A few years before the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in Paris in 1789, the text of the Declaration of Independence of the United States, proclaimed on July 4, 1776, sets out the main principles which founded Western democracies: natural equality between men, inalienable rights to life, to the search for happiness, to self-determination.
However, these two declarations which respond to each other have the common point of having been forged in the heart of the two largest slave empires of the time, British and French, which between them combine the vast majority of the Atlantic slave trade, colonial production (in regions where the population in slavery sometimes reached 90%) and the benefits of colonial trade on European markets.
The idea of race
In France as in the new United States, the principles of natural freedom and equality had few consequences on the practice of slavery, and it would be necessary to wait more than half a century to open real discussions on its abolition.
However, proclaiming natural equality in this context produced a paradoxical tension immediately perceived by its main drafter, Thomas Jefferson, himself a planter owning three hundred slaves and biological father of several dozen of them.
When Jefferson reflected on the first Constitution of the State of Virginia which he governed in 1787, he pointed out the difficulty of applying the principles of the American revolution in a society where there were many free people of slave origin: it was impossible to grant free blacks the full attributes of citizenship, because society, he said in substance, would simply not accept it.
Through the solutions he evokes – the deportation of blacks to the Great West, to the margins of United States society, or to the African coasts where they could self-determine among themselves – he actually formulates what runs through our societies to this day, namely the idea of race.
Because if slaves were kept outside of society by the institution of slavery, blacks, in an egalitarian society, are kept outside of humanity. Although this gives them natural rights, they will not be applied to them.
Massive practice of slavery
It is also around this idea – the impossibility of free blacks in a democratic American society – that slave-holding planters from the South and proletarians from the North came together to form the Republican-Democratic party, still to this day the main political organization in the country.
250 years later, we can question the vitality and still active violence of this affect. To understand this, we must return to the effects of a massive practice of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade on society. In this regime which intensified in the 18th century, millions of individuals deported from Africa formed a large part of the population. However, slavery makes them “non-persons”, that is to say to whom the rules of society do not apply: to whom we can do everything, to whom we do everything.
This situation was a permanent invitation to aggression and transgression – which, due to the effect of the institution of slavery, was no longer one –, not without arousing guilt or unease or even an escalation of violence. Of these shameful or abusive transgressions, there remains a trace, a stain, to which no one wants to be related.
The American citizen, an anti-slave
Slave or freed, those who bear the trace of it are assigned there. To forget it would be to recognize the crime that was or could be committed against them: aggression, murder, rape, incest. No one wants to be assimilated to these overexploited workers either: the poorest or downgraded defend themselves at all costs from not being… Black.
Because it is indeed the color which has become, over two centuries, the stigma of the slave condition. Since slaves from European empires in the Americas were purchased in Africa, the vast majority of Africans and their descendants on the continent were associated with the slave condition.
Quickly, the term “black”, used by the Portuguese who had initiated the Atlantic slave trade in the 15th century, gave rise to the term “white”, which defines someone who would have no African or indigenous origin, that is to say free from any slave origin.
With the Declaration and the establishment of a nation, a new fundamental belonging is constructed mirroring the slave condition: the American citizen is an anti-slave, and beyond that, an anti-black, a white. The meaning of the word freedom is not only that given to it by liberal philosophy but full of another signifier: the free, the entirely free, the naturally free, it is that which is absolutely not black, neither near nor far.
An improbable reactionary convergence
To be white, it is not enough to not be a slave. We must embody the figure opposite to this condition: exercise our freedom through our material autonomy, that is to say through the ownership of property capable of providing for our needs and those of our dependents – women, children, slaves, animals, servants, affiliates. It is by extension the right to defend one’s property and one’s dependents – hence the importance of carrying a weapon as a sign of citizenship, a privilege denied to “free blacks” in the slave society.
Such a reading allows us to consider the recurring manifestations of racism as reactions to a reconsideration of this founding belonging: all the moments of democratic enlargement, the stages of the disappearance of slavery in particular the abolition after the civil war in 1865, the deepening of civil rights a century later, and in general each time new social groups claim the attributes of citizenship that the law confers on them.
At the time of Independence, the planters of the South and the proletarians of the North had very distant class interests. Their alliance was based on the refusal to see free blacks participate in the nation: some so as not to weaken the slave order which made their fortune and their status, others so as not to risk being assimilated into it.
This unlikely reactionary convergence seems to resonate today in Trumpism and much other populist rhetoric in Europe. It continues to highlight the place of race in our political and anthropological identity.
About opinions
This text is signed by a guest author. He expresses his opinion and not that of the editorial staff. Our Live section aims to allow the expression of pluralism on religious, social and current affairs subjects, and to encourage dialogue, according to the criteria set by our editorial charter.
Share your opinion in comments or by writing to us at: readers.lacroix@groupebayard.com
