‘Slaves Freed Themselves’

August 31, 2018 8:58 AM

“At the time of its publication, it was widely denounced. Writing from the depths of the Great Depression, and amidst a burgeoning black communist internationalism, Black Reconstruction was Du Bois at his finest. By deftly applying classical Marxist analysis to a population so often overlooked by its orthodoxies, Du Bois’s general strike thesis emerged not only as a historical corrective, but as a stark critique of Western philosophy and modern academic inquiry itself.” When Slaves Go on Strike: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction 80 Years Later. (Black Perspectives) ”As Du Bois argued, Reconstruction and the history of slavery in the United States had been shaped by “one of the most stupendous efforts the world ever saw to discredit human beings” through the use of public education and public memory.” The Legacy of Black Reconstruction. (Jacobin) The Urgency of a Third Reconstruction: The ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment marked a turning point in U.S. history. Yet 150 years later, its promises remain unfulfilled. (Dissent).
posted by The Whelk (4 comments total)

Awesome! Bookmarked for deep reading.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:17 AM on August 31, 2018 [1 favorite]

I've been very slowly working through Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution and it has been an excellent, detailed history lesson for me. (Perhaps a bit too much so; in retrospect I wish I had chosen this abridged version instead.) Most of the book is about the history of Reconstruction, but he also talks a bit about the historiography, about the competing views of historians.

Du Bois' work stands tall as a towering statement of Black agency, of the ways Blacks took power where they could, of how Reconstruction was not a complete failure. Unfortunately the dominant view in the US is still the racist view created in the 1900s-1920s by Dunning and his colleagues at Columbia. That's certainly the view I absorbed growing up in the 80s in Texas. The linked articles above go into great detail about Du Bois' role in trying to revise this history and how his writing has influenced future generations. He was an amazing scholar.

Reconstruction is such an important and complicated part of American history. Unfortunately it's so tied up with corruption in the Congress during the rise of the railroads, it's hard to separate the racial politics from the war politics from the general malfeasance of the government. I still don't feel like I understand it.
posted by Nelson at 10:36 AM on August 31, 2018 [4 favorites]

Great stuff.

Du Bois believed, as more American radicals during the Depression came around to see, that forging a unity across the color line was the only way to build a genuinely free American society. He [...] showed how the fracturing of the working class had redounded to the benefit of oligarchy.

Inciting and continuing this racial division in the working class been a project of the right since the 1860s. By fomenting racial conflict, these forces weaken the power of the workers to oppose the capitalists. Trump is just the latest to use the same old ugly rhetoric to unify his “base” and induce them to vote against their economic interests, while governing to further enrich the real base of the political class, call them robber barons, trusts, corporations, oligarchs, or whatever the current guise.
posted by sudogeek at 11:18 AM on August 31, 2018 [5 favorites]

Inciting and continuing this racial division in the working class been a project of the right since the 1860s. By fomenting racial conflict, these forces weaken the power of the workers to oppose the capitalists.

I think it's more like the 1640s.

African peoples originally came here as indentured servants, same as those from the British Isles. But as both groups tended to run away, the Virginia House of Burgesses (aka the plantation owners) realized that to keep these workers from revolting against the relative few of them, they needed a stratagem. They made it a law that when a white person got caught after running away, they got a year or two added to their indenture. Black people in the same circumstance would be made slaves for life.

Ironically, one of the first was enslaved to a black landowner, a man who himself originally had been indentured when he came to Virginia from Angola.

And gradually the powers that be in mid-1600s to early 1700s in Virginia passed laws to make the condition of the mother that of her children as well, and that new groups of black people forcibly brought over from Africa would be owned outright by whoever bought them.

Of course, almost every colony decided to adapt these laws. Extremely cheap labor that could propagate more extremely cheap labor! And poorer whites were given a psychological wage of feeling like they're "better", which bound them emotionally to their "betters". And every white group that's come here since, they go through their decade or three of non-whiteness, but once they get in, holy moly, they have all had their members who will happily cut (and lynch and shoot) someone to keep black people "beneath" them in the socio-economic pecking order. And have fits if we fight back! Their delusion that we're so stupid and sub-human that we'd be happier with their boots in our faces forever is just... insane. Hence DuBois' work.

All while the oligarchs, then and now, make sure those whites in the labor classes stay poor and angry, yet wouldn't deign to piss on them if they were on fire. It's evil that they can be had for so little.
posted by droplet at 5:31 PM on August 31, 2018 [6 favorites]