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There were of course black or indigenous peoples in Australasia and North America
long before there were whites. But few people realise that there were black people in
Britain before the English (or Anglo-Saxons) arrived - black soldiers in the Roman
army helped to pacify and ‘civilise’ the ‘barbaric’ natives. And there
was a continuous black presence in Britain from the sixteenth century onwards - Sir
Walter Raleigh’s wife started a trend by having an imported African servant and this
became highly fashionable in the course of the next hundred years. Certainly there was
racial prejudice at this time - wild notions about people who looked so
obviously different and came from a world away. But racism - an ideology which
bundled up prejudices into a package to ‘prove’ that black people were inferior
- didn’t come about until it became economicallyuseful forwhite people to
believe such a thing. That time came with slavery.
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Racism emerged out of the rise in the slave trade in the eighteenth century. Black
people could be bought and sold like property and treated - or maltreated - as
their owners wished, because they were regarded as something less than human. The basis
for this idea already existed in European culture in general and in Catholicism in
particular, which held that those who were not believers in the ‘one, true
church’ were inferior beings. Around this in the era of slavery a whole system of
beliefs was erected which attempted to prove that blacks were less intelligent than
whites, with smaller brains and a capacity only for manual labour. They were seen,
moreover, as uncivilised and barbaric. The existence of the great black civilisations has
been hidden from history - right down to the present day.
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The abolition of slavery didn’t come about because people like William Wilberforce
and Abraham Lincoln were liberal and philanthropic. It was rather because it ceased to be
profitable and stood in the way of economic development. Slaves were expensive to control,
and developing capitalist economies needed a free market in labour and a population which
could afford to buy the goods now being produced in factories. Slaves, who were not
a mobile workforce and had no wages with which to buy commodities, obviously didn’t
fit this bill and thus stood in the way of ‘economic progress’. This is what was
behind the American Civil War - not the North’s humanitarianism but instead
their wish to industrialise and challengethe power of the Southern plantation-owners.
Slavery was replaced with wage labour - and the US Constitution continued to regard
black people as only three-fifths human.
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From peace to slaughter. Three pictures that hint at the tragic story of
Australia’s aborigines: a quiet rural settlement in Queensland; the first contact
with British settlers; and Truganini, last female left in Tasmania after the black
population had been wiped out by whites (she died in 1876).
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In the years after the Second World War, racism really came home to Europe. In North
America and Australasia there had always been a large black population suffering alongside
the white, but it was only when mass labour was needed for the post-war reconstruction
that black immigration to Europe took off. Britain had a ready source of cheap labour in
the colonies, and the new immigrants were given the jobs white people refused - dirty,
ill-paid work, night shifts and dead-end jobs. The country had not paid to raise, educate
or house these people yet everybody made money out of them - landlords, employers, and
the Government through taxes.
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new
internationalist 145
