I needn’t believe I need write more about the origins of slavery. My concern is not really, despite what any may think, about the past, but about the past when it still reaches the present. But that concern is primarily focused on the real consequences of the king’s zest to transform humanity from a community of strong individuals into a colony of ants that lives only to keep the king alive. My concern is that this need had to essentially throw confusion into the mix of the community. It is that confusion which is of prime concern today. I don’t think I am smarter but I think many have become somewhat dumber because they are being educated to be dumber. Not educated by our schools to be dumber. Educated by a barrage of advertisements to convince us that we need what we need, that government is important and that we must identify ourselves by ever more conflicting categories. Advertisements need not be just ads for products to purchase or candidates to vote for. Advertisements begin to enter into our consciousness as youths. A white supremacist advertisement was the arrangement of the movie theaters in Muncie, Indiana. Blacks in the balcony, whites on the floor. If I had not been brought by a black family as a three year old and then we had been rejected, I seriously suppose the advertisement could have worked upon, at least at some inner levels of consciousness. But that experience altered my future in other ways, it created a rejection within me to doubt all advertisements, whether of propagandizing temptations or propagandizing structural and societal norms, Or maybe I was born to reject and challenge, who knows.
Another advertisement is the need for a car. Not for a particular brand of car, but the concept of the superiority a person has to others, pedestrians,bicycle riders—anyone who is not driving a vehicle when another is, then the person who is not is inferior to the one who is. And concepts of superiority are really that easy to implant in a culture based on structuring its advertisements of not only about candidates and products but the very mentally distorting hijinks necessary to convince include the concept that those who are convinced have obtained a higher and more superior level. The entire purpose is to convince others that what they achieve by purchasing a product or voting for a candidate is somehow a personal choice granted by the freedoms of an industrially democratic. But of course the opposite, you are prevented from choice by being advertised to believe, oftentimes, in opposition to personal choice. In this sense, democracy becomes about what you are supposed to believe or ought to believe to be superior to another. Personal choice as opposed to community needs, takes the community’s need for strong individualism and becomes a blitzed confusion of differing manners towards success by conformity to whatever idea will make one more superior. Personal choice becomes a loss of identity separated from the group who recognizes its need for the individual to a choice over what the individual must do to rise to a superior position (or maintain a perceived personal identity.
The kicker is it's all false. The CEO (supposedly) decides what direction he needs to take the company to benefit the shareholders. Translated: the group is more important and the CEO succeeds only when he satisfies his role to the community of stockholders. The housebuilder only succeeds when the houses he built satisfy the needs of the community he builds the houses for. When are still individuals within a community and must still fulfill needs of the community to stand out and become important to the community; even though we are taught the opposite through the advertisement that presents the cultural concept of some type of Randian perversity of individuals who rise above and are entitled to more because they are superior to the bulk of the community. The minister who wants a bigger church and a greater outreach may think he is an important preacher if he achieves a larger audience, still needs the church community to whom he is important to. But we have been advertised into believing the minister of the larger church is more important than the minister with a smaller church.
So our success remains dependent on the community but we advertise to the community that our success is because the community is beholden to those who have succeeded apart from the community. Thus we are deluded into confusion. The white man has no natural superiority to a black man anymore than the leading actors are more important than anyone else who are part of making a movie. The leading actors only gain the idea of being superior to the rest of the film community by the delusion that they are why we go see a movie. But I suppose every lead actor has at some point had a “flop” and success depends not on the lead actor but on the entirety of those involved in the film. But an actor, director, etc., who can have two or three hits, thereafter will have more opportunities to be in films that are more likely to become hits. The individuals who become important remain dependent on the community as a whole that produces their success but their success becomes more important than the community, leading to a continued desire to be more important. This is due to the advertisement we are presented with that some are more important than others.
Langston Hughes is considered somewhat heroically profound to black Americans today but was totally dependent in his lifetime on the support of white patrons that aided his ability to be published at all, due to his lack of success. Which does not mean what he achieved was any less heroically profound simply because only a very few knew his name when he was alive. Toni Morrison achieved tremendous success as an individual but remained troubled throughout her lifetime that that success made her writing reinterpreted into concepts she had not intended, or at least in her Nobel speech she said that if she could have been understood better and never achieved the acclaim that brought her the prize she would have been more successful to her own desires. She often felt she was interpreted to be writing about blacks needing to delude themselves to be more acceptable and that what she had been writing about was the delusions presented to people that prevented success and created the continual human conflict of separation. (At Least that is my paraphrased understanding of what her Nobel speech was saying.)
Barbara Fields in her book Racecraft , states that racism is an action. Race, as such, doesn't exist. If you carry it only slightly further you might perhaps perceive that nationcraft is an action, nations, as such, only exist to do actions. We will return to Ms. Fields in a later article, but before I can actually attempt to explain how skin color became an identifier, we have to understand how nationcraft began. Essentially, just before we entered into what we term “history” , the northern hemisphere was sheathed beneath large extended sheets of frozen ice. It is speculated at this time the human species began to learn to eat wild grains as more than likely food was somewhat scarce. So our ingenuity took over and we searched for different sources. Since grains are not typically digestible, somehow we learned to boil the grains and dislodge the outer husk and realized they could supplement the diet. The oldest indication that I am aware of was around 19,500 B.C.E. in the middle Yellow River region in Asia. Long ago we had dug tuberous plants from the ground, and the first grains that we digested seemed to be the grasses in which the tubers were the seed. But there is speculation that that time frame might be extended even further into the past, perhaps as long ago as 30,000 B.C.E. and perhaps was much more widespread than previously thought. Into the near east, the habitable parts of Europe, and even as far south as Australia.
So long before the new environment posted the end of that last ice age, we had developed the technology to break down grain husks and be able to consume grains. And as that age descended humanity was able to move into more permanently settled villages. It was again a global phenomenon and of course it would have had to have an effect upon the behavior of humanity. Migration of course did not cease but it had to take on new dimensions. As communities settled into certain locales they would have had to begin to determine that certain areas were “theirs”. And while people did not yet perceive themselves as an identity. Or maybe they saw others as an identity that was-not-their-identity. What is striking is (and I say this only from evidence of much later encounters with native groups globally) that they did not have identifying names for themselves. We often say they called themselves “the people” but actually simply had no term for themselves, at least not until encounters with others, as Ms. Fields points out. They were just who they were. But some real estate was more prime and conflict began to occur. Those that were not them, were simply that they are not us, but other than us. Another detail to mention that supports my contention that mating was done by the female initially is that as we begin to have linguistic language remnants often there is a word for mother and often there is a feminitive declination for human which might be subdivided into women who were not married, so mother-humans or not-mother humans, but males would have no specific designation as a sex. If they were defined at all it was with some adjective attached to human. Only the women seem to have considered themselves actually human because only they alone could bring forth offspring. Those not being capable of doing so we’re never considered to be completely of the human race in ancient non-kingly structured linguistical development. And males, like group identities, became individually part of humanity as men began to dominate and reform societal leadership. It was equally important to alter the linguistical framework to fully incorporate males as equally, and often more, human. And language was the first tool to become necessary to advertise this confusion necessary to begin deluding others in their attempts to convince others to believe in their own superiority.
Now as these clans began to settle, these mothers still needed to have diversity in their choice of mates and the roots of matrilineal kinships began to develop. I cannot say these were matriarchies. From later developments–and still there are no kings, per se— but by anthropological observation of still existing older societies there are both, and only going from that, it might suggest that “leaders’ might not necessarily have depended on the person’s sex at all. But warriors were more than likely male when conflict arose simply because women might be more needed to be the “inner guard" to protect the young. Of course I would not wish to suggest a universal rule.
But the settlements would of necessity need to protect themselves from encroachment because the environment that supported a community was now more specific to a locale. And as early as 8-9000 years ago actual farming, or cultivating of crops, began , once again near the Yellow River where the Mongolians would eventually arise as one of the first kingdoms, possibly prior to Sumerian or Egyptian kingdoms. But we still must wait another four or five centuries for kings. But the Mongolians didn’t leave behind the written records that the Sumerians did, so most think it was also here that kingdoms first emerged.
But while Sumer is generally assumed to be a collection of city-states until Akkad conquered them and united them into an empire, there are, nevertheless, several reasons to believe these city-states were the beginnings of the transformation in human leadership. The first reason is the soil was rich for agriculture and I imagine it was pretty well settled before the “Sumerians” entered into the picture. New research has shown different genetic lineages for the peasants and the city dwellers. Learning of the peasants is surprising, at least some had not expected it, I do not know why. Cities of fine homes, filled with exotic crafts of all kinds, theaters for entertainment, large temples and walls around three cities, somehow does not indicate to me that the people living here were feeding themselves or building all of these structures. So obviously there had to be those building these buildings and those feeding these people within the city, and those being used to bring all of the material to the region to do so.. Because none of the building materials, the crafting materials, etc were locally available.
My supposition is because the region had nothing but good soil for agriculture made it a prime target for outside marauders to be able to easily enslave the unsuspecting communities.
Another indicator is writing and the development of a structured time system. Writing developed to keep records—tax accountings of grain in this instance, are the oldest—and time structures indicate a need to force people to work certain hours.
The other is religion. I try to point out the essential difference between awe of what is providing sustenance, and developing myths and culture that show respect; and religion that turns awe into worship and gods and heroes to reduce people to fear, and thus obedience.
Religion becomes the first method of deforming human culture. Religion demands obedience. Heroes illustrate the superiority of some over others. And those who carry the stick fight over whose stick is bigger. Those without a stick want one. Religions are the first advertisement for superiority. If the God is king, or anoints the king, then he has other-worldly authority and your life or death no longer depends on the world that provides your community with life or death but the authorities of god or king.
We now also have a race. A people that are no longer just us, but a people with an identity, a people that is no longer a species, but a separate identifiable race of humanity that is separate from other races of humanity and as a race of humanity, God gives to Gilgamesh the authority over nature. Nature now is not the sustenance of survival, but under the authority of the race that you belong to. As do other humans, who are not of your race. And as do the people of the race who now belong to the leader and the gods that support the leader.
Man, the human species of man, is now races of man allied to particular authorities. The possibility of settling in locales on a more or less permanent basis has now given the opportunity to those humans who had never been acceptable to the community to stand above the community that they had always desired. But to do so they had to transform humanity from communities united to a world where owning others, owning land, and owning wealth could be presented as a raison d’etat. The measure of power was defined in those terms and not in terms of what individuals could bring to the community. And it would be maintained by altering the selection process of breeding from women selecting partners to create the necessary diversity to classes restricted to mating within their own kind and an inbreeding to maintain and continue to separate the separateness of the classes within the societal structure.It required a powerful transformation in human behavior that necessitated a new understanding of humanity within the sphere of the world.
But much of man’s evolutionary inheritance remained and so man became somewhat schizophrenic in his comprehension. People could be measured for their allegiances, conformity became more important than diversity. And perhaps worst of all in my opinion, power was maintained by authority rather than consensus.
But it would be, out of fear of the indentured whites, the few black slaves in Virginia and some natives, that joined together to overthrow the existing colonial rule until reinforcements could be sent from England. Prior to that, in the 1600’s a black working in the fields next to a white could be set free and earn his own property if he survived a slavery that was not supposedly contracted, but was nevertheless placed into indenture as a slave. Among them were blacks that would become named historical footnotes such as Anthony Johnson and Elizabeth Key. Ms. Key’s small claim to fame was that when she was not freed after her duration of indentured slavery she placed a mandamus lawsuit with the colonial authorities who mandated her “owner” grant to her the freedom she had earned and designate a plot of land to her.
The rebellion altered the existing order. Indentured whites who had been purchased to work in the fields were pretty much all released and black slaves were imported for immediate need before ships could be brought from Africa. Historian Michelle Alexander, among most contemporary interpretations who have finally cast aside Owsley’s ridiculous theories of southern white classless solidarity, and blacks who came from Africa without human human (gorilla type “wet noses” ) and hairless but for wool that grew on top of their heads like sheep). Ridiculous, but Owsley’s revised southern history predominated from the 1920’s to the 1960’s, states that: “The events in Jamestown were alarming to the planter elite, who were deeply fearful of the multiracial alliance of [indentured servants] and slaves. Word of Bacon’s Rebellion spread far and wide, and several more uprisings of a similar type followed. In an effort to protect their superior status and economic position, the planters shifted their strategy for maintaining dominance. They abandoned their heavy reliance on indentured servants in favor of the importation of more black slaves.”
And legal distinctions were adopted to separate the white lower non-elite from both freed and still enslaved blacks who were legally classified as separate races. HistorianIra Berlin gets this point right I believe, when he states that, “Now what is interesting about this is that we normally say that slavery and freedom are opposite things—that they are diametrically opposed. But what we see here in Virginia in the late 17th century, around Bacon's Rebellion, is that freedom and slavery are created at the same moment.” All legal documents now indicated race as not belonging to an ethnic nationality or religion, but to “black” and “white” personages. All of European descent, no matter their actual coloring, were legally “white”. And all of African descent were “black, including those of Moorish descent who were probably never enslaved, but if they entered from North Africa they were legally black; if they were true Moors that still resided in Spain, they were legally white. And the rights granted were never based on status of being a slave or not but of the color designation assigned and the world’s first classification system of race being defined by a color, or being a descendant of a color; and those descendants of all of the European nations were now legally superior to the descendants of all descendants from Africa, no matter how many times the black woman and her daughters were raped by masters and no matter the actual coloring of anyone, the designation by law of ancestral locality was central. So it’s still the old ethnic designation redefined into permanent legal statuses.
And that confusing legal delusion might have been abolished by the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. But it is much more difficult to say to a white man “yesterday you were legally superior to a black man, today he is your equal” when that white man has systematically been turning his own offspring into inferiors he needn’t legally be responsible for and make him want to believe such is true. Especially when the legal fiction his own white masters gave him over the “black legal race” were the only people he had been entitled to be superior to.
Race was a legal delusion but it created a permanent confusion about how to identify another human being.