American History 101: Blood Money (USA as Well as CSA)

            "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography," Ambrose Bierce is said to have said, and we might add nowadays that multiple murders, shootings, and figurative battles over emotion-laden symbols is God's way of teaching Americans a bit of history.

            Among the more useful lessons that can be taught may come from the backlash against removing Confederate (CSA) flags and memorials through a more legitimate variation on the argument tu quoque — "You're one too!" — that points out the evils committed under the flag of the United States (USA), and notes how slavery flourished because of complacency, complicity, collusion, and corruption extending far beyond the South.*

            We talk today of "blood diamonds": diamonds from combat zones in Africa whose purchase helps brutal warlords in their massacres. Well, in England and much of the United States one could talk of "blood sugar" in England and the northern American colonies and not refer to people's glucose levels but to the brutal exploitation of slave labor in the Caribbean plantation system that supplied the sugar. Similarly for tobacco in what became the United States, and then, finally, cotton.

            It was indirect, but elegant people putting sugar in their coffee and tea and learning to "drink" tobacco — that was the early expression — were complicit in the slave trade (plus other exploitation for the coffee and tea). Less culpable were more ordinary folk later producing cotton fabric and being able to buy cheap textiles: people complicit in "blood cotton."

            Far more directly sin-laden was the wealth generated by trade by northern colonies and then under the United States converting blood sugar and molasses to rum to slaves in the Triangular Trade: "a pattern of colonial commerce in which slaves were bought on the African Gold Coast with New England rum and then traded in the West Indies for sugar or molasses, which was brought back to New England to be manufactured into rum." Although some of the rum went to other purposes: as Benjamin Franklin said, in his Autobiography of the local Indian tribes, with only a bit of hyperbole: "[…] if it be the design of Providence to extirpate these savages in order to make room for cultivators of the earth, it seems not improbable that rum may be the appointed means. It has already annihilated all the tribes who formerly inhabited the sea-coast" (1771-90, Part III, p. 57).

            Cotton is a useful product, and sugar is a "food-drug," not just a drug. With tobacco and rum, however, colonial America and later the United States were engaging in trade in psychoactive addictive drugs produced by slaves, including the hard drug ethyl alcohol that from colonial times to the present has been devastating to many Native Americans.

            Et bloody cetera.

            So we do indeed need to look back at the sins of the CSA, but to do so without hypocrisy, all White Americans (and some of the Black economic elite) need to acknowledge how much of our present wealth is blood money, the product of good old USA crimes against humanity.

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          * "Under the flag of the United States" could get literal. In Smuggler Nation, Peter Andreas points out that during the period in the 19th c. in which slavery was widespread but the slave trade illegal, US flagged vessels were the ships of choice for what had become illicit shipping of slaves. The US government resisted British attempts to stop and search even blatant slavers on the grounds that freedom from search on the high seas was more important than ending the slave trade.

Unite, Distract — and Rule: Donald Sterling (& Cliven Bundy [and SAE Bus Songs]) 1 May 2014/20 March 2015

            The headline on The Ventura County [CA] Star for 30 April 2014 read "Sterling Tarnished" (the Star has a real thing with cutesy headlines): "Clippers' owner banned for life by NBA." That was above the fold, just below the box referring readers to page 5A for the deaths of "at least 35 people in the South and Midwest" in tornadoes. Under the headline was a story by a local reporter on the celebration that replaced planned protests at the LA Clippers v. Golden State Warriors game (the Clippers won 113-103), and the Associated Press story on NBA Commissioner Adam Silver's announcement of the lifetime ban on Donald Sterling from "any association with the league or the Clippers," plus a $2.5M fine, plus calls that Sterling sell the team. The Star that day commented on Sterling's fall in its lead editorial, and a reporter-cum-columnist reported and commented on the case on page 1 of the Sports section, dealing mostly with the racist comments Sterling had been recorded making, but mentioning briefly — very briefly — Sterling's history of issues with race and misogyny, and housing discrimination.

            And so on with much of America's media uniting in noting that Donald Sterling is a racist asshole.

            Okay, I agree: Donald Sterling is a racist asshole, an ineffective team owner, and one creepily weird dude. Still, people should not be punished for what they are and most of the time only condemned, contemned, and verbally (counter)attacked for what they say. What counts most is what people do, and where the hell was the National Basketball Association when Sterling was quite likely racially discriminating in housing and undoubtedly acting as one shitty landlord!?

            Far more important is this. The attacks on Sterling unite all us right-thinking Americans in enforcing norms of decency in language but do little else. The attacks help assuage White feelings of guilt and help Blacks' self-esteem, but that's pretty much it. It's a legitimate high, but a cheap one, literally cheap; real progress will be expensive.

            I'll repeat a rule, one of the Basics every adult human should know: "Guilt isn't inherited; but the loot is."
            To find the US peculiarly evil among the nations is just another form of BS American exceptionalism, but European America was born in the dual original sins of the dispossession and slaughter of Native Americans and the enslavement and exploitation of Blacks. That is where any serious discussion of race matters in the US must begin and topics to which it must return.

            The loot is the main issue, folks; relatively speaking, all else is distraction.

            Look, it's nice if people admire and like you and potentially dangerous if people hate you. Still, what is crucial for minorities is whether or not and how much you really have to care what other people think. Keep your eye on the prize, and the most initial prize is political clout and social status — as in, initially and largely, money: if you have enough of it, you can laugh off the bigots.

            Sticking with Blacks here: much of the wealth of the United States came from extorted Black labor during slavery and to a lesser but significant extent under Jim Crow. That's the loot when it comes to African-Americans, or the main body of it, and some of us shared the loot far more than others. White folks tend to have more wealth than Black folks in large part because White folks inherited almost all of the loot.
            The serious question is what, if anything White and Black Americans — and the various blends of Americans — are going to do about that.

            Freed slaves didn't get "Forty Acres and a Mule," and figuring out a contemporary equivalent will be very difficult; actually doing anything will be painful for a lot of people because it involves reparations, which means taking some of the stolen property and giving it back.

            So let us enjoy righteous indignation against Donald Sterling and throw in Cliven Bundy, the songsters of Sigma Alpha Epsilon of Oklahoma U, and other such, and rejoice in the fall of Sterling and perhaps when the Federal Marshalls stop Mr. Bundy from going from deadbeat racist to insurrectionist. But let's keep the party fairly quiet, and brief.

            Then we can get down to serious discussion of who has what and how they and we got it: what to do with the loot from Grand Theft Continental, with lethal violence, against the AmerIndians, and kidnapping, murder, and crimes against humanity against the ancestors — some quite recent — of African-Americans.
            That's the issue — not the attitudes and blather of bigots.