumpy old,’ man die ‘alles heeft opgegeven.’ En alleen omdat Enzensberger de duidelijk zichtbare beperkingen van het Europese eenwordings-experiment had beschreven. Toch zit Enzensberger in zijn essay Brussels, the Gentle Monster or the Disenfranchisement of Europe dichter bij de waarheid wanneer hij tenslotte concludeert dat er

tot nu toe weinig is geweest om aan te nemen dat de Europeanen geneigd zijn zichzelf te verdedigen tegen de onteigening van hun politieke rechten. Er bestaat geen gebrek aan uitingen van ressentiment, van stille of publieke sabotage, maar in het algemeen heeft het fameuze democratische deficiet niet geleid tot revolte, eerder tot apathie en cynisme, tot minachting van de politieke kaste of tot collectieve moedeloosheid.

Intussen brokkelt het westers imperium onder aanvoering van de Verenigde Staten steeds verder af en daarmee ook de invloed van Europa. Enzensberger:

Alle imperia in de geschiedenis bloeiden niet langer dan een beperkte tijd, voordat ze door expansie en interne tegenstellingen ten onder gingen.

Maar dat nu staat loodrecht tegenover de hoopvolle verhalen van Geert Mak in zowel zijn tamelijk naieve boek over Europa als zijn reisboek over VS.  Auteurs uit grote culturen zijn realistischer dan onze poldermodel-adepten. De mainstream weet niet wat ze aan moet met de volgende beschrijving van Steinbeck:

I remembered Seattle as a town sitting on hills beside a matchless harborage — a little city of space and trees and gardens, its houses matched to such a background. It is no longer so. The tops of the hills are shaved off to make level warrens for the rabbits of the present. The highways eight lanes wide cut like glaciers through the uneasy land. This Seattle had no relation to the one I remembered. The traffic rushed with murderous intensity. On the outskirts of this place I once knew well I could not find my way. Along what had been country lanes rich with berries, high wire fences and mile-long factories stretched, and the yellow smoke of progress hung over all, fighting the sea winds’ efforts to drive them off.

This sounds as though I bemoan an older time, which is the preoccupation of the old, or cultivate an opposition to change, which is the currency of the rich and stupid. It is not so. This Seattle was not something chaged that I once knew. It was a new thing. Set down there not knowing it was Seattle, I could not have told where I was. Everywhere frantic growth, a carcinomatous growth. Bulldozers rolled up the green forests and heaped the resulting trash for burning. The torn white lumber from concrete forms was piled beside gray walls. I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.

Voor vooruitgangsgelovigen die alles afmeten aan materiele zaken is dit onbegrijpelijke taal.  Meer hierover morgen.

The Making of Slavery in America This is required viewing.  Chilling!  Episode 1 Episode one opens in the 1620s with the introduction of 11 men of African descent and mixed ethnicity into slavery in New Amsterdam. Working side by side with white indentured servants, these men labored to lay the foundations of the Dutch colony that would later become New York. There were no laws defining the limitations imposed on slaves at this point in time. Enslaved people, such as Anthony d'Angola, Emmanuel Driggus, and Frances Driggus could bring suits to court, earn wages, and marry. But in the span of a hundred years, everything changed. By the early 18th century, the trade of African slaves in America was expanding to accommodate an agricultural economy growing in the hands of ambitious planters. After the 1731 Stono Rebellion (a violent uprising led by a slave named Jemmy) many colonies adopted strict "black codes" transforming the social system into one of legal racial oppression Episode 2 From the 1740s to the 1830s, the institution of slavery continued to support economic development. As the slave population reproduced, American planters became less dependent on the African slave trade. Ensuing generations of slaves developed a unique culture that blended elements of African and American life. Episode two follows the paths of several African Americans, including Thomas Jefferson's slave Jupiter, Colonel Tye, Elizabeth Freeman, David Walker, and Maria Stewart, as they respond to the increasingly restrictive system of slavery. At the core of this episode is the Revolutionary War, an event which reveals the contradictions of a nation seeking independence while simultaneously denying freedom to its black citizens.  Episode 3 One by one the Northern states, led by Vermont in 1777, adopted laws to abolish and phase out slavery. Simultaneously, slavery in the Southern United States entered the period of its greatest expansion. Episode three, which starts at the beginning of the 1800s, examines slavery's increasing divisiveness in America as the nation develops westward and cotton replaces tobacco as the country's most valuable crop. The episode weaves national events through the personal histories of two African American slaves -- Harriet Jacobs and Louis Hughes -- who not only managed to escape bondage, but also exposed the horrific realities of the slave experience in autobiographical narratives. These and other stories of physical, psychological, and sexual exploitation fed the fires of a reinvigorated abolitionist movement. With a diverse membership comprised of men and women, blacks and whites, and led by figures including Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Amy Post, abolitionist sentiment gathered strength in the North, contributing to the widening fissure and imminent break-up of the nation. Episode 4 Episode four looks at Civil War and Reconstruction through the experiences of South Carolina slave Robert Smalls. It chronicles Smalls' daring escape to freedom, his military service, and his tenure as a congressman after the war. As the events of Smalls' life unfold, the complexities of this period in American history are revealed. The episode shows the transformation of the war from a struggle for union to a battle over slavery. It examines the black contribution to the war effort and traces the gains and losses of newly freed African Americans during Reconstruction. The 13th amendment abolished slavery in 1865, the 14th and 15th amendments guaranteed black civil rights, and the Freedmen's Bureau offered aid to former slaves throughout the 1870s. Yet simultaneously, the formation of militant groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan threatened the future of racial equality and segregation laws began to appear across the country. Slavery's eradication had not brought an end to black oppression.

http://archive.feedblitz.com/127270/~4075106