The United States of America is still under the sway of the persuasiveness and profitability of African chattel slavery. The psychological payoffs offered to those who were melanin deficient at the expense of those who are melanin enhanced proved as appealing and attractive as the economic rewards associated with the system.
The willingness to maintain emotional ignorance as an excuse and justification for plausible deniability of the horror and injustice embedded in that world view that supported African chattel slavery and its social, political, economic and real-life consequences is a basis for rationalizing the continued existence of the resulting inequities and the lack of involvement or enthusiasm for change.
The story of the social implications of African chattel slavery have been twisted to obscure the torment, human cruelty and the sexual savagery that ravaged American society. In order to engage in the socially degrading (for perpetrators, collaborators and victims) and sexually debased behaviors that African chattel slavery allowed, there had to be a corresponding justification that allowed for the debauchery without condemnation. This flowed from the enlightenment ideas that postulated a polygenetic origin for the human family. Prior to the enlightenment, when religion held sway as the supreme wisdom, the main lens through which eruopeans viewed the world was religion. If you were christian you were with us. If you were not christian you were subject to conversion or domination. Evangelization was in part the early justification for much of european internal strife and external forays into what the considered "the new world" as well as continued exploitation of the known old world, i.e., Africa, China, India.
The historical policies and practices of physical /psychological domination and control have remained in place as institutionalized elements of the european presence in the world. We see the attempts at physical domination and control by various european countries in turn. From the Crusades to the Spanish invasion of the Americas to the sun never setting on the British Empire to the Pax Americana. Each in turn highlighting the military technological advantage and social pathological indifference that combined to spawn again and again crimes against humanity. The psychological component of the onslaught was designed to minimize resistance, anesthetize resilience and eradicate remembrance of a before time when european thought and interests did not dominate.
The cultural apparatus necessary for the type and tenor of the campaigns of coercion was a propensity for cruelty and violence that was grounded in the spiritual hostility between man and GOD evidenced by the rejection, shame and damnation of being driven from the Garden of Eden. Used as both a cudgel and a comfort, the estrangement from the relationship with divinity allowed for abhorrent behavior used as a cudgel that was rationalized as necessary for a wayward humanity and provided comfort in knowing that it was allowed due to original sin (Old Testament) and redemptive as an evangelizing activity (New Testament). The basic idea being to break the body to save the soul. This low context, binary, dualism created a paradigm that allowed unacceptable behavior to be accepted. It ultimately served as the rationalization of the exploitation of non-european people. From the slavery associated with the colonias of the conquistadors to the chattelization of African peoples the motivation was understood and explained as an extension of the biblical injunction of dominion.
African chattel slavery was a crime against humanity and the crowning accomplishment of the religious rationalization that served as a veneer for the economic exploitation that emerged as capitalism. Early efforts of enslavement of the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas met with the physical constraints of the people and the practical constraints resulting from their cultural knowledge and knowledge of local geography. The european weapons and warfare technology gave them the ability to command. Locally rooted culture gave made it difficult for the local people to be controlled.
The story of humanity is the path of order, disorder and reorder according to Joseph Campbell. I think we see in that observation a truth that is applicable to a wider universal experience. It is reflected in the traditional wisdom of "as above so below" where we see the tendency for order to transform into disorder and respond as reorder. It is the caterpillar that dissolves itself and after reordering emerges as the butterfly. It is the female that creates and cultivates the egg that reorders itself into a new being. It is the seasonal cycle that takes the order of summer into the disorder of winter and on to the reorder of spring. It is the order of thr human form that grows into disorder and death returning its form to its constituent parts that are taken up through the environment as the nutrient building blocks for egg and sperm to reorder as life again, But this cycle in human affairs is subject to cultural choices and preferences in terms of how if not what.
We can't change the cycle. We are part of it. But while we don't define our options
, we do determine our choices. We may not make a difference in the grand scheme of things but we can make a distinction. We can throw one starfish back into the sea from among the thousands that litter the beach of life. Throwing one back may not make a difference in the grand scheme of things but it makes a difference for that one, Who or what will be your starfish?
