Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2001 00:23:27 +1100
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comedu.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: AUT: Linebaugh and Rediker, _The Many-Headed Hydra_


G'day all,

>Linebaugh and Rediker seem to assert that racial differences only develop
>towards the end of the 18th century/beginning of the 19th century, as a
>discourse of race and nation is constructed (he points to the London
>Corresponding Society moving from talking about the rights of humanity to
>the rights of Englishmen). Was this really the case? Because the book is
>quite polemical the contary evidence (assuming there is any, i don't know)
>isn't weighed up.

Have long wondered about the claim that racism is relatively new.  I'm not
taking issue with anyone, because I still don't really have a clue.  I do
know the radical right use evidence (whether it be in context, I dunno)
from the Koran to show a racism entirely recognisable from here and now.
Typical of a European-educated type, I don't have the history to know what
was going on in northern Africa at the time, but, if the following quotes
are right, I'd suggest there was a certain bellicosity between black and
non-black peoples.  Muhammed himself is often described as white, and black
faces are taken as markers of disbelief in Allah (after all, the Afrikaners
borrowed 'kaffir' - nonbeliever - from Arabic languages to tag blacks per
se).

"Abu Darda reported that the Holy Prophet said: Allah created Adam when he
created him. Then He stroke his right shoulder and took out a white race as
if they were seeds, and He stroke his left shoulder and took out a black
race as if they were coals. Then He said to those who were in his right
side: Towards paradise and I don't care. He said to those who were on his
left shoulder: Towards Hell and I don't care. - Ahmad" (Mishkat ul-Masabih,
translated by Karim, 3:117)

"On the Day of Judgement wilt thou see those who told lies against God; -
their faces will be turned black; is there not in Hell an abode for the
haughty?" (Az-Zumar 39:60)

"On the Day when (some) faces will be whitened and (some) faces will be
blackened; and as for those whose faces have been blackened, it will be
said unto them: Disbelieved ye after your (profession of) belief? Then
taste the punishment for that ye disbelieved." (Al-Imran 3:106)

In Hadith Sahih Al Bukhary (Vol. 1, 662; Vol.9, 256), Muhammad references
Blacks as "raisin-heads." In Sahih Muslim (Vol.9, pp.46-7) there is a
reference to Blacks as "pug-nosed slaves."

If that lot is right, associations between 'black' and 'disbeliever',
'condemned' and 'slave'  go a long way back, and may have been lying around
to be rejuvenated/appropriated by the likes of the Chesapeake
settler/invaders of the early 17th century (see
http://www.bowdoin.edu/~prael/256/origins_of_racism.htm ) - who must have
got their ideas, clearly already widely shared by 1620, else they would not
so readily have been trotted out as mere elaborations of the obvious - from
somewhere.

That said, the direct and exclusive associations, if not discursive
identity, between 'slave' and 'negra' was something that took form only
later in the 17th century in Anglo-parts.  I quote Oscar and Mary Handlin:

"Through the first three-quarters of the seventeenth century, the Negroes .
. . came into a society in which a large part of the population was to some
degree
unfree. . . . The Negroes' lack of freedom was not unusual. These
newcomers, like so many others, were accepted, bought and held, as kinds of
servants.
They were certainly not well off. But their ill-fortune was of a sort they
shared with men from England, Scotland, and Ireland. . . . Like the others,
some
Negroes became free, that is, terminated their period of service. Some
became artisans; a few became landowners and the masters of other men. Thus
the
status of negroes was that of servants; and so they were identified and
treated down to the 1660's ...  In the early 1600s, "the word, 'slave' had
no meaning in English law, but there was a significant colloquial usage.
This was a general term of derogation. It described the low-born as
contrasted with the gentry; to two hundred warriors, a sixteenth-century
report said eight were gentlemen, the rest slaves. It was in this sense
that Negro servants [in early seventeenth-century Virginia] were sometimes
called slaves. Yet in not much more than a half a century after 1660 this
term of derogation was transformed into a fixed legal position."

Seems to me that, if race was an idea that depended on 'nation', even
'nation state', then it had had plenty of conducive circumstances in which
to fester to full bloom.  'Frenchness', 'Englishness' and 'Spanishness' had
all become sensible ideas by the late 15th century, I think.

>I would also have been interested to know ... how the racisms
>that were generated by the ruling class were negotiated, overcome (or not)
>by the sailors, dock workers, etc.

Well, the definitive job of a hegemony worth its salt is that there's
something in it for the Great Unwashed to hang on to - racism does afford
the white suddenly-landless-peasant-cum-nascent-prole the comfortable
feeling that there's someone less worthwhile and less deserving than his
own class.  Racism is just one of the 'isms' that offers this balm.

>I think this issue is crucial, because the book suggests a revolutionary
>fervour during the 17th century and the 18th century. But if there was such
>a fervour, why didn't the struggles develop into a more substantial attack
>on capitalism? If we don't accept the trot argument that 'the material
>conditions weren't right' then what was limiting it?

Well, the British rebels of 1649 still had their god sitting on their
shoulders.  That many committed rebels were so awestricken by Charlie's
beheading suggests that there was still a bit of the 'oh, shit, now we've
gawn'n'dunnit - we've just topped the Lord God's bleedin' representative on
earth!' sensibility about.  Remember, many weren't moved to fury by
Charles's material outrages against the people, but by his dalliance with a
Catholic consort and the consequent likelihood of a Catholic army on
British shores.  They weren't rejecting the divine right of their betters
so much as rejecting Charles's bemusing betrayal of his part as Defender of
the Faith.

Anyway, for what that little lot is worth ...

All the best,
Rob.




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