Tags:African slavery Ari Merretxon General under developed black economy in America“I have received the following article from Ari S. Merretzon, M.S.CED, Board Member, Northeast Representative, National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA) as a comment of previous posts in regard to slavery. The full title of the article is “African Enslavement & Trade: The Legacy of the Under-Developed Black Economy in America. In appreciation for the work that went into the preparation and writing I thought it fitting to publish it as a posting so that it will not be lost amongst the comments. I thank him kindly for this contribution and hope that it may help to develop some insight into the subject matter.
“Too many people in high, middle, and low places in America are still in denial about the crimes against humanity represented by the monstrous destruction of human life, culture, and human possibilities called The Holocaust of African Enslavement and Trade. This human tragedy covers a continuum from 1440 to the present. Often, when justice and repair is sought for such crimes, it is tagged by many Europeans and “Americanized Africans” as “playing the race card” or the “victim card.” To counter this rebuff, the context card must be used. What I call the context card is America’s violent God complex and history of enslavement based on race. In essence, my point is public policy and terror in America is still based on race, and, therefore, it must be challenged and re-constructed based on race, in the context of enslavement, and not the condescending notions of an inherent curse of God, and permanent social, economic, and political pathologies.
My presentation, African Enslavement & Trade: The Legacy of the Under-developed Black Economy, within the format designed by the Philadelphia Institute for African Studies, will delineate how an external vertical system of human destruction, enslavement and trade, the beginning of “capitalism,” is the causality of the under-developed Black economy in America. Left unchanged it is our legacy.
The comparatively small degree of economic development of Americanized Africans is often wrongly and purposefully regarded as high achievement and success. This is a delusion created, controlled, and filtered by the interest convergence strategies of the descendents of the “founding fathers” and the “power elite” of America, for example, chattel property, integration, Christian religion, civil rights, diversity, wealth-building, and, the first black person, place or thing, to do this or that.
As an expected outcome of my presentation, and the questions and answers which will follow, it is my objective to transfer within the time allotted enough defining information wherein we as Americanized Africans will use the context card as the predicate for the re-construction of our thinking and behavior so that we might continue the struggle for economic justice, repair and sovereignty as all humans do. To trump the “race card” and the “victim card,” I will not bore you with economic data, but replay the “context card” so we may, as Yumy Odom, Director of Temple University, Pan-African Studies Community Education Program, (PASCEP) says, “start a revolution where it truly counts: in the mind!”
The Context Card
The “context card” outlines and describes the defining elements of the economic legacy of Americanized Africans, referred to hereinafter as the “under-developed Black economy in America.”
I am using the word “context” as defined by Webster’s New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition meaning., “the whole situation, background, or environment relevant to a particular event personality, creation, etc.” circumstances in which an event occurred or occurs; a setting.” The word context comes from the Latin contextus; the past participle of contexere, to join together, to weave.
There is no card in the human capital development deck that can beat the context card because it is the core element of our moral universe. Like “deuces are wild,” the context card outranks all cards in the human capital development deck. Also, the context card is a key resource to be used at an opportune time to contend with and beat back assaults on our capacity as a people. The context card distinguishes our experiences, those which are positive and those which are negative, from any and all immigrant groups in America. Please know and understand that we are not to be compared to any immigrant group.
The context card, is not an excuse; it is posited as the cause and the reason for our status in America as a group.
In respect to under-development, I use the definition of Amos Wilson, in Blue Print for Black Power:
“a situation in which a certain group of countries have their economy conditioned by the development and expansion of another economy, to which the former is subject. The relation… assumes the form of dependence when some countries (the dominant) can expand and give impulse to their own development, while other countries (the dependent) can only develop as a reflection of this expansion… The dominant countries have a technological, commercial, capital resource and social-political predominance over the dependent countries… This permits them to impose conditions of exploitation and extract part of the domestically produced surplus.”
While this definition which describes the economic situation of dependent nations, especially African nations relative to European imperialism, applies with equal or greater force to the large Americanized African community in the United States. However, the economic under-development of the Americanized African community cannot be logically or factually traced to the alleged innate or assigned group pathologies or pre-existing defects in our financial and economic infrastructure. Just like the continuum of past and contemporary under-development in Africa, our conditioned dependency in America can be traced precisely to African enslavement and trade as rationalized by Europeans, and to the outcome of economic in-justice.
This is to say that Americanized Africans were and are de-capitalized by White America’s use of enslavement as a basis for the preventive regulation and control of the distribution of capital, capital tools, techniques, restriction of credit and other forms of financial leverage indispensable to capital formation and to the accumulation of wealth in the United States.
Contrary to the history of capitalism taught in our colleges and universities, the origin of capitalism was quilted together by distinct patches of human terror which is the context card of the under-developed Black economy as we see and experience it today. These patches are many, old and new, some glaring ones are: 1) the holocaust of enslavement; 2) the gun and the ship, 3) the prison and the plantation, 4) Christian religion in America, and 5) Immigration. Each of these patches are wild and applies to every aspect of our human capital development, however the latter two will not be covered in this paper because of time restrictions, however, are mentioned because of exceptional importance.
The Holocaust of Enslavement
According to Dr. Maulana Karenga, African enslavement must be defined as holocaust. By holocaust he means a morally monstrous act of genocide that is not only against the people themselves, but also a crime against humanity. The Holocaust of enslavement expresses itself in the three basic ways I mentioned in my introduction: the morally monstrous destruction of human life, human culture and human possibility. Here is what Dr. Karenga says:
“In terms of the destruction of human life, estimates run as high as ten to a hundred million persons killed individually and collectively in various brutal and vicious ways. The destruction of culture includes the destruction of centers, products and producers of culture: cities, towns, villages, libraries, great literatures (written and oral), and works of art and other cultural creations as well as the creative and skilled persons who produced them. And finally, the morally monstrous destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among peoples. It also involves lifting Africans out of their own history making them a footnote and forgotten casualty in European history and thus limiting and denying their ability to speak their own special cultural truth to the world and make their own unique contribution to the forward flow of human history.”
Prior to and since the first landing of the ship of enslavement, we Africans have been forcefully conditioned, our reasoning inverted, causing our perception and reality to be mangled and twisted. It is here that the issue of stolen labor, un-just enrichment, and economic development must be contextualized. Removing us from our own history, enslaving us and brutally exploiting our labor, limited and prevented us from building our own future based on the origins of Black civilization, which is our human right.
The argument that there are no more slave owners and slaves and that enslavement is a thing of the pat has become too popular. The proverbial “past” is not as far back as we are lead to believe.
In his book Pawned Sovereignty, Ezrah Aharone, uses America’s official version of history that enslavement of Africans in America began in 1619 and was abolished in 1865. This means that to the year we spent 246 years in captivity. Since it is now closer to 2008 than 2007, we have been so-called “free” for only 143 years. This means that we were enslaved for 103 years longer than we have been free. This means that 100 years of our so-called freedom (1865-1965) were spent repairing ourselves and seeking recognition as humans. Still, today, we are not fully repaired or recognized as others in the global economic family of people.
So, of our 389 years in America we have been out of enslavement and segregation as we have known it for only 43 years! We must also understand that during the 100 years we sought recognition as humans, the crimes against humanity were being covered-up and generations indoctrinated to the enslavers history and psychology. During this time, profiting from un-just enrichment enabled Europeans to amass, centralize, and lockup untold amounts of wealth. We were “freed” dead broke, while the enslavers were paid reparations, un-just enrichment, based on our value as chattel property.
Economically, this means that the Black economy is approximately 400 years behind in the ownership and/or control of the natural resources and the means of production in versus the White economy. So, for 346 we were regarded as in-human and as chattel property (60% of a human being) to be worked from can’t see in the morning ‘til can’t see at night, without recourse, and sanctuary only in the form of the Bible. This was the “Dark Bargain” of the constitution rationalized by so-called divine revelation showed inequality to the order of the universe. The scriptures, enslavers said, demonstrated that “an inferior race must live under the domination of the superior race.
The Gun & the Ship of Enslavement
The ruling classes of Western European were able to conquer the world between 1400 and 1700 because of two distinct and soon powerfully combined technological developments; the gun and the ship of enslavement. These two developments combined to produce the cast iron cannon and ships for the sea.
Many enslaved Africans that came from the Gold Coast, named for Black human Gold, than mined gold, had experience in mining gold in Ghana. Some Africans had backgrounds of smelters and blacksmiths. It was our ancestors smelting techniques, turned against us, that helped build the metallurgical industry of the United States. Historian Ivan Van Sertima has shown that Africans living on the western shores of Lake Victoria, produced carbon steel as long as 2,000 years ago using a method that was technologically more sophisticate than any developed in Europe until the mid 19th century.
No other metal products of African enslavement were of more great consequence, ruthless or irreversible than the gun. Firearms of all types were mass-produced to the standards of that period. The end result developed what is now the U.S. high-tech multi-billion-dollar weapons industry, which has no equal. Africa was the most important overseas target of guns from Europe and America. Guns in Africa were used to kill, capture, and enslave. Over the course of the 18th century, the Gold Coast was de-populated of untold millions of Africans.
It was the distribution of guns amongst the different groups of Africans that led to petty quarrels and subsequent capture and trade to European enslavers. These petty quarrels were called wars, and the word war was a euphemism for the organized theft of human beings. Walter Rodney observed in his history of the Upper Guinea Coast that local ruling groups made law “into the handmaid of the trade of enslavement.
When it comes to guns and the domestic deaths of Americanized Africans, America is just as hostile. As conspiratorial as it may sound, there is a lot of similarity to the use of guns during African enslavement and the illegal guns that now saturate our communities. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but just look at the facts in time and space, only the faces and places have changed. We must stop the bleeding.
Now a word about the ship of enslavement, according to Marcus Rediker, in his newly released book Slave Ship, A Human History. The ship of enslavement was “the historic vessel (engine) for the emergence of capitalism, a new an unprecedented social and economic system that remade large parts of the world beginning in the late 15th century. Like a machine it transformed the lives of Africans and Europeans alike. Europeans came to America freely with a design of a new way of life in their hearts and minds.”
Africans were kidnapped and shipped in chains with their life design already made, in the hearts and minds of Europeans. The historical record show it was the first major engine of capitalism that restructured the division of labor and wealth, and thereby, the world. Ships mounted with cannons were the vessel of terror. So terrifying was this technology that it forced Africans to worship Jesus Christ.
African enslavement and trade, starting in Britain, was extremely expensive and demanded huge resources and infrastructure that private capital alone could not finance it from the beginning. British and American mercantilists (individuals, and financial institutions actively supporting the establishment of a theory and a system of colonies that would supply materials and markets and relieve home nations of dependence on other nations.) invested in; made loans to; and took deposits from merchants engaged in African enslavement and trade.
One of the first financial institutions in Britain/ United Kingdom, in 1727, was the Royal Bank of Scotland Group. It is the enabling predecessor of Citizens Bank (8th largest in America) which was originally founded as the Citizens Savings Bank in Providence Rhode Island in 1871, the same year as the Bank of North America, the enabling predecessor of Wachovia Bank (4th largest), the first charted bank in this country. Primarily operating out of London, Liverpool and Bristol, as well as British colonies in the Caribbean, African enslavement and trade ties were permanently, and triangularly linked to the North American shipping colonies, especially, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York and Connecticut inlets where Citizens Bank took root and branched.
Each phase of the process, from concept, design, capture, terroristic transformation, , and to the construction of a new economic order required massive fleets of ships and their capacity to transport both stolen laborers and the new plantation made goods and commodities. Each ship was a combination of war machine and prison; a mobile prison. The typical ship of enslavement weighed 200 tons, although a vessel of any size could be a ship of enslavement, and some were smaller and some larger.
The vertical capitalist system of the 21st century is impossible to disentangle from African enslavement and trade which hit Africa like a tsunami as early as the 15th century, resulting in what is now the under-developed Black economy. Some slave ships and their cargoes were worth as much as $1.6 to $2 million per trip in today’s currency.
Many of the ships that went into African trade were plantation-built. They were constructed in New England, especially in Rhode Island and Massachusetts; in the upper south, Maryland and Virginia; and after the 1760s, in the lower South, primarily South Carolina. What this means is that the economics of ship building became cheaper because the trader in Africans reproduced the shipping system on an international scale.
The Prison and the Plantation
After the ship of enslavement and the gun, came prisons and plantations and each were key to the economic development of the day giving rise to capitalism.
Africans were confined to solitary spaces on the ship much in the same way today’s prisoners are assigned to prison cells. It allowed approximately 6 feet in length and 16 inches in width for each man; for boys 5 feet by 14 inches; for women 5 feet by 10 inches; girls 4 ft by 8 inches of miserable living space. While today’s over crowded prisons are inhumane, they are not to be compared to humans packed side by side, cramped like sardines in a can with just enough air to make them realize the horrors of their situation.
The origin of prisoners being recognized with numbers is from captive Africans being identified on the ship of enslavement and at the auction block by a number, not a name. After the gun and the ship of enslavement, came the prison, first at sea then on land, and THEN the plantation.
According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States with 5% of the world of the world’s population houses 25% of the world’s incarcerated people. The U.S. incarceration rate (714 per 1000) is almost 40% greater than those of our nearest competitors which are Bermuda, Belarus, and Russia. Additionally, our incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 time that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan.
Further, economically speaking, we have a prison industrial complex that has more employees than the combined workforces Ford, General Motors, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country. We are spending upwards from $200 billion annually on arrests and corrections at all levels of government and the criminal justice process.
This economic growth is propelled by the shift in thinking about the basic purpose of criminal justice. Many sociologists attribute the shift from rehabilitation to punishment. Felons from the “Black economy” are no longer to be supported, but are defined as predators to be controlled. The continuing connection between race and prison helps explain our under-developed economy. This connection is managed by the monopolies of media, politics and public policy. This triad, once again, fused economic exploitation with race and crime thereby aborting economic justice from moral and legal issues in respect to racial struggle.
The appalling truth is that the police and prison system are now the primary contact between Blacks and public policy. You cannot rationalize the incarceration increases without computing the enormous economic costs imposed upon the persons imprisoned, their families, and their communities.
The under-developed Black economy is a moral issue that we cannot avoid, no matter how hard we try. As Glenn C. Loury says in a Boston Review article entitled America Incarcerated,
“We cannot afford pretend that there are more important problems in our society, or that this circumstance is the necessary solution to more pressing problems – unless we also are prepared to say that we have turned our backs on the idea of equality for all citizens and abandoned the principles of justice.”
The first major aspect of American economics was the plantation system. It was in fact an objectification of the enslaved African, reducing him/her to an object of labor, and using “his/her race as proof and assignment of human worth and social status. It was insanely driven by a God complex!
The American plantation system can be defined by its cultural genocide, its machinery of control, and the extent of its brutality physical, psychological, and sexual: Breeding and rape became the two principal forms of sexual abuse and brutality which, they all suffered, but especially women.
Here is a guiding definition of enslavement by Patterson in, Slavery and Social Death, (1982:1-14): “the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.” This means our life design was circumscribed by the European when our ancestors were in the womb.
This definition brings us to cultural genocide. Political identities, ethnic identities,
families and cultural leaders all were destroyed. These were all units of the preservation and transmission of African Culture. Slave laws were directed toward defining Africans as property and depriving them of any legal or human right or personality.
The American system of enslavement can be categorized and discussed in terms of its machinery of control and destruction, namely:
– Slave Laws
– Coercive bodies
– The Church
– Politically divisive strategies, and
– Plantation punishment
The plantation period gave way to post- Reconstruction; and this period gave way to a climate of terror that allowed Whites to take Black lives and Black-owned property with impunity. They were exempt from crimination or punishment.
According to William Darity, Jr. and Dana Frank, the process of White destruction of Black wealth reached its apex in the literal annihilation of prosperous African communities in Wilmington, North Carolina, 1898; in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921; and in Rosewood, Florida, in 1923. According to Winbush, the lynching trail was a trail of stolen Black land and property.
Since the major source of wealth for most persons today is inheritance, the reduction during the Jim Crow era has to have played a key role in producing contemporary racial wealth differences. Additionally, under American apartheid, successive generations of Americanized- Africans were assigned to separate schools with inferior facilities and resources. Sounds familiar?
Conclusion
As we know the stream of income from the African community derives mainly from the purchase of goods and services produced and sold by outsiders. The outflow of physical capital, i.e., industrial, manufacturing and information technology, has dealt the most devastating blow to the economic well-being of African communities in urban communities of America.
The under-developed economy of the African community is in good part an outcome of American social policy, both in law and in practice, over the duration of our enslavement and civil rights bestowed. These laws and practices have been and are such that the largest numbers of Africans have been excluded from full and equal participation in the American social-economic-political system. . All of these and other context based factors and practices are very much responsible for the under-developed Black economy inherent in settings and situations.
I close with two questions asked by Glenn Loury, which we must answer, they are: Just what manner of people are we Americanized Africans? And in light of this, what are our obligations to our fellow citizens—even those who break the laws? Thank you for your attention and response.
Minister Ari S. Merretazon is the Co-chair of the Economic Development Committee for the Philadelphia Millions More Movement and teaches a subject called Understanding the Demand of African Americans for Reparations, Temple University, Pan-African Studies Continuing Education Program (PASCEP)
REFERENCES
Aharone, Ezarah. Pawned Sovereignty, Sharpened Black Perspectives on Americanization, Africa, War and Reparations, 1st Books, 2003
America, Richard F. The Wealth of Races: The present Value of Benefits from Past Injustices, Greenwood Press, 1990
Anderson, Claude. Powernomics, The National Plan to Empower Black America, Powernomics Corporation of America, 2001
Darity, William, Jr. and Frank, Dania, The Political Economy of Ending Racism and the WCAR, The Economics of Reparations
Diop, Cheikh Anta. The African Origin of Civilization, Myth or Reality, Lawrence Hills Books, 1974
Goldstone, Lawrence. Dark Bargain, Slavery, Profits, and the Struggle for the Constitution, Walker & Company, 2005
Karenga, Maulana. The Ethics of Reparations: Engaging The Holocaust of Enslavement, California State University, Long Beach, 2001
Loury, Glenn C. America Incarcerated, Boston Review, 2007
Merretazon, Ari. Should Wachovia Pay: A Local Case for Reparations, N’COBRA, Philadelphia Chapter, 2005
Rediker, Marcus. The Slave Ship, A Human History, Viking, Published by the Penguin Group 2007
Wilson, Amos N. Blue Print for Black America, A Moral, Political Economic Imperative for the Twenty-First Century, Afrikan World Infosystems, 1998
Winbush, Raymond. The Earth Moved: Stealing Black in the United States,” in Raymond Winbush, ed., Should America Pay? Slavery and the raging debate over reparations, New York, Harper Collins, 2003″
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