You’re Projecting: The Fear, Shame & Contempt of Imperial European Chattel Slavery in the 21st Century
The contemporary social reality of racial blackness consists in the conceptual amalgamation by Europeans of various African ethnic groups into a single species, which they called black or negro. Europeans defined black as the natural subordinate counterpart of a single European species, called white.
The phenomenon of pale skinned people stigmatising dark skinned people does not originate with imperial Europe. However, the binary racial concepts of black and white, which are now globally understood, were formed in conjunction with imperial Europe’s anomalously vicious trade in enslaved human beings from West and Central Africa, beginning in the late 1500s.
The nebulous subject of what exactly constitutes Europe or The West can be examined in another essay. For the purposes of this one, imperial Europe refers to modern European nation states (e.g., France, Belgium, Great Britain and the USA, a European colony). These nation states amassed foundational wealth from their trade in enslaved Africans and its associated industries (e.g., sugar, tobacco and cotton and, later, transportation infrastructure etc.).
Predictably, those who benefitted financially from chattel slavery, and subsequent exploitative systems, propagated and continue to propagate the hierarchical ideology of race which rationalised it. This particular ideology of race is perpetuated consciously and subconsciously, and has completely permeated the various national identities of imperial Europe, as well as those of its colonies and former colonies.
Imperial Europe’s enduring and incessant need to excuse itself for the vast industry of extreme dehumanisation upon which its current wealth is built betrays the unease of its suppressed conscience.
This undercurrent of guilt is cavalierly overridden by an inflated sense of noble grandeur which borders on the ridiculous: during the 18th century, in the midst of committing the most grim and depraved catalogue of crimes against humanity in the name of monetary gain, European imperialists went to great lengths to identify themselves as the most rational, courageous, talented, civilised, honourable and good looking people in world history. This specific claim to the inborn racial supremacy of Europeans over Africans was formed in tandem with and is precisely identical to the concept of the white race.
The proposition that peoples of any ethnicity, who share similar physical features with a select group of European imperialists, somehow constitute a unified and infallible race of people prevails in the 21st Century. The concept of the white race continues to be instrumental in legitimising and protecting the profits which imperial European nations have accrued from chattel slavery. The concept of a white race (benevolent, democratic, rational, paternal) is also instrumental in legitimising and protecting those profits extracted by means of ongoing neo-colonial violence across the world.
In order to balance their claim to an exalted racial status, 18th century European slavers instigated, correspondingly, the utter mental and physical degradation of their African captives — such that their status as human beings could be more plausibly denied. Europeans re-defined their African captives as members of an inferior black race: the necessary and opposite conceptual counterpart of the white race. Europeans stage-managed Africans as black in order to create for themselves the delusion of whiteness.
The improbable concept of an infallible “white race” is nothing less than the point blank refusal of imperial Europe to endure and account for its own shame.
The white race, in this sense, is less of a race and more of a psychological mechanism by which Europeans compensate for a perceived moral deficiency in themselves. Whiteness as a concept functions as a conscience suppressant for the direct benefactors of imperial chattel slavery and, crucially, the descendants of those benefactors.
The elevated status carried by the idea of being white is also a useful political tool to rally anyone of any European ethnicity who might seize upon the hollow prestige associated with whiteness (such as disaffected people trapped in inter-generational poverty).
Despite the dogged pretense to racial grandeur, the spectre of guilt which haunts modern imperial European nations is also apparent in the perverse and unrelenting paranoia regarding the violent threat posed to whites by blacks.
The projection of an intrinsically violent temperament onto African-descended people stems from a repressed but inescapable sense of empathy: Europeans imagine that, if they found themselves in the place of the people whom they have for centuries attempted, in an avaricious mania, to subjugate out of humanity, they would consider their oppressors a mortal enemy and seek to take their revenge in the same manner.
In modern imperial European nations, the fear of black violence and criminality remains the primary justification for the social and state-sanctioned contempt, exclusion, suspicion, surveillance and targeted harassment of African-descended citizens.
When we look at the European characterisation of “blacks” today, we are looking at the grotesquely convoluted justifications for industrial chattel slavery.
“The white race” is conceived as supremely high functioning, but also as pure — therefore “whites” are, by definition, perpetually vulnerable to corruption through interactions with other “races”.
To be clear, race in the context of imperial racial pseudoscience denotes only a subjectively observed trend in physical appearance— as identified and formally taxonomised, mainly in the 18th and 19th Centuries, by a wealthy minority of moderately educated European men.
The innate supremacy and defenseless purity of the white race functions as a lens through which to view imperial violence as a righteous cause. Through this lens, violence towards blacks from whites is necessarily either defensive or corrective; on the other hand, violence towards whites from blacks is considered merely further proof of the intrinsically violent nature of blacks — which, in turn, can only underline the continuing need for corrective or defensive violence towards blacks from whites.
It is a concern, as pressing in the 21st Century, as in the 18th Century, that the delicate supremacy of the white race is preserved — that is — protected from the violence of blacks and also protected from racial annihilation inherent in sexual reproduction with blacks.
Terror of the slaves’ revenge is still projected by Europeans as “black” aggression, while terror of “white” extinction by miscegenation is the foreseeable result of basing an ideology of “race” on physical appearance alone.
In modern imperial nations, the guilty projections of European slavers onto their African slaves are now more neutrally familiar as “black racial stereotypes”.
Due to global influence of European imperialism, African-descended people with a certain appearance are still unquestioningly designated racially black, and are still perceived as: Unintelligent — because European slave owners asserted that blacks were intellectually inert, akin to service animals, and therefore uniquely suited to relentless and arduous labour; Uncivilised — because European slave owners asserted that blacks were filthy savages, who could only be improved by life in bondage; Lascivious — because European slave owners asserted that blacks invited their routine sexual assaults and were indifferent to being coerced into reproducing for commercial purposes; Unfeeling — because European slave owners asserted that these blacks did not grieve for their family members, old and young, who were casually murdered or sold away from them; Lazy — because European slave owners asserted that their brutal and impulsively sadistic punishments were actually necessary in order to keep blacks productive; Resilient— because European slave owners asserted that blacks were by nature dull to the pain of malnutrition, neglect, physical torture, exhaustion, sickness and interminable hard labour.
We are in the 21st Century, where the average European will often, comfortably, publicly and politely, observe that a black person is remarkably articulate and well-mannered; or imply without the slightest cause that a black person is highly sexual; or notice with surprise that a black person is demonstrating nuanced insight or complexity of feeling; or insinuate that a black person has perhaps not understood the value of hard work; or that a black person is exaggerating when they report physical pain.
For this same reason, Europeans, who learn to see themselves as white, are often compelled to diminish the achievements of those they have learned are black. They will imply or state outright that the achievement must be the result of brute force, dumb luck or white pity (e.g., affirmative action).
This is done reflexively in order to re-frame the individual in their psychosocial function as black, which is to be present and visible at all times as the inferior of white, thereby easing the unconscious clash between the inherited sense of racial prestige and the inherited sense of collective shame for the violations of humanity which that ideology of racial prestige is contrived to absolve.
The riddle of so-called white guilt continues to be something that many Europeans wrestle with, whether by conspicuous moral agonising or terse over-statements of indifference. However, in modern imperial European nations, those who are designated white assume the compulsory social advantages of collective racial prestige. This same racial prestige is entirely defined by the very violence for which they wish to take no collective accountability.
Essentially, then, it is an impossible task to extricate oneself from the question of white guilt, whatever one’s feelings about it, whilst still uncritically conceiving of oneself as a member of a white race. The question, then, of who and what modern imperial Europeans are without their ideology of white racial prestige, borne from centuries of trade in chattel slavery, is brought to the fore.
Currently, in modern imperial nations, the binary concept of a wretched subhuman “black race” and a gleaming superior “white race” is maintained — as the living, breathing moral vindication for the atrocity of imperial European industrial chattel slavery.
For those who today perceive themselves as members of one “black race”, it is important to acknowledge that, while new, complex and meaningful cultures comprised of various ethnicities have formed around this category, “black” is a “race” only in so far as it has been defined, enforced and profited from by a subset of European imperialists over the last four centuries.
In understanding this, we can contextualise the shame and social alienation associated with the stigma of blackness, which has been internalised and which is so corrosive to the mental, spiritual and physical health of African-descended people living in modern imperial nations.
The insidious dishonesty of imperial racial categories will never truly ease the collective conscience of Europeans: no matter the force with which the imperial hierarchical ideology of race is posited, the shame of imperial Europe’s crimes will never truly reside with African-descended people: there is nothing any human being could do or not do to warrant the deviant violence of imperial chattel slavery; there was no innate weakness in those who who adapted to and survived it over centuries, nor in those who were killed by it, nor in those who chose to end their lives or the lives of their children, rather than suffer in it; nor is there any innate defect in African people which can ever mitigate its bizarre evil.
For those who understand themselves to be black, recognising and releasing the shame, fear and contempt, off-loaded onto us by imperial Europe and finding an ethnic identity outside of the binary concept of blackness, which always implies its white racial counterpart, is vital.
With reference to the estrangement from Africa of those enslaved in the USA and their descendants, Randall Robinson writes: “The worst thing you can do to a people is to rob them of the memory of themselves.”
Some interesting books on the subject:
Dr Joy De Gruy Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing \ Robin Walker If You Want to Learn Early African History Start Here \ David Olusoga Black and British: A Forgotten History \ Peter Fryer Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain \ Frantz Fanon Black Skin, White Masks \ Dr Christienna Fryar Entangled Lands: A Caribbean History of Britain \ CLR James Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution \ James Baldwin The Fire Next Time \ John Newsinger The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire \ Basil Davidson A History of West Africa, 1000–1800 \ Nell Irvin Painter The History of White People \ Jacqueline Battalora Birth of a White Nation \ Medical Apartheid Harriet A. Washington \ Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents Isabel Wilkerson
