Thread by @SarahTaber_bww

wow someone got really offended about @jbouie's tweets from earlier today but is too scared to tag him

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by @jbouie view original on Twitter

with some assist from historian twitter let's get into it #twitterstorian

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by @ThylacineReport view original on Twitter

The bit that seems to bog folks down is "but ppl hated each other before the Enlightenment, therefore racism must have already existed."

This is a misreading of history. But before we get into the details, let's talk WHY this particular misreading of history. Who does it serve?

There are people whose political & career ambitions depend on racial conflict.

They need it to thrive.

So they need people to believe that racial conflict is natural. Inevitable. Primordial.

And they need folks to believe that a functioning multiracial society is an aberration of the modern age. Unnatural. Untested. Unknown. Impossible.

When you see a "thought leader" who insists multiculturalism is impossible- when there are millennia of societies across the world that show us otherwise-

know that they're not just ignorant of history. They're incompetent & scared of having to compete in a full world.

They know that in order for anyone to care what they have to say, they have to divide & conquer and appeal to the basest fears of people who don't know any better. That's the highest goal they can imagine for themselves.

Sad!

Now that that's out of the way. As far as we know, yes, humans have always had group-on-group rivalries.

Literally nobody says "group-on-group rivalries & judgments didn't exist before the Enlightenment."

What the Enlightenment did was drastically change how the lines of "in our group, not in our group" were drawn

In Europe just prior to the Enlightenment, there were national rivalries. But the big line was drawn by religion. Including whether or not it was ok to enslave someone.

Crudely, if someone was a Christian, they were a real child of God & shouldn't be enslaved. If not, go for it.

But that rule had a big problem. Enslaved Africans figured this out & kept getting baptized so they could stop being slaves.

Well THAT nonsense just had to stop. How are you supposed to run a sugar plantation if everyone keeps finding Jesus?

So, colonial societies in Europe found themselves on the market for a new dividing line between who was OK to enslave and who wasn't.

By this time, colonizers in the New World had already figured out that buying Africans was a better investment than indentured servants from Europe, or trying to enslave Native Americans.

Native Americans kept dying from imported diseases, if they didn't run away first (which was p. easy for them to do since they knew the terrain & had friends & family to go to)

and indentured servants had this annoying habit of earning their freedom after several years.

So after that trial & error, colonial Europe built solid trade routes, coastal forts, specialized ships, invented in the concept of "insurance," etc so as to capture & traffic millions of Africans to America.

The result was that European colonizers were surrounded by hundreds, thousands of Africans toiling away and not looking very happy about it.

Humans are funny. We have this thing called empathy. We have to find ways to turn it off.

Have you ever worked as a slave overseer? I have.

I mean, they called it "supervising inmate farm crews," but that's semantics.

Supervising prisoners with jobs (thanks, @TaikaWaititi) does interesting things to your mind, & it does them quickly.

Intellectually you know the inmates are all just kids who got caught with 1oz of weed, bc violent criminals & serious felons don't get farm privileges.

Intellectually you know since they don't get paid & can't get a reference out of this job, literally what's the point for them of trying hard. "Giving it your best" is not how slave labor works.

Which, as the person who's tasked with supervising them, is just kinda difficult.

They gave you this shitty inmate crew, it's so hot you've got tunnel vision, and they're just faffing around, and that's not ok bc there's this whole list of things you have to get done before the end of the day.

Plus there's the whole Stanford Prison Experiment angle of the thing where putting a bunch of guys in prison jumpsuits and putting someone else in charge of them just ... really sets the tone for the whole dynamic. Y'know?

There was this whole dynamic put into play where the people in jumpsuits became a problem you had to manage. There were certain feelings that came up when you saw an inmate in uniform, regardless of whether they were on your crew or not.

At that time @RobTaber was deep in his work on the Haitian Revolution, and we talked a lot about the role of poor white overseers in building modern racism.

In other words, I knew exactly what was happening in my head. And it still kept going. The nature of the job trains your brain to respond to people in jumpsuits as something a little different or less than human.

There's a reason every society we have record of has had very clear rules about physical appearance of slaves & second-class citizens.

There's a reason ancient Sumer gave slaves visible brand marks, Germany made Jewish people wear gold stars, and today we make inmates wear the orange pajamas.

For slavery and second-class status to work, every person has to instantly be on the same page about who's on the bottom of the social pyramid and can be, nay, MUST be treated as less than human.