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Enslavement - No Permanent Effects |
Photo: © Marion Ouphouet (Enslavement)
From talks by Barbara Love, the Re-evaluation Counseling (RC) International Liberation Reference Person for African-Heritage People in Runaway Bay, Jamaica
We African-Heritage people (in the Americas) started out in Africa, and we got brought over here to America. (Some of us came by ourselves.) Basically the European landed gentry had run out of land and resources, and they were looking for somewhere to go. They sent explorers out looking for land and resources in various parts of the world. One place they went was Africa. In Africa they found much land and wealth, and it happened that the land had people on it.
It also happened that this age of exploration coincided with the age of scientific development in Europe. They categorized and described birds and flora and fauna and other things of the earth, and they got around to categorizing the peoples of the world. They called the categories "races." People with blue eyes and brown hair were a certain kind of people. Pretty soon they had three hundred races. It got to be too much, and there were not enough larger categories. They ended up with three categories: Negroid, Mongoloid, and Caucasoid.
At the time, racial categorizing was just an interesting way of grouping the peoples of the world. Most Europeans fell into the Caucasoid category; most Asians ended up in the Mongoloid; and most Africans, in the Negroid. It was just an interesting way to group the human race. Then the Europeans began "needing" more resources - and began going to Africa for gold, copper, diamonds, land, brass, and all sorts of things. And for people. "These people," said the Europeans, "are Negroid, and we are Caucasoid. What are we going to do here?" Categorizing was no longer an interesting way of understanding the people of the world. Europeans began to attach valuation to the categories. Some categories became superior to others, and Europeans began to say, "Being in the superior category gives us the right to take what these other people have. Not only will we take what these people have, we will also take them."
At some point it occurred to Europeans that this was not exactly right. At the same time as they were taking these people and all they had, Europeans were coming upon ideas of fairness and justice and brotherhood. Holding human beings in conditions of enforced servitude just didn’t fit. So they had to create a justification, an explanation, that would allow them to feel all right about taking the land, the wealth, the resources, and the people themselves. The enforced servitude was justified by the notion of the superiority of the one group and the inferiority of the other.
It is difficult to keep a people in a condition of servitude, particularly proud people with a strong heritage, people accustomed to organizing their own affairs to suit them. In order to make it work, they made the people themselves believe the idea that was created to justify this condition. If you can just get the people themselves to believe in their own inferiority, they’ll say servitude is fine. That’s what I mean when I talk about internalized racism and internalized oppression. When the people, placed in a position of limited access to resources, themselves start believing those ideas and start believing in their own powerlessness, believing in their own limitations, I call that internalized oppression. When they start believing they are less-than, that they are not-as-good-as, that they are not-as-smart-as, that they are not-as-beautiful-as, they are not-as-strong-as, they are not-as-entitled-as, that’s the internalized racism.
A whole society was organized around supporting this mythology, around getting us to buy into it and go along with it. It got passed from one generation to the next. We resisted it and have continued to resist both the condition and the ideology. In 1804, Toussaint L’Ouverture, a Haitian patriot said, "We are not going to go for that. We will have us a revolution, and we’ll reclaim ourselves for ourselves."
So the words that I bring you tonight are: You are not victims. You never were victims. Consider that there were no slaves. There were no slaves. There were people, Africans, who were held in a condition of enforced servitude, in enforced bondage.
They were held in that condition in the United States from 1619 to 1865 - long, long years. Here in Jamaica it was thirty years shorter, but still too long. The point, however, is that this was a condition in which my people were held. My people were never their condition. They are not their condition. It has been part of the design of the oppressive society to get us to believe we are our condition. If we believe we are our condition, if we take it on as an identity, the best we can do is to work with it, make the best of it.
But we can recognize that although we may be in this condition, nothing compromises our humanity. Nothing compromises the fact that we are completely powerful, good, loving, zestful, cooperative, connected, and brilliant. Nothing ever compromises complete humanness. No matter how brutal the conditions that we survived, our humanity was never compromised. An oppressive society would have us believe that our humanity was compromised if it got us to call ourselves slaves. Every time we call ourselves slaves, we agree to this idea that our essential humanity was compromised by the conditions in which we found ourselves held.
We can reject that notion completely and reclaim for ourselves our own understanding of our complete humanity, uncompromised in any way. We are not broken. We have never been a broken people-never. We have been in conditions that were designed to break us, but we have never been a broken people. We are fully powerful, brilliant, lovingly connected, zestful, fully human. That’s how we come together here. And when we leave here I want you to remember who you really are and to act accordingly.
Contact: United to End Racism/Re-evaluation Counseling
Tel: 206-284-0311
Website: www.rc.org/uer/index.html
Reprinted from Black Re-emergence. © Rational Island Publishing
We African-Heritage people (in the Americas) started out in Africa, and we got brought over here to America. (Some of us came by ourselves.) Basically the European landed gentry had run out of land and resources, and they were looking for somewhere to go. They sent explorers out looking for land and resources in various parts of the world. One place they went was Africa. In Africa they found much land and wealth, and it happened that the land had people on it.
It also happened that this age of exploration coincided with the age of scientific development in Europe. They categorized and described birds and flora and fauna and other things of the earth, and they got around to categorizing the peoples of the world. They called the categories "races." People with blue eyes and brown hair were a certain kind of people. Pretty soon they had three hundred races. It got to be too much, and there were not enough larger categories. They ended up with three categories: Negroid, Mongoloid, and Caucasoid.
At the time, racial categorizing was just an interesting way of grouping the peoples of the world. Most Europeans fell into the Caucasoid category; most Asians ended up in the Mongoloid; and most Africans, in the Negroid. It was just an interesting way to group the human race. Then the Europeans began "needing" more resources - and began going to Africa for gold, copper, diamonds, land, brass, and all sorts of things. And for people. "These people," said the Europeans, "are Negroid, and we are Caucasoid. What are we going to do here?" Categorizing was no longer an interesting way of understanding the people of the world. Europeans began to attach valuation to the categories. Some categories became superior to others, and Europeans began to say, "Being in the superior category gives us the right to take what these other people have. Not only will we take what these people have, we will also take them."
At some point it occurred to Europeans that this was not exactly right. At the same time as they were taking these people and all they had, Europeans were coming upon ideas of fairness and justice and brotherhood. Holding human beings in conditions of enforced servitude just didn’t fit. So they had to create a justification, an explanation, that would allow them to feel all right about taking the land, the wealth, the resources, and the people themselves. The enforced servitude was justified by the notion of the superiority of the one group and the inferiority of the other.
It is difficult to keep a people in a condition of servitude, particularly proud people with a strong heritage, people accustomed to organizing their own affairs to suit them. In order to make it work, they made the people themselves believe the idea that was created to justify this condition. If you can just get the people themselves to believe in their own inferiority, they’ll say servitude is fine. That’s what I mean when I talk about internalized racism and internalized oppression. When the people, placed in a position of limited access to resources, themselves start believing those ideas and start believing in their own powerlessness, believing in their own limitations, I call that internalized oppression. When they start believing they are less-than, that they are not-as-good-as, that they are not-as-smart-as, that they are not-as-beautiful-as, they are not-as-strong-as, they are not-as-entitled-as, that’s the internalized racism.
A whole society was organized around supporting this mythology, around getting us to buy into it and go along with it. It got passed from one generation to the next. We resisted it and have continued to resist both the condition and the ideology. In 1804, Toussaint L’Ouverture, a Haitian patriot said, "We are not going to go for that. We will have us a revolution, and we’ll reclaim ourselves for ourselves."
So the words that I bring you tonight are: You are not victims. You never were victims. Consider that there were no slaves. There were no slaves. There were people, Africans, who were held in a condition of enforced servitude, in enforced bondage.
They were held in that condition in the United States from 1619 to 1865 - long, long years. Here in Jamaica it was thirty years shorter, but still too long. The point, however, is that this was a condition in which my people were held. My people were never their condition. They are not their condition. It has been part of the design of the oppressive society to get us to believe we are our condition. If we believe we are our condition, if we take it on as an identity, the best we can do is to work with it, make the best of it.
But we can recognize that although we may be in this condition, nothing compromises our humanity. Nothing compromises the fact that we are completely powerful, good, loving, zestful, cooperative, connected, and brilliant. Nothing ever compromises complete humanness. No matter how brutal the conditions that we survived, our humanity was never compromised. An oppressive society would have us believe that our humanity was compromised if it got us to call ourselves slaves. Every time we call ourselves slaves, we agree to this idea that our essential humanity was compromised by the conditions in which we found ourselves held.
We can reject that notion completely and reclaim for ourselves our own understanding of our complete humanity, uncompromised in any way. We are not broken. We have never been a broken people-never. We have been in conditions that were designed to break us, but we have never been a broken people. We are fully powerful, brilliant, lovingly connected, zestful, fully human. That’s how we come together here. And when we leave here I want you to remember who you really are and to act accordingly.
Contact: United to End Racism/Re-evaluation Counseling
Tel: 206-284-0311
Website: www.rc.org/uer/index.html
Reprinted from Black Re-emergence. © Rational Island Publishing
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