Since the 1920s, Charleston has been the name of a dance, a
dance with roots in Africa, made white and famous on Broadway. Now Charleston
is the name of a massacre, the murder of nine people and the desecration of the
Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Charleston was founded as Charles Town in 1670 when Charles
II of England granted land in Carolina to some of his supporters after he was
restored to the throne. The city and its putative Southern gentility were built
on two great historical crimes – the genocide of the indigenous American people
and the African slave trade.
The great liberal philosopher John Locke, an advocate of
genocide and a man with personal investments in the African slave trade, wrote
the Constitutions for North and South Carolina in 1669. They affirmed the
rights of private (white) property over both the (indigenous) commons and
(African) slaves. Locke is often described, quite rightly, as the “intellectual
father” of the United States.
Like other liberal thinkers, he was appalled by slavery,
which he described as “vile and miserable an estate of man”, only in so far as
the people to be enslaved were among those considered fully human. Liberalism,
from the beginning, was constituted by a racialised distinction between the civilised
and the barbarian, the sacred and profane, those who are fully human and those
who are less than human.
The racialisation of the ancient distinction between the
sacred and the profane and civilisation and barbarism is older than liberalism.
The year 1492 was an important moment in the development of this process: in
that year, Isabella and Ferdinand, the Catholic queen and king of Spain,
expelled the Arabs and the Jews from Spain; it became possible to imagine
Europe as a project, as the locus of the sacred, first Christian and then
white.
It was also the year in which Christopher Columbus, sailing
under the authority of King Ferdinand, reached the Caribbean and inaugurated a
period of European domination of the world built on the riches wrung from
genocide and slavery in the Caribbean and the Americas.
The initial ideology legitimating the authority of European
colonialism was rooted in a religion founded, in the Middle East, on a
commitment to the universal. Paul the Apostle, the primary figure in the
development of Christianity as a religion, insisted that the revelation of the
divinity of Jesus was for all of humanity: “Here there is no Gentile or Jew,
circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is
all, and is in all.”
This posed certain problems for the legitimation of the
denial of the full and equal humanity of all people. Yet, just 10 years after
Columbus arrived in the New World, Pope Nicholas V gave Spain and Portugal’s
rulers the right to enslave pagans.
In 1537 Pope Paul
III, asked to rule on whether or not the indigenous inhabitants of the New
World were fully human, declared that, although they were human, their souls
were empty. This doctrine, anima nullius, fitted the idea that the lands of the
New World were empty, terra nullius, and for the taking.
The idea that there
was a split between those who were fully human and those who were not would
later be written into European philosophy, literature and then science. It’s
still evident in much of the Euro-American academy, Hollywood and, in
particularly crude forms, Fox News and the Daily Mail.
England’s “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 weakened the power of
the monarchy and enabled the rise of liberalism. Italian philosopher Domenico
Losurdo has shown that, for this political project, emancipation was imagined
in the confines of a distinction between the sacred and the profane. This
distinction rendered the colonised – “barbarians” in the language of John
Stuart Mill, the other great liberal philosopher – as less than fully human.
As liberalism advanced, slavery reached unprecedented levels
of horror. The desecration of the lives of some was the basis for the
emancipation of others. Neither the American Revolution (which enabled 13
British colonies in North America to achieve independence from Britain in 1783)
nor the French Revolution of 1789 took its grand declarations of the rights of
man to apply to all. In 1787, the United States Constitution declared Africans
to count for three-fifths of a full (white) person.
The first great challenge to a racialised conception of who
was fully human was the revolution against slavery in Haiti, which concluded in
1804. Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led an army of African slaves to victory
against the European powers, seized on the declaration of the rights of man in
revolutionary Paris in 1791 to affirm a vision of universal freedom, a vision
enforced by a military victory.
Yet, as the Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot noted in
1995, the great thinkers of Europe were so invested in the colonial ideology of
a graduated humanity that, even after defeat by L’Ouverture’s forces, they were
not able to grasp the political agency of enslaved Africans in Haiti. This,
Trouillot noted, continued to be a feature of the European academy, including
its radical edge, for almost two centuries.
But, though the Haitian revolution was incomprehensible in
the salons of Paris, news of its triumph spread across the black world, largely
through black sailors. It may have inspired the 1808 slave revolt in Cape Town.
In 1822, Denmark Vesey and others planned a slave rebellion,
which they called “the rising”, in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal
Church in Charleston. Their aim was to overwhelm their oppressors and escape to
Haiti. They were betrayed and the church was burnt down. Twelve years later,
the church community was forced underground. It met in secret for more than 30
years.
Abraham Lincoln signed the emancipation proclamation in 1863
and by 1865 it held legal force across the US. But rights in law are seldom
rights in practice for oppressed people.
“Equality,” Aimé Césaire noted in the context of the
Caribbean struggles for decolonisation nearly a century later, “refuses to
remain abstract.” The practical realisation of rights granted in principle
requires the material basis and political strength necessary to ensure
equality.
Segregation secured ongoing white domination,
along with a brutal backlash in the form of organised white terror that
included ritualised mob killings of nearly 4 000 black people. These grotesque
performances of white power continued until 1968. It was not simply a matter of
white mobs acting outside of the law: as WEB du Bois noted in 1903, the “police
system was arranged to deal with blacks alone, and tacitly assumed that every
white man was ipso facto a member of that police”.
In 1962 Martin Luther King Jr came to the Emanuel African
Methodist Episcopal Church to address the struggle for full civil rights. The
victories that came out of the struggles of the 1960s, confronting serious and
at times murderous opposition, faced their own backlash, one that came to
centre on the systemic criminalisation of, in particular, young black men.
There has been imprisonment on a vast scale and white men, in
or out of uniform, have often been able to kill black men with impunity.
Recently names such as Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown,
Walter Scott and Freddie Grey – as well as places such as Ferguson and
Baltimore – have come to stand, across the world, for the evident fact that in
the US today black lives continue to be accorded a lesser weight and value than
those of white people.
The man who walked into the Emanuel African Methodist
Episcopal Church with a gun and murderous intent may well end up on death row.
Now that there is a debate about taking down the Confederate flag in South
Carolina, it is possible that Dylann Roof may not meet his fate under that sign
of racial terror.
But racial terror may very well continue to be read as
individual madness. The execution of Timothy McVeigh in 2011 did not result in
any meaningful awareness that organised terror – terror with its own symbols,
ideas, music and networks – can be and often is white, Christian and American.
Unlike, say, Locke, #jesuischarliehebdo or the BBC, Rhodesia
and the Klu Klux Klan are no longer credible points of reference for much of
the ongoing conflation of full humanity with whiteness. People like Roof are
invested in outmoded forms of white domination and an embarrassment to its most
powerful contemporary iterations. But the project continues with an evolving
symbolic economy and set of organisational forms.
One only has to look at policing and prisons in the US, or
what has been done by the US to Haiti, Palestine and Iraq, or, closer to home,
to the deep structure of our own society, the relentless catalogue of white
abuse, as well as Operation Fiela, to see that the historical sequence
inaugurated in 1492 is not yet over.
