Race: "A Dreadful Deceit"
Jacqueline Jones on the myth of race
If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you. --Lyndon B. Johnson
This quotation captures in very few words what I regard as the essence of the relationship between class and race in the US. Racial issues cannot be reduced to class issues, but class issues are fundamental. Racism supports oligarchic power structures because racism divides the poor and working classes against themselves, weakening resistance to exploitation.
What is less clear is how the fiction of race became so firmly entrenched in American thought and culture. Was it deliberately devised and promoted by the economic elite as a conscious strategy to divide working people? Or did it arise organically from the workers themselves? Or both to some extent?
Jacqueline Jones explores the origin and development of American racial ideology in A Dreadful Deceit (Basic Books, 2013). She organizes her study around six case studies from colonial times to the postindustrial present:
Antonio, born in Angola, captured and brought to Maryland as a slave, where he was tortured to death by his master in 1656 after attempting to escape and refusing to work. His master was put on trial for murder, but was acquitted.
Boston King, born a slave in South Carolina, who sought liberty and religious fellowship amid the upheavals of the American Revolution.
Elleanor Eldridge, who cannily made her way as an independent entrepreneur in the face of legal and social discrimination in antebellum Rhode Island.
Richard W. White, a light-skinned black Civil War veteran, who threw in his lot with the Republican Party during Reconstruction in Savannah, Georgia.
William H. Holtzclaw, a disciple and sometime competitor of Booker T. Washington, who founded and led the Utica Normal and Industrial Institute to provide primary, secondary, and vocational education for African Americans in Mississippi during the late 19th century, when it was “the most benighted state in the Union for the black man.”
Simon P. Owens, a labor activist who agitated for workers’ rights and solidarity across racial lines, contending with corruption and complicity in union leadership and racism on the shop floor in Detroit during its industrial heyday.
Jones argues that race is a “myth” and a “fiction” (she does not call it a “construct”) and that the ideology of race has shifted in response to what was at stake in particular competitions at particular times in particular places. She draws inspiration from the work of the African-American abolitionist David Walker, whose Walker’s Appeal was published in 1829.
His Appeal draws from history, political theory, and Christian theology to expose the falsity of race. [...] Gradually, white people, he wrote, concocted lies by which they “dreadfully deceived” themselves, ruses to keep blacks in ignorance and subjection [...]. These notions mocked the equality of all people before God and amounted to the greatest deceit of all – that blacks are “an inferior and distinctive race of beings.” (xvi)
Given that race is a “dreadful deceit”, what do the terms white and black mean in her study?
Over time these two adjectives each took on multiple meanings, with white signifying “someone free and descended from free forebears,” and black signifying “someone enslaved or descended from slaves.” These contrasting associations were the result of political processes, when people in power foisted a “black” identity on people devoid of legal protection, and later, when members of the latter group embraced the term “black” as an act of solidarity among themselves. The terms [as used in] this book distinguish between groups […] according to heritage, legal status, or collective self-identification, depending on the immediate context. (xvii)
Emphasis mine. Jones’s work shows that black identity was initially neither created nor chosen by those to whom it was ascribed; it was imposed on them.
Jones argues that the initial subjugation of people of African descent in colonial America was at first an exercise of raw power. Colonial landowners and entrepreneurs needed laborers, and they exploited vulnerable people of all origins. Africans were simply easier to exploit than poor whites or Native Americans, who had a degree of legal or diplomatic protection that Africans lacked and, if those protections failed, could simply run away with greater ease than Africans could. The exploiters felt no need to justify what they were doing in terms of racial ideology.
Between the Revolution and the Civil War, slavery was abolished in the North, but Northern whites began to develop a rationale for treating former slaves and their descendants as second-class citizens. Meanwhile, the Southern planter class began to articulate justifications for maintaining their “peculiar institution”, but at first it was often framed in terms of naked self-interest rather than supposed racial characteristics. (I find it odd that Jones does not mention the writings of John C. Calhoun.) Jones focuses more attention on discriminatory practices that developed in the North during this period:
Southern colonial planters had lacked the incentive to construct a rhetorical or legal apparatus to justify slavery; their power came from the barrel of a gun and the handle of a whip. In contrast, antebellum northern whites launched a concerted project to impose ‘order’ on newly freed slaves by devising racial ideologies and enshrining those ideologies in discriminatory laws. (103)
Such discrimination restricted black economic, social, and political participation and was often supported by the white working class, who also at times engaged in mob violence to keep blacks marginalized.
Jones argues that the details of racist ideology are less important than the underlying conflicts between groups. The Southern planter class strove to maintain an aristocratic lifestyle, and felt entitled to engage in whatever exploitation was necessary to do so. White workers, including immigrants, feared competition from freed slaves for jobs and supported efforts to limit freedmen’s ability to vote. Even after Jim Crow laws had been dismantled, workers were still susceptible to division along racial lines, which impeded efforts to achieve better pay and working conditions for all workers.
One might have thought that by 2013, we should not need to insist upon the idea that race is a fiction. Yet, in 2023, a brief look at media from across the political spectrum shows that race continues to be reified, and oligarchic power structures go unchallenged while voters are distracted by disputes about identity politics. As contention about how to teach history in public schools intensifies, Jones’s book is a useful reminder that we must neither forget the injustices of the past nor accept the spurious racial categories that have been both an effect of and instrumental to those injustices.