The New World, as the Western Hemisphere has been called, specially the Americas, including such nearby islands as those in the Caribbean and Bermuda, is a term that originated in the early 16th Century after Europeans made landfall. This “fourth part of the world,” as the Americas were also called, was “conquered,” in the modern sense of the word, and “colonized” by extremes of will and power.
It was a violent takeover, a crazy, fierce and brutal acquisition of exotic lands and a murderous subjugation of native people. This legacy – this warring DNA – runs rampant through the Americas, but most notably in the extreme nature of American ideology, which brought us the horrible and savage act of racial terrorism in South Carolina.
America is misaligned; in turn, this most powerful nation is causing a misalignment in the world. The cause of this improper alignment originates with a denial of history and, of course, the refusal to believe that any history leaves behind a stain that is carried forth by those re-writing and making a new history.
The violent legacy that founded the New World roams our unconscious; it has never left, not since 1492 when a New World Order was determined. We are still working it out; we’re still living it; and we’ve yet to acknowledge its violent, repressive aftermath, which reared its ugly head in South Carolina.
Here’s a brief outline of the extremely powerful history, psychology and ideology that came across the Atlantic – and made us who we are today:
- January 2, 1492: the Fall of Granada: Muhammad XII, the last Moorish Emir of Granda, surrenders the city to the army of the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand II of Arragon and Isabella I of Castile, ending the 10 year Granda War and the centuries-long Reconquista and bringing an end to 780 years of Muslim control of Al-Andalus.
Question #1: How well did this work out, the first modern misalignment?
- January 15, 1492: Columbus meets Ferdinand and Isabella at the Alcázar de los Reyes Cristiano in Córdoba, Andalusia, and persuades them to support his Atlantic voyage intended to find a new route to the East Indies.
Question #2: How well did this work out, the first vital exportation of an ideology of misalignment ? How did Columbus treat the “docile” and “friendly” natives in this “New World”? What did he establish as the modus operandi for Europeans colonizing the “New World”, especially since his backing already comes fraught with violence and oppression – and expulsion – under the auspices of a Christian God?
- October 28, 1492: Columbus lands in Cuba. (In 1762, the British army led by George Keppel, 3rd Earl of Albemarle captured Havana as part of the Seven Year War with France. During the year-long occupation of Cuba (Spain regained the island in 1793 by exchange of Florida with the British), the British colonists expanded the plantation system on the island and imported 4000 African slaves as laborers, nearly 10% of all the slaves imported to the island during the previous 250 years.)
Question #3: How did this work out? The Plantation System, an extreme organism comprised of a harsh hierarchy, becomes firmly ensconced as the economic engine for the New World. Slavery is an economic system under which people are treated as property. Slaves can be held from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work or to demand compensation. Slavery in the Americas has a contentious history, and plays a major role in the history and evolution of some countries.
An estimated 12 million Africans arrived in the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Of these, an estimated 645,000 were brought to what is now the United States. The usual estimate is that about 15% of slaves died during the voyage, with mortality rates considerably higher in Africa itself in the process of capturing and transporting indigenous peoples to the ships. Approximately 6 million black Africans were killed by others in tribal wars.
- July 30, 1492: the entire Jewish community, some 200,000, were expelled from Spain.
- December 31, 1492: 100,000 Jews are expelled from Sicily.
Question #4: Violent conquest, antisemitism, expulsions, beginning with the Spanish Inquisition, and the establishment of the plantation system, have brought us where?
One answer is a total denial of history and how the blood and violence that established an illusion of order still runs deep in American ideology.
Slavery was well established in the “New World” by the Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch, who all sent African slaves to work in both North and South America during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The English began aggressively trading in what was called “black ivory” during the middle of the seventeenth century, spurred on by the need for laborers in the hot, humid sugar fields on the West Indian islands of Barbados, St. Christopher, the Bermudas, and Jamaica.
For their cargoes of human flesh, the traders brought iron and copper bars, brass pans and kettles, cowrey shells, old guns, gun powder, cloth, and alcohol. In return, ships might load on anywhere from 200 to over 600 African slaves, stacking them like cord wood and allowing almost no breathing room. The crowding was so severe, the ventilation so bad, and the food so poor during the “Middle Passage” of between five weeks and three months that a loss of around 14 to 20% of their “cargo” was considered the normal price of doing business. This slave trade is thought to have transported at least 10 million, and perhaps as many as 20 million, Africans to the American shore.
Slaves from the region of Senegambia and present-day Ghana were preferred. At the other end of the scale were the “Calabar” or Ibo or “Bite” slaves from the Niger Delta, who Carolina planters would purchase only if no others were available. In the middle were those from the Windward Coast and Angola.
Carolina planters developed a vision of the “ideal” slave – tall, healthy, male, between the ages of 14 and 18, “free of blemishes,” and as dark as possible. For these ideal slaves Carolina planters in the eighteenth century paid, on average, between 100 and 200 sterling – in today’s money that is between $11,630 and $23,200!
Many of these slaves were almost immediately put to work in South Carolina’s rice fields.
Which brings us to the shooting in South Carolina and a deep seeded ideology that runs through American culture and is carefully massaged by conservative politicians and extremists, such as the Council of Conservative Citizens, whose leader, Earl Holt, III, has donated large sums of money to several politicians of note, and emblazoned in the display of the Confederate flag over South Carolina’s State Capital, an affront to decency and social justice.
Slavery became the American Economic System – a way of seeing the world, a way of experiencing an Other, a way to disregard human life. (In 2006, William C. Rhoden, sports columnist of the New York Times, publishes, Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall and Redemption of the Black Athlete, demonstrating how The Plantation System is alive and well in professional sports. See Rhoden’s interview, here, on Quite Frankly.)
Until we get back to this history and acknowledge that history does not end, rather it continues in strange and dark strains that haunt us because we are interconnected in complex ways, such that so much goes undetected – such as a baby-faced, unassuming young man who becomes, as Charles M. Blow says, “baptized in a theology of race hate,” we will be unable to move towards the idea of justice, as Amartya Sen writes about:
The need for an accomplishment-based understanding of justice is linked with argument that justice cannot be indifferent to the lives that people can actually live…The freedom to choose our lives can make a significant contribution to our well-being, but going beyond the perspective of well being, the freedom itself may be seen as important. Being able to reason and choose is a significant aspect of human life…The freedoms and capabilities we enjoy can be valuable to us, and it is ultimately for us to decide how to use the freedom we have … First, human lives are then seen inclusively, taking note of the substantial freedoms that people enjoy, rather than ignoring everything other than the pleasures or utilities they end up having. There is also a second significant aspect to freedom: it makes us accountable for what we do.
Dylan Storm Roof had access to a dangerous single story perpetuated by a white supremacist theology of race hate that victimizes whiteness. “You are raping our women and taking over the country,” said Roof right before his rampage, according to witnesses. Roof has no sense of justice, obviously; he’s been educated in a limited sense of freedom, too, one in which some have it and others do not – and that’s the way it is.
If we live in a country that privileges stories that are limiting in their very nature, we will experience many more people like Roof ; we will also find the racial illogic of Rachel Dolezal. Misalignment produces extremes. These are times that are defined by the inconsistencies brought about by a binary view of the world: black and white, right and wrong, conservative and liberal, Republican and Democrat. Rather, we fail to see what can bring us together: our connections to each other, to humanity – the notion that when you look into someone’s eyes you’re seeing yourself. Only when we begin to realize this will we able to move away from our misaligned belief that this is “the new normal.”
It’s the theology of race hate that is the prodigal child of the plantation system. And it’s the theology of race hate that is uniquely lodged in the American Ideology. The American Dream, our national ethos, the set of ideals in which freedom includes opportunity for prosperity and success, and an upward social mobility for the family and children, achieved through hard work in a society with few barriers, is completely hindered, even non-existent – for all of us – if the theology of race hate remains unabated. There’s no way around this. And it requires re-education for all on a massive scale, one in which social justice is at its core.
The connections between the ideology of race hate and how it affects opportunities for prosperity and success in a society that sees itself as having few barriers are the only things worth talking about, otherwise we’re not moving forward as a nation that is open and willing to embrace the idea of justice. We cannot embrace the idea of justice without first acknowledging that a violent history informs us and that we have to embrace the challenge of undoing this across the Americas, together.
The Uncanny 