“Us” Versus “Them” Doesn’t Follow When the History of Slavery Isn’t “Black and White.”

“Equity”-based rationales for many social programs are premised on the promotion of an “us” versus “them” mentality in which people are separated into racial groups, and then benefits or costs are divvied up based on how, in some way, society should “equal the score.”  That perspective has even come to permeate so-called “social-emotional learning” initiatives in public schools as well (which I’ve written about previously).  As Judith Sears writes:

Social-emotional learning (SEL), an umbrella term for a variety of curricula that target the development of emotional awareness and self-regulation skills, has gone mainstream in U.S. K-12 education. For most of its existence, the rationale for SEL has been that encouraging emotional and character development is just as important as teaching facts and skills, and may be essential to helping students perform well academically. SEL, it is argued, provides the psychological foundation necessary for students to master academic challenges and live fulfilled lives. To many educators and parents, SEL had the ring of common sense, and thus the main debates have been not over whether SEL should be part of the curriculum, but over how much time and emphasis to allot to SEL. However, 2020 marked a turning point in SEL programs, when The Collaborative for the Advancement of Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL), which is widely recognized as the authoritative source for social-emotional learning curricula, introduced “Transformative SEL.” Transformative SEL dramatically shifts the focus from the individual acquisition of social and emotional competencies to encouraging students to understand their personal experiences primarily according to race, gender, or other group classifications. These identity categories are assumed to determine a person’s status in society as either an oppressor or a victim. “We focus on issues of race/ethnicity as a first step toward addressing the broader range of extant inequities,” wrote Jagers, Rivas-Drake, and Brittany Williams in introducing Transformative SEL. “The concept of transformative SEL is a means to better articulate the potential of SEL to mitigate the educational, social, and economic inequities that derive from the interrelated legacies of racialized cultural oppression in the United States and globally.” Transformative SEL entirely redefines CASEL’s original five basic SEL competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making. The self-awareness competency, for example, which originally was built around the goals of fostering individual exploration and self-esteem, has been replaced by an “intersectional approach” to individual identity construction, in which students are taught to view their identities as the sum of the social identity groups—race, class, gender, etc.—they fall into. The self-management competency, which used to teach students skills like “resilience” and “social efficacy,” now includes “resistance,” defined as “taking actions to advance policies or changes that are consistent with human rights, social justice, and equality.” Social awareness now includes “critical social analysis,” “public regard of one’s racial group,” and “actions to ameliorate oppression and injustice and to realize liberation.” … [T]eaching students to define themselves primarily in terms of a broad identity group—based exclusively on immutable physical characteristics— prepares the ground for tribalism and an ‘Us Versus Them’ mentality. Such a focus obscures the view of our common humanity. As the authors of The Coddling of the American Mind have observed, “This sort of teaching seems likely to encode the Untruth of ‘Us Versus Them’ directly into students’ cognitive schemas: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.”

Speaking of narrowly framing an issue to encourage an “us” versus “them” mentality, I came across some local news stories about how some local officials were traveling to Montgomery, Alabama, to visit the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which houses pillars commemorating lynching victims in America.  Reading about the memorial, I came to understand that it features commemorations to black victims of lynching, but not white victims.  Of course victims of racially-motivated lynchings should be commemorated and remembered, but it seems odd to limit the commemorations based on skin color.  As Richard Emmanuel, a professor at Alabama State University, writes:

No prominent monument or memorial exists to commemorate the thousands of African-Americans who were lynched during the era of racial terrorism in America. But in 2018, the Equal Justice Initiative will open a national memorial to African-American victims of lynching. The memorial will be located on six acres of land atop a rise that overlooks Montgomery, and out to the American South, where lynchings were most prevalent. However, there is a dearth of public awareness, knowledge or memory regarding the lynching of whites in America.  “The Negro Holocaust: Lynching and Race Riots in the United States, 1880-1950” states that, contrary to present-day popular conception, lynching was not a crime committed exclusively against black people. Between the 1830s and the 1850s the majority of those lynched in the United States were whites. From 1882-1968, some 4,743 lynchings occurred in the United States (not all lynchings were recorded). Of these, 3,446 or 73 percent were black and 1,297 (27 percent) were white. In other words, whites were the victims of more than one-fourth of all lynchings in the United States … Many whites were lynched for helping blacks or being anti-lynching … The Klan terrorized both black and white Americans not to vote for Republican tickets.

As explored in a previous essay, the history of slavery itself is also far from a “black and white” issue.  African warlords themselves initiated the slave trade by enslaving other Africans and selling them to others.  This trade in human beings brought wealth and foreign goods to some parts of Africa, while impoverishing other parts of Africa by depleting the area of needed workers.  Lewis Gann and Peter Duigan describe the varied effects of the slave trade in Africa South of the Sahara in their book Burden of Empire as follows:

Tribal cultures had many achievements to their credit, but they also had many defects which no amount of romanticizing or appeal to philosophies of cultural relativism can explain away. The tribal community restricted the over-all development of the community and of individuals. Its outlook and public philosophy were narrow. Essentially the tribe aimed, successfully or not, at preserving the status quo. Fear of witchcraft restricted innovation. The kinship system, for all its admirable qualities, also made people less venturesome and restricted economic development. Other unattractive aspects in many tribal communities included domestic slavery, the frequent practice of infanticide, the execution of suspected witches, ritual murders, and the widespread custom of killing people to accompany the dead king into the nether world. The mutilation or torture of criminals and the slaughter of prisoners were common … Sub-Saharan Africa was never able to solve fully its economic problems; its exports were limited and its natural wealth remained small. There was, however, one commodity which for many centuries found an ever-increasing market. This was muscle power, the working capacity of Africa's own sons and daughters. The disastrous combination of an unsatisfied demand for foreign trade goods with an insatiable demand for slaves in the Americas and in the Muslim world resulted in the development of a traffic in slaves that in time came to dominate much of Africa's economic life. In its earliest form this commerce did not originate in the West. Slave dealing in the Sudan dates back to remotest antiquity; the slave trade was Africa’s first form of labor migration. From time immemorial, Egypt, North Africa, and the Middle East purchased black people from the south who did duty as servants and farmhands, as soldiers and palace guards, as eunuchs and concubines … Some historians now largely ascribe Africa's technological and material backwardness to the effects of the slave trade and to the loss of population which the traffic entailed … The evidence is not, however, clear-cut. Barotseland remained relatively sheltered from the incursions of slave traders into the interior of southern Africa. The Lozi ruling class had little interest in exporting much-needed manpower; on the contrary, they preferred to raid their neighbors on their own account. The kingdom was also protected by sheer distance from the main centers of slave dealing in Angola and the East Coast. Nevertheless, Barotseland never attained a higher level of material civilization than the West African states which did participate in slave traffic. Lozi politics also had a dark side, with tortures, liquidations, and other refinements of cruelty that owed nothing to foreign pressure or inspiration. Cannibalism—a custom adopted by some African communities either for ritual purposes or for the sake of obtaining a more varied diet—flourished among people like the Ibo of Nigeria, who were involved in the slave trade; cannibalism, however, was also popular with the Zimba, a conquering horde who terrorized various parts of East Africa during the sixteenth century but did not sell their captives to the Christians … The effects of manpower losses brought about by the slave trade are equally difficult to assess. Daniel Neumark, a modern economic historian who has gone over the slave-trade figures, estimates that if the total population of West Africa during the slave-trade period stood at no more than 20 million, the average loss would have amounted to a maximum of 0.5 percent a year. Slave depredations, however, were very unevenly spread. The strong and highly centralized black states of the coastal regions, which managed to monopolize the traffic with the hinterland, prospered amazingly; kingdoms such as Oyo, Dahomey, and Ashanti owed their greatness and prosperity to slave dealing. Thus some areas derived considerable economic benefit from the trade. Oddly enough, it is precisely those parts of West Africa which might be assumed to have suffered most from the slave trade—the Gold Coast and what is now southern Nigeria—that comprise today some of the most advanced and densely populated districts of the country. Even when the slave trade was at its highest, these regions were remarkable for the density of their population and for their elaborate political organization. In some instances the expansion of trade acted as a stimulus to the growth of population by the introduction of American plants and fruit. It also contributed to the development of more centralized forms of political rule. The export of slaves enabled Africans to purchase consumer goods which they could not have afforded otherwise. All in all, slave traffic probably gave even more employment to African than to European dealers. No wonder, therefore, that the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807 led to bitter African discontent on the Gold Coast … The damage inflicted on parts of Africa was nevertheless disastrous. Outlying regions on the periphery of the slave-trading states suffered with special severity; so did the less densely populated regions, which could not easily stand any additional loss of manpower. Slave trading represented not merely an inhuman system, but also a serious diversion of economic resources. Imported guns made warfare more destructive in its effects; the trade in firearms certainly gave an added advantage to freebooting chiefs, able to acquire the discarded weapons of the West for use against less well equipped neighbors and rivals. Slave-trading kingdoms themselves became demoralized. Human sacrifice flourished in Benin; Dahomey at the end of the century presented a picture not of youthful vigor, but of bloodstained decadence.

Slavery was a part of African culture, and many people around the world sadly thought it was acceptable because it was seen as something approved of by African culture itself.  Understanding that, one sees that responsibility for slavery and its effects is not at all a black-and-white proposition.  In 2019, Nigerian journalist Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani wrote the following in the Wall Street Journal:

This August marked 400 years since the first documented enslaved Africans arrived in the U.S. In 1619, a ship reached the Jamestown settlement in the colony of Virginia, carrying “some 20 and odd Negroes” who were kidnapped from their villages in present-day Angola. The anniversary coincides with a controversial debate in the U.S. about whether the country owes reparations to the descendants of slaves as compensation for centuries of injustice and inequality. It is a moment for posing questions of historic guilt and responsibility. But the American side of the story is not the only one. Africans are now also reckoning with their own complicated legacy in the slave trade, and the infamous “Middle Passage” often looks different from across the Atlantic. Records from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, directed by historian David Eltis at Emory University, show that the majority of captives brought to the U.S. came from Senegal, Gambia, Congo and eastern Nigeria … “The organization of the slave trade was structured to have the Europeans stay along the coast lines, relying on African middlemen and merchants to bring the slaves to them,” said Toyin Falola, a Nigerian professor of African studies at the University of Texas at Austin. “The Europeans couldn’t have gone into the interior to get the slaves themselves.” The anguished debate over slavery in the U.S. is often silent on the role that Africans played. That silence is echoed in many African countries, where there is hardly any national discussion or acknowledgment of the issue. From nursery school through university in Nigeria, I was taught about great African cultures and conquerors of times past but not about African involvement in the slave trade … When I was growing up, my father Chukwuma Nwaubani spoke glowingly of my great-grandfather, Nwaubani Ogogo Oriaku, a chief among our Igbo ethnic group who sold slaves in the 19th century. “He was respected by everyone around,” he said. “Even the white people respected him.” From the 16th to the 19th centuries, an estimated 1.4 million Igbo people were transported across the Atlantic as slaves. Some families have chosen to hide similar histories. “We speak of it in whispers,” said Yunus Mohammed Rafiq, a 44-year-old professor of anthropology from Tanzania who now teaches at New York University’s center in Shanghai. In the 19th century, Mr. Rafiq’s great-great-great-grandfather, Mwarukere, from the Segeju ethnic group, raided villages in Tanzania’s hinterland, sold the majority of his captives to the Arab merchants who supplied Europeans and kept the rest as laborers on his own coconut plantations. Although Mr. Rafiq’s relatives speak of Mwarukere with pride, they expunged his name from family documents sometime in the 1960s, shortly after Tanzania gained independence from British colonial rule, when it was especially sensitive to remind Africans of their role in enslaving one another. The need to keep his family’s history secret intensified after Mr. Rafiq left home in his 20s to study at Indiana University and then at Yale and Brown for graduate work. “Truthfully, with my African-American colleagues, I never revealed this aspect,” he said … Some families feel no qualms about publicizing their own history. “I’m not ashamed of it because I personally wasn’t directly involved,” said 58-year-old Donald Duke, a lawyer who ran for president in Nigeria’s 2019 elections. He is from the port town of Calabar, home to the Efik ethnic group of Nigeria’s Cross River state. In the 18th century, some 1.2 million slaves were sold through Calabar, according to the Tulane University historian Randy J. Sparks. The Efik were mostly stevedores and middlemen. They negotiated prices between the white traders and their African partners from the hinterlands, then collected royalties. “Families like mine benefited from that process,” Mr. Duke told me … Still, my father does not believe that the descendants of those who took part in the slave trade should now pay for those wrongs. As he points out, buying and selling human beings had been part of many African cultures, as a form of serfdom, long before the first white people landed on our shores. And though many families still retain the respect and influence accrued by their slave-trading ancestors, the direct material gains have petered out over time. “If anyone asks me for reparations,” he said sarcastically, “I will tell them to follow me to my backyard so that I can pluck some money from the tree there and give it to them.” Mr. Chishimba takes a similar view. “Slavery was wrong, but do I carry upon my shoulders the sins of my forefathers so that I should go around saying sorry? I don’t think so,” he said.

As explored in previous essays, the effects of slavery in the American South included making the region much poorer and less industrialized than it would have been if the horrific practice of human slavery hadn’t been used as a crutch to replace mechanical innovation.  As Thomas Sowell writes in Social Justice Fallacies:

In 1851, for example, when the white population of the South was about half as large as the white population in other regions, only 8 percent of the patents issued in the United States went to residents of the Southern states. Southern whites also long lagged behind other whites in various work skills. For example, although the South in 1860 had 40 percent of the nation’s dairy cows, they produced just 20 percent of the nation’s butter and only 1 percent of the nation’s cheese. Southerners’ lags in the dairy industry continued on into the twentieth century.

Indeed, the entanglement of slavery with cotton manufacture so diminished technological progress in the South that during the Civil War the Confederacy had to resort to employing “cottonclad” boats in battles with the Union navy because the South’s reliance on slavery sapped it of the incentives that would otherwise have produced the sort of technological progress that comes with seeking increased mechanical efficiency.  As Wikipedia describes the odd phenomenon of the “cottonclad” boats:

Cottonclads were a classification of steam-powered warships where a wooden ship was protected from enemy fire by bales of cotton lining its sides. Cottonclads were prevalent during the American Civil War, particularly in the Confederate States Navy for riverine and coastal service such as in the battles of Memphis, Galveston, and Sabine Pass. Confederate tactics generally had cottonclads, which were outgunned by Union warships, steam at full speed towards enemy vessels, relying on the cotton to absorb fire. Once they were within firing range, they would open fire, and, if possible, ram or board the enemy … Around 1863, Confederate Commander John B. Magruder realized that Texas did not possess the funding and resources—such as iron mills—to produce impressive and potent vessels such as the ironclad CSS Virginia, thus inspiring the development of a new type of warship, later classified as a cottonclad warship. Cottonclads were various kinds of steamboats transformed into warships in places such as Buffalo Bayou, near Houston. In this process, the upper deck, called the Texas deck, was removed. As a result of this, many of these ships developed "the rakish look of an ironclad ram, if not the potency." … Once protected by layers of both wood and cotton, the ships needed some way to fight back; they needed weapons. However, finding any heavy guns to place on the new cottonclads proved to be a difficult task. A motley of guns had to be scavenged for and affixed to the steamers, as no standard armament could be found. However, much of the time, a lack of ammunition forced these guns to be used purely for morale boosters for the men onboard … [I]n the end, every single one of the once proud cottonclad warships were either sunk, burned, or captured by Union forces.

There’s perhaps no more fitting embodiment of the South’s debilitating reliance on human slavery than the Confederacy’s having to resort to building warships out of cotton bales.