Heather Stewart and Ian Sample report for the Guardian (The 11 Jun 2020) under the subheading:
Former scientific adviser to No 10 says earlier restrictions could have halved death toll
Heather Stewart and Ian Sample report:
The number of coronavirus deaths in the UK could have been halved if the government had introduced the lockdown a week earlier, according to damning testimony from one of the scientists who was advising the government at the time. The stark claim by Prof Neil Ferguson that thousands of lives could have been saved intensified the pressure on the government over its handling of the outbreak, leaving Boris Johnson facing repeated questions at the daily Downing Street press conference. The prime minister insisted it was “premature” to make judgments about the government’s approach, and said he had taken the steps “that we thought were right for this country”, on the basis of scientific advice. But this position came under further scrutiny when the chief medical officer for England, Prof Chris Whitty, was asked about his regrets about the handling of the crisis so far. “I think there’s a long list of things that we need to look at very seriously,” he said. Both he and the prime minister were put under intense pressure after the intervention of Ferguson, who leads the influential outbreak modelling group at Imperial College, London. He sat on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) during the early stages of the outbreak. “Had we introduced lockdown a week earlier we’d have reduced the final death toll by at least half,” he told MPs on the House of Commons science committee. “The measures, given what we knew about the virus then, were warranted. Certainly had we introduced them earlier we’d have seen many fewer deaths.” Official figures on Wednesday show the death toll from the virus already stands at 41,128, suggesting that if Ferguson is right, more than 20,000 lives could have been saved by taking more draconian action earlier. His comments echoed those made by fellow Sage member John Edmunds, who said at the weekend, of the government’s actions in mid-March: “I think it would have been very hard to pull the trigger at that point but I wish we had. I wish we had gone into lockdown earlier. I think that has cost a lot of lives unfortunately.” Johnson declined to express regret that the government did not act sooner, saying the data is not yet available to make a full assessment. “Frankly, I think a lot of these questions are premature,” he insisted. “There are lots of things that we still don’t know, and this epidemic has a long way to go.” And he pointed out that Ferguson was a Sage member at the time decisions on lockdown were made. Ferguson subsequently resigned, after breaking lockdown rules to meet with a lover. Earlier, during tense exchanges in the Commons, Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, confronted the prime minister over his claim that he was “proud” of the government’s response. Citing the official death toll, as well as the Office for National Statistics estimate of 63,000 excess deaths during the pandemic, Starmer said: “Those are among the highest numbers anywhere in the world. Last week the prime minister said he was proud of the government’s record, but there is no pride in those figures, is there?” Johnson said international comparisons should wait until the outbreak is over: though he later favourably compared the UK’s approach to returning children to school, to that taken in other countries.
The row came on the eve of Johnson’s self-imposed deadline for getting on top of the pandemic. On 19 March he said that it would take 12 weeks to “turn the tide”. But he is now facing mounting disquiet over his handling of the crisis, with backbench MPs increasingly vocal, including over the government’s quarantine plans, and its failure to open schools to more pupils. The prime minister promised a “catch-up” programme for pupils over the summer: and conceded that he had not been able to open schools more rapidly because the infection is not yet sufficiently under control. While Johnson nevertheless highlighted the opening of zoos, and the creation of “support bubbles” to tackle loneliness, Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, struck a sombre tone at the press conference. “The epidemic is shrinking, but not fast,” he said. “The numbers are coming down, but they’re not yet very low. And the vast majority of the population remains susceptible to that infection.” He said that meant changes must take place slowly and might need to be reversed. However, he did offer a hint that the government’s 2-metre advice for social distancing could be relaxed. Vallance told the briefing: “It is not a scientific rule – it is a risk-based assessment on when risk reduces … It is wrong to portray this as a scientific rule that says it is two metres or nothing.” Whitty also warned that some restrictions may need to be reimposed if there is a resurgence in cases later in the year, for example. “There is a reasonable chance that in the winter, this virus will have some advantages it doesn’t have in the rest of the year,” he said. “It’s something which transmits more easily indoors, for example. We are not at the end of this epidemic, not by a long shot. We’re in the middle of it.” Asked about his greatest regret in the management of the outbreak, Whitty highlighted the failure to increase testing capacity more rapidly. “If I had to choose one, it would be probably be looking at how we could speed up testing, very early on in the epidemic,” he said. “Many of the problems we had came because we were unable to work out exactly where we were, and we were trying to see our way through the fog.” Scientists at Imperial College and a second team at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine modelled the impact of lockdown in February. But it was the realisation that the size of the epidemic was doubling every four days and greater clarity over the severity of the illness that prompted Sage to recommend lockdown. According to Ferguson, it was around nine days after that modelling, which was only one stream of information ministers were reviewing, that lockdown was announced. Before March, scientists believed the UK had far fewer infections than it actually had. But it later became clear that between 1,500 and 2,000 cases arrived from Italy and Spain in the first two weeks of that month. At the time, the modellers assumed about two-thirds of infected people coming into the UK were not being identified, but Ferguson said a more accurate figure was about 90%. The Sage committee recommended that travellers should be tested when arriving from countries that had been identified as having active transmission, but the scale of the risks from Italy and Spain were not appreciated at the time. “We frankly underestimated how far into the epidemic the country was,”Ferguson said.
The disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on the elderly in Care Homes or Care oriented settings!
The conclusion contained in a section of a report, that the UK government refuses to publish, finds that racism has contributed to a disproportionate number of UK BAME coronavirus deaths!
Dennis Campbell, Health policy editor for the Guardian, reports (Sun 14 Jun 2020):
Racism and discrimination suffered by Britain’s black, Asian and minority ethnic people has contributed to the high death rates from Covid-19 in those communities, an official inquiry has found.
The conclusion is contained in a section of a government-commissioned report that ministers have refused to publish, apparently for fear of stoking tensions around race and racism after protests in response to George Floyd’s killing by a white police officer in Minneapolis.
Sky News has obtained a previously unpublished section of the review of the disease’s disproportionate impact on BAMEpeople, which was undertaken by Public Health England (PHE).
It said: “Stakeholders pointed to racism and discrimination experienced by communities and more specifically BAME key workers as a root cause to exposure risk and disease progression.
“Racism and discrimination experienced by BAME key workers [is] a root cause affecting health and exposure risk. For BAME communities, lack of trust of NHS services resulted in reluctance to seek care.”
The document helped to inform the main report, which PHE published on 2 June. The emergence of the new document comes after the Department of Health and Social Care and PHE both responded to claims of censorship by insisting that the report had been published in full.
The extra part of the evidence review summarises testimony received by PHE’sProf Kevin Fenton, the report’s author, from about 4,000 stakeholders, including BAME groups and academics.
“It is clear from discussions with stakeholders the pandemic exposed and exacerbated longstanding inequalities affecting BAME communities in the UK,” it said.
The fact that many BAME people occupy key worker roles, for example in the NHS and social care, means that they “may be more exposed to Covid-19 and therefore are more likely to be diagnosed,” it added.
The newly uncovered section of the report highlights fears in BAME communities that people from those backgrounds could be badly affected again if there is a second wave of coronavirus and lessons from the initial wave have not been learned and acted upon.
Labour criticised the government’s lack of openness over the report, which had been eagerly awaited at a time of huge concern over the disproportionate number of deaths among BAME people.
Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, said: “The impact of Covid-19 on people from BAME communities is serious, and as the data shows for many it can be fatal. This should demand urgent action from ministers. Instead we have had misleading statements and a lack of transparency.
“We shouldn’t have to reply on leaks. The report should be published in full as soon as possible and action taken.
“Labour have been raising concerns for weeks and calling for greater use of targeted testing and protection for staff on the frontline, for example.”
The main report found that people from black ethnic groups were most likely to be diagnosed with Covid-19 and those from BAME groups overall had the highest death rates. Those of Bangladeshi origin faced the highest risk of dying – twice that of white Britons – while people of Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, other Asian, Caribbean and other black backgrounds faced an extra risk ranging between 10% and 50%
Q. How many lives will be saved if the objectives of the Paris agreement are fulfilled?
A.
Even if the Paris agreement objectives are achieved, maintaining the habitability of the planet for human beings remains an immense challenge.
In his book The Uninhabitable Earth (2019), David Wallace-Wells reflects on our "situation"NOW in his first chapter titled "Cascades":
As recently as the 1997 signing of the landmark Kyoto protocol, two degrees Celsius of global warming was considered the threshold of catastrophe: flooded cities, crippling droughts and heat waves, a planet battered daily by hurricanes and monsoons we used to call "natural disasters" but will soon normalise as simply "bad weather". More recently, the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands offered another name for that level of warning: "genocide".
There is almost no chance we will avoid that scenario. The Kyoto protocol achieved, practically, nothing; in the twenty years since, despite all of our climate advocacy and legislation and progress on green energy, we have produced more emissions than the twenty years before. In 2016, the Paris accords established two degrees as a global goal, and, to read our newspapers, that level of warming remains something like the scariest scenario it is responsible to consider; just a few years later, with no single industrial nation on track to meet its Paris commitments, two degrees looks like a best case outcome, at present hard to credit, with an entire bell curve of more horrific possibilities extending beyond it and yet shrouded, delicately, from public view.
For those telling stories about climate, such horrific possibilities - and the fact that we had squandered our chance of landing anywhere on the better half of that curve - had become somehow unseemly to consider. The reasons are almost too many to count, and so half-formed they might be better called impulses.
We chose not to discuss a world warmed beyond two degrees out of decency, perhaps;
. . . or simple fear;
. . . or fear of fear mongering;
. . . or technocratic faith;
. . . or deference to partisan debates or even partisan priorities;
. . . or skepticism about the environmental Left of the kind I had always had;
. . . or disinterest in the fates of distant ecosystems like I'd always had.
We felt confusion about the science and its many technical terms and hard-to-parse numbers, or at least an intuition that others would be easily confused about the science and its many technical terms and hard-to-parse numbers.
We suffered from slowness of apprehending the speed of change, or set-conspiratorial confidence in the responsibility of global elites and their institutions, or obeisance toward those elites and their institutions, whatever we thought of them.
Perhaps we felt unable to really trust scarier projections because we'd only just heard about warming, we thought, and things couldn't possibly have gotten that much worse just since the first Inconvenient Truth;
. . . or because we liked driving our cars and eating our beef and living as we did in every other way and didn't want to think too hard about that;
. . . or because we felt so "postindustrial" we couldn't believe we were still drawing material breaths from fossil fuel furnaces.
Perhaps it was because we were so sociopathically good at collating bad news into a sickening evolving sense of what constituted "normal", or because we looked outside and things seemed still okay.
Because we were bored with writing, or reading, the same story again and again, because climate was so global and therefore nontrivial it suggested only the corniest politics;
. . . because we didn't yet appreciate how fully it would ravage our lives, and because, selfishly, we didn't mind destroying the planet for others living elsewhere on it or those not yet born who would inherit it from us, outraged.
Because we had too much faith in the teleological shape of history and the arrow of human progress to countenance the idea that the arc of history would bend toward anything but environmental justice, too.
Because when we were being really honest with ourselves we already thought of the world as a zero-sum resource competition and believed that whatever happened we were probably going to continue to be the victors, relatively speaking anyway, advantages of class being what they are and our own luck in the natalist lottery being what it was.
Perhaps we were too panicked about our own jobs and industries to fret about the future of jobs and industry;
. . . or perhaps we were also really afraid of robots or were too busy looking at our new phones;
. . . or perhaps, however easy we found the apocalypse reflex in our culture and the path of panic in our politics, we truly had good-news bias when it comes to the big picture;
. . . or, really, who knows why - there are so many aspects to the climate kaleidoscope that transforms our intuitions about environmental devastation into an uncanny complacency that it can be hard to pull the whole picture of climate distortion into focus.
But we simply wouldn't, or couldn't, or anyway didn't look squarely in the face of the science.
This song was originally released on Randy Newman's 1999 album "Bad Love", a song written with some consciousness of the fact that the twentieth century was about to close. Randy Newman, using some particular chosen historical events, encapsulates four centuries of European civilisation in less than four minutes. Randy Newman begins his song The Great Nations of Europe with the arrival of the Portuguese on the shores of the Canary Islands. The song ends, amazingly, with a prescient warning of a catastrophic global pandemic. The concision of Newman's lyric is astonishing, and Re:LODE Radio chooses to use this concise encapsulation of European civilisation as a conceptual armature in an attempt to answer the question above: Q. So, how did we get to where we are NOW? The Indigenous People of the Canary Islands are part of the story of capitalism's role in the cheapening of nature and the cheapening of lives. In the their book A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things - A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet, byJason W. MooreandRaj Patelbegin their history with a number of startling examples, one of which involved the forced migration of the Indigenous People of the Canary Islands to work, more or less as slaves, on a new kind of capitalist venture, the production of sugar from sugar cane. One of these examples was referenced in an article for the Re:LODEInformation Wrap for Pangandaran in Java, Indonesia, with the caption: Profits come before carbon capture, the prevention of tree cover loss of primary forests and the future of the planet?
Indonesia has seen industries, including sugar production and palm oil production, in the past and continuing in the present, result in catastrophic environmental impact upon the natural environment, and exploitation of a colonised and oppressed people providing the labour for these industries.
"Nature" and "Society" began to take shape in the throes of feudal crisis and the birth of early capitalism . . .
. . . but feudalism's systemic weakness wasn't something as simple as soil exhaustion. Feudalism crumbled because of peasants' inability to produce a bigger economic surplus for their seigneurs. Left to their own devices, peasants could have shifted from rye and wheat mono-cultures to a diversified crop mix that included garden produce. In western Europe that could have doubled or tripled food production. But this shift was impossible, given the seigneurs' demand for marketable produce that could readily be turned into cash. In an unsettling parallel with the present day, feudal lords reproduced an agricultural system that privileged short-run gains over meaningful adjustments that would have dented their income but sustained life. It is in this context that cheap nature becomes strategic.
It was the feudal lords' refusal to adjust to new "natural" conditions that precipitated an epochal crisis in the late middle ages. On top of famine and longer winters, the wiping out of between one-third and one-half of Europe's population as a result of the Black Death:
Feudalism depended on a growing population, not only to produce food but also to reproduce lordly power. But with the onset of the Black Death, webs of commerce and exchange didn't just transmit disease - they became vectors of mass insurrection. Almost overnight, peasants revolts ceased being local affairs and became large-scale threats to the feudal order. After 1347 these uprisings were synchronized - they were system-wide responses to an epochal crisis, a fundamental breakdown in feudalism's logic of power, production and nature. Peasant demands for tax relief and the restoration of customary rights were calls that feudalism's rulers could not tolerate. Repressive legislation to keep labour cheap, through wage controls or outright reenserfment, came in reaction to the Black Death. Among the earliest was England's Ordinance and Statute of Labourers, enacted in the teeth of the plague's first onslaught (1349-51). The equivalent today would be to respond to an Ebola epidemic by making unionization harder. The ruling classes tried - and failed - to reenserf peasants in western Europe. But the crisis was about more than class; it was the moment when feudalism's ecology of power, wealth, and nature stopped working. That meant something genuinely epoch making; states, lords, and merchants all had to scramble for novel solutions to restore their wealth.
Capitalism emerged from this broken state of affairs!
One solution that reinvented human's relation to the web of life was stumbled upon by the Iberian aristocracy - in Portugal and Castile above all. By the end of the fifteenth century these kingdoms and their societies had made war through the Reconquista, the centuries-long conflict with Muslim power on the the peninsula, and were so deeply dependent on Italian financiers to fund their military campaigns that Portugal and Castile had in turn been remade by war and debt. The mix of war debt and the promise of wealth through conquest spurred the earliest invasions of the Atlantic - in the Canary Islands and Madeira. the solution to war debt was more war, with the payoff being colonial profit on new, green frontiers.
The Earliest Frontiers
Early modern colonialism used frontiers in an entirely new way. Always before, rising population density in the heartlands had led to the expansion of settlement, followed by commerce. This pattern turned inside out in the two centuries after 1992. frontiers were to become an organising principle of metropolitan wealth.
An experiment
And it was in an experiment on an early Portuguese colonial outpost that many of the features of the modern world were first convened in the manufacture of one of the first capitalist products.
Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel explain how the impact of the use of wood as fuel in sugar production upon the great forest of trees covering the island of Madeira is the precursor to the ongoing capitalist degradation of nature. They write:
In 1419, Portuguese sailors first sighted an island just over 600 kilometres west of the African coast of Morocco. They called the island Ilha da Madeira, "island of wood." The Venetian traveler and slaver Alvise da Ca' de Mosto (Cadamosto) reported in 1455 that "there was not a foot of ground that was not entirely covered with great trees." By the 1530's it was hard to find any wood on the island at all. There were two phases in the clear-cutting of Madeira. Initially, the trees had been profitable as lumber for shipbuilding and construction. The denuded forest became acreage for wheat to be sent to Portugal starting in the 1430s. The second, more dramatic deforestation was driven by the use of wood as fuel in sugar production.
India, where the process of refining cane juice into granulated crystals was developed, was often visited by imperial convoys (such as those from China) to learn about cultivation and sugar refining. By the sixth century AD, sugar cultivation and processing had reached Persia, and from there that knowledge was brought into the Mediterranean by the Arab expansion.
"Wherever they went, the medieval Arabs brought with them sugar, the product and the technology of its production."
Spanish and Portuguese exploration and conquest in the fifteenth century carried sugar south-west of Iberia. Henry the Navigator introduced cane to Madeira in 1425
Moore and Patel then examine how the biological necessities in the treatment of the sugarcane impose particular organisational factors. They write:
Humans, primates, and most mammals love the taste of sugar. Since the discovery of sugarcane in New Guinea in 6000 BCE, humans have understood the biological necessities of its treatment. There is a peak time to harvest the cane, when it is turgid with sweet juice - but then the grass is thick and difficult to cut. Once chopped, the can can be coaxed to yield its greatest quantity of sugar for only forty-eight hours. After that the plant starts to rot.
Moore and Patel then foreground how the methods employed in the sugar plantations on Madeira generated the core organizing ideas of modern manufacturing:
In the 1460s and 1470s, farmers on Madeira stopped growing wheat and stated growing sugar exclusively. A lot more sugar. The sugar frontier quickly spread, at first to other islands in the Atlantic, then on a massive scale to the New World. Like palm and soy monocultures today, it cleared forests, exhausted soils, and encouraged pests at breakneck speed.
The only thing missing from this story, of course, is the humans who did the work. In Madeira, they were Indigenous People from the Canary Islands, North African slaves, and - in some cases - paid plantation labourers from mainland Europe. These Indigenous People were the Guanches, as identified in Randy Newman's song The Great Nations of Europe:
The Grand Canary Islands, first land to which they came. They slaughtered all the canaries, which gave the land its name.
There were natives there called Guanches, Guanches by the score.
Bullets, disease, the Portuguese, and they weren't there anymore.
Work
Initially the Portuguese, Genoese, and Flemish sugar plantation owners on Madeira brought Guanches, people indigenous to the Canary Islands, to work on their land. A few fifteenth-century wills show that owners bequeathed Guanches to their heirs. Indigenous workers succumbed to European disease and brutality.
They were supplemented and replaced with a mix of wage-workers and North African slaves, humans whose recent ancestors had made a living in subsistence agriculture but who themselves arrived in Madeira as a consequence of either enslavement or exclusion from the land they once worked. Madeira was a field site for experiments in the limits of human endurance and strength but also for the trial of new technologies of order, process, and specialisation that - centuries later - would be used in the England's industrial factories. We don't know nearly enough about the ways that workers on Madeira - slaves and freedmen alike - resisted their masters and employers. There's little recorded about how they fought the regime that both worked them to death and exhausted the soil on which they laboured. but we do know that they resisted and that their attempts to combat the conditions of their exploitation generated crises sufficient for authorities to forbid slaves from living alone or with freedmen in 1473.
As for the Guanches, according to Randy Newman:
Now they're gone, they're gone, they're really gone.
You've never seen anyone so gone.
They're a picture in a museum, some lines in a book, but you won't find a live one no matter where you look . . .
. . . except in mitochondrial DNA . . .
. . . and found in the population of the world's oldest colony! Puerto Rico!Originally populated by the indigenous TaÃno people, Puerto Rico was colonized by Spain following the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1493. It was contested by various other European powers, but remained a Spanish possession for the next four centuries. The island's cultural and demographic landscapes were shaped by the displacement and assimilation of the native population, the forced migration of African slaves, and settlement primarily from the Canary Islands and Andalusia. In the Spanish Empire, Puerto Rico played a secondary but strategic role compared to wealthier colonies like Peru and New Spain. By the late 19th century, a distinct Puerto Rican identity began to emerge, based on a unique creole Hispanic culture and language that combined indigenous, African, and European elements. In 1898, following the Spanish–American War, the United States acquired Puerto Rico, which remains an unincorporated territorial possession, making it the world's oldest colony.
Puerto Ricans have been citizens of the United States since 1917, and can move freely between the island and the mainland. But, as it is not a state, Puerto Rico does not have a vote in the U.S. Congress, which governs the territory with full jurisdiction under the Puerto Rico Federal Relations Act of 1950. As it stands today, Puerto Rico's sole political representation is through one non-voting member of the House called a Resident Commissioner. Consequently, as residents of a U.S. territory, American citizens in Puerto Rico are, to all intents and purposes, disenfranchised at the national level, cannot vote for the president or vice president of the U.S., and in most cases do not pay federal income tax. The United States Congress approved a local constitution in 1952, allowing U.S. citizens of the territory to elect a governor, but that is all. Not surprisingly Puerto Rico's future political status has consistently been a matter of debate and concern.
Since 1953, the UN has been considering the political status of Puerto Rico and how to assist it in achieving "independence" or "decolonization." In 1978, the Special Committee determined that a "colonial relationship" existed between the US and Puerto Rico. The UN's Special Committee has referred often to Puerto Rico as a nation in its reports, because, internationally, the people of Puerto Rico are often considered to be a Caribbean nation with their own national identity. Most recently, in a June 2016 report, the Special Committee called for the United States to expedite the process to allow self-determination in Puerto Rico. More specifically, the group called on the United States to expedite a process that would allow the people of Puerto Rico to exercise fully their right to self-determination and independence;
". . . allow the Puerto Rican people to take decisions in a sovereign manner, and to address their urgent economic and social needs, including unemployment, marginalization, insolvency and poverty". Puerto Rico has held referenda to determine whether to retain its status as a territory or to switch to some other status such as statehood. The fourth such referendum, the Puerto Rican status referendum, 2012 occurred on November 6, 2012. The result a 54% majority of the ballots cast against the continuation of the island's territorial political status, and in favor of a new status. Of votes for new status, a 61.1% majority chose statehood. This was by far the most successful referendum for statehood advocates. In all earlier referenda, votes for statehood were matched almost equally by votes for remaining an American territory, with the remainder for independence. Support for U.S. statehood has risen in each successive popular referendum. The fifth Puerto Rican status referendum of 2017, was held on June 11, 2017 and offered three options: "Statehood", "Independence/Free Association", and "Current Territorial Status." With 23% of registered voters casting ballots, 97% voted for statehood. Benefits of statehood would include an additional $10 billion per year in federal funds, the right to vote in presidential elections, higher Social Security and Medicare benefits, and a right for its government agencies and municipalities to file for bankruptcy. The latter is currently prohibited. Even with the Puerto Ricans' vote for statehood, action by the United States Congress would be necessary to implement changes to the status of Puerto Rico under the Territorial Clause of the United States Constitution.
So, one
of the LODE Zone places, and another island, where demonstrations have taken place outside the United States in the
aftermath of George Floyd's murder by a policeman in Minneapolis, is also a place where testing of the population's mitochondrial DNA reveals the modern population of Puerto Rico has a high genetic component of TaÃno and Guanche(especially of the island of Tenerife). This type of Guanche genes have also been detected in the Dominican Republic.
For Re:LODE this island, because of its position on the LODE Zone Line, has special resonances, not least reflected in the ancestry of Puerto Ricans. The arbitrary nature of the LODE Zone Line functions as a geographic "slice" through the unmanageable volume of relevant information connecting to the capitalism/globalization meme, and allowing a comprehensible matrix to emerge. Funding limitations in 1992 meant that Puerto Rico was not one of the places where LODECargo was created. However, Re:LODE research makes it clear how Puerto Rico provides a nexus for the links that the guiding LODE Zone Line keeps generating. Puerto Ricans are a population that carry the genetic codes of the human stories of, what Noam Chomsky describes in hisYear 501: The Conquest Continues, as capitalism's continuing conquest of people and the planet.
In the 16th century, a significant depth of Puerto Rican culture began to develop with the import of African slaves by the Spanish, as well as by the French, the Portuguese, the British, and the Dutch.
Thousands of Spanish settlers also immigrated to Puerto Rico from the Canary Islands during the 18th and 19th centuries, so many so that whole Puerto Rican villages and towns were founded by Canarian immigrants, and their descendants would later form a majority of the population on the island. In 1791, the slaves in Saint-Domingue (Haiti), revolted against their French masters. Many of the French escaped to Puerto Rico via what is now the Dominican Republic and settled in the west coast of the island, especially in Mayagüez.
Some Puerto Ricans are of British heritage, most notably Scottish people and English people who came to reside there in the 17th and 18th centuries. When Spain revived the Royal Decree of Graces of 1815 with the intention of attracting non-Hispanics to settle in the island, thousands of Corsicans arrived during the 19th century (though the island was French since 1768 the population spoke an Italian dialect similar to Tuscan Italian), along with many German immigrants. Joining this migration from Germany along the LODE Zone Line were other migrants from the LODE Zone, including part of the Irish diaspora who had to leave Ireland in the wake of the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s. They were followed by smaller waves from other European countries and also from far away China.
During the early 20th century many Jewish migrants began to settle in Puerto Rico. The first large group of Jews to settle in Puerto Rico were European refugees fleeing German–occupied Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. The second influx of Jews to the island came in the 1950s, when thousands of Cuban Jews fled Cuba after Fidel Castro came to power.
The first recorded use of the word Boricua comes from Christopher Columbus in his Letter to the Sovereigns of March 4, 1493. So, picking up where we left off with Randy Newman's lyric :
Columbus sailed for India, found Salvador instead.
He shook hands with some Indians and soon they all were dead.
They got TB and typhoid and athlete's foot, diphtheria and the flu.
The TaÃno Indigenous populations of the Caribbean
Columbus and the crew of his ship were the first Europeans to encounter the TaÃno people, as they landed in The Bahamas on October 12, 1492.
After their first interaction, Columbus described the TaÃnos as a physically tall, well-proportioned people, with a noble and kind personality.
In his diary, Columbus wrote:
They traded with us and gave us everything they had, with good will ... they took great delight in pleasing us ... They are very gentle and without knowledge of what is evil; nor do they murder or steal...Your highness may believe that in all the world there can be no better people ... They love their neighbours as themselves, and they have the sweetest talk in the world, and are gentle and always laughing.
At this time, the neighbors of the TaÃno were the Guanahatabeys in the western tip of Cuba, the Island-Caribs in the Lesser Antilles from Guadeloupe to Grenada, and the Calusa and Ais nations of Florida. Guanahanà was the TaÃno name for the island that Columbus renamed as San Salvador (Spanish for "Holy Saviour").
Was Columbus the first Conquistador?
Columbus called the TaÃno"Indians", a reference that has grown to encompass all the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. A group of TaÃno people accompanied Columbus on his return voyage to Spain.
On Columbus' second voyage to their culture, he began to require tribute from the TaÃno in Hispaniola. According to Kirkpatrick Sale, each adult over 14 years of age was expected to deliver a hawks bell full of gold every three months, or when this was lacking, twenty-five pounds of spun cotton. If this tribute was not brought, the Spanish cut off the hands of the TaÃno and left them to bleed to death. These cruel practices inspired many revolts by the TaÃno and campaigns against the Spanish — some successful, some not.
In 1511, several caciques in Puerto Rico, such as Agüeybaná II, Arasibo, Hayuya, Jumacao, Urayoán, Guarionex, and Orocobix, allied with the Carib and tried to oust the Spaniards. The revolt was suppressed by the Indio-Spanish forces of Governor Juan Ponce de León. Hatuey, a TaÃno chieftain who had fled from Hispaniola to Cuba with 400 natives to unite the Cuban natives, was burned at the stake on February 2, 1512.
In Hispaniola, a TaÃno chieftain named Enriquillo mobilized more than 3,000 TaÃno in a successful rebellion in the 1520s.
Despite the small Spanish military presence in the region, they often used diplomatic divisions and, with help from powerful native allies, controlled most of the region. In exchange for a seasonal salary, religious and language education, the TaÃno were required to work for Spanish and Indian land owners. This system of labor was part of the encomienda.
Early population estimates of Hispaniola, probably the most populous island inhabited by TaÃnos, range from 100,000 to 1,000,000 people.
For example, Anderson Córdova estimates that a maximum of around 500,000 people were inhabiting the island at this time. However, they had no resistance to Old World diseases, notably smallpox. The encomienda system brought many TaÃno to work in the fields and mines in exchange for Spanish protection, education, and a seasonal salary.
Under the pretence of searching for gold and other materials, many Spaniards took advantage of the regions now under control of the anaborios and Spanish encomenderos to exploit the native population by seizing their land and wealth.
Historian David Stannard characterizes the encomienda as a genocidal system which "had driven many millions of native peoples in Central and South America to early and agonizing deaths."
It would take some time before the TaÃno revolted against their oppressors — both Indian and Spanish alike — and many military campaigns were undertaken before Emperor Charles V finally eradicated the encomienda system as a form of slavery. Disease obviously had a lot to do with the catastrophic death rate of the indigenous population, but forced labour was also one of the chief reasons as to why the population declined so dramatically. The first Spaniard to introduce this forced labour among the TaÃnos was leader of the European colonisation of Puerto Rico, Ponce de León. This forced labour eventually led to the TaÃno rebellions, in which the Spaniards responded with violent military expeditions known as cabalgadas. In thirty years, between 80% and 90% of the TaÃno population died. Because of the increased number of people (Spanish) on the island, there was a higher demand for food. TaÃno cultivation was converted to Spanish methods. In hopes of frustrating the Spanish, some TaÃnos refused to plant or harvest their crops. The supply of food became so low in 1495 and 1496 that some 50,000 died from famine. Historians have determined that the massive decline was due more to infectious disease outbreaks than any warfare or direct attacks. By 1507, their numbers had shrunk to 60,000.
Scholars believe that epidemic disease (smallpox, influenza, measles, and typhus) was an overwhelming cause of the population decline of the indigenous people, and also attributed a "large number of TaÃno deaths...to the continuing bondage systems" that existed.
The chapter in Raj Pateland Jason W. Moore's book A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, which is called Cheap Care, begins with a reference to Columbus's wife and his observations in the "New World" regarding his Indigenous hosts; "they go as naked as when their mothers bore them, and so do the women, although I did not see more than one young girl." A month later and he had kidnapped half a dozen women, thinking that the men he'd already abducted would be more servile with female company. For Columbus and his Spanish expedition, this encounter with an alien culture was not a learning experience, it was another instance of what turned out to be the continuous and unrestrained projection of a set of European attitudes upon "virgin" territories. The TaÃno world they were about to plunder, and the society they were about to destroy, was based on a matrilineal system and all notions of descent and heritage was traced through the mother.
Women lived in village groups containing their children. The men lived separately. Because of this TaÃno women had extensive control over their lives, their co-villagers, and their bodies.
Since they lived separately from men, they were able to decide when they wanted to participate in sexual contact. This social organization partially shaped the views of conquistadors who came in contact with TaÃno culture. They reportedly perceived women as "macha women" who had strong control over the men. TaÃno women played an important role in intercultural interaction between Spaniards and the TaÃno people. When TaÃno men were away fighting intervention from other groups, women assumed the roles of primary food producers or ritual specialists.
Women seem to have participated in all levels of the TaÃno political hierarchy, occupying roles as high up as being cazicas. Potentially, this meant TaÃno women could make important choices for the village and could assign tasks to tribe members. There is evidence that suggests that the women who were wealthiest among the tribe collected crafted goods that they would then use for trade or as gifts.
Women transformed into commodities Despite women being seemingly independent in TaÃno society, during the era of contact Spaniards took TaÃno women as an exchange item, putting them in a non-autonomous position. Dr. Chanca, a physician who traveled with Christopher Columbus, reported in a letter that Spaniards took as many women as they possibly could and kept them as concubines. Some sources report that, despite women being free and powerful before the contact era, they became the first commodities, things for Spaniards to trade, or often, steal. This marked the beginning of a lifetime of kidnapping and abuse of TaÃno women.
La Revolution Sera Feminista y Anti-racista - O no Sera -
The Revolution will be Feminist and Anti-racist - Or it will not be -
Re:LODE Radio chooses to present this image and accompanying article to explore a complex set of gender and race related histories. The screenshot shows the bottom half of the photograph by Victoria Leandra for a story published by Remezcla, a United States-headquartered Latin American media company serving the millennial market. The upper part of this image is used above, to illustrate the fact the protests about George Floyd's murder have occurred across many frontiers, including Puerto Rico, America's colony in the Caribbean.
Returning to the chapter in Raj Pateland Jason W. Moore's book A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, which is called Cheap Care, and referenced above, the authors consider the contents of Columbus's diaries, and while there is little textual material explicitly about women, his diaries; "contain a great deal about gender -about how a differentiation by sex mattered in the order of things, about how workers might be managed , about how women might be owned."
Raj Pateland Jason W. Moore continue this analysis. They write:
"The language of sex and sexuality cropped up on Columbus's third voyage when he wrote to the Spanish monarchs that the world was not a sphere but more breast shaped, with Paradise on the nipple."
This use of simile was perhaps part of Columbus covering his tracks in his gross miscalculation of the distance between Spain and China.
Toscanelli's notions of the geography of the Atlantic Ocean (shown superimposed on a modern map), had directly influenced Columbus's plans. Columbus took some convincing from his fellow conquistadors that Cuba was NOT a part of mainland China, and was in fact an island! Perhaps this also connects to the long running, and fake story, that before Columbus sailed to the New World, people thought the world was flat.
Raj Pateland Jason W. Moore continue their commentary and insight:
Sailing around the world, the resources and people of the "other world" succumbing to him, Columbus conquered virgin lands for his king and queen. There's no necessary reason why the language of sex should also be the language with which silver mines were acquired. Yet as some humans moved across the surface of the planet, bringing it under the reign of property, they compassed it as they would a sexual conquest. The reign of cheap nature and cheap work was, from the beginning, a transformation not just in how and what humans could own but also in who could own and work, how they would be born, and how they would be cared for.
Two and half centuries later, and thousands of kilometres to the east, a European fantasy/projection of Indigenous People of the Americas appears as a symbolic personification for the New World continents in a vast mural in the Würzburg Residenz (1751-53)of Apollo and the Four Continents, painted by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, an artist of considerable skill and prodigious output. "America", bare breasted, sits on an enormous alligator.
Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore reference the work of Ann Stoler (Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th Century Colonial Cultures, 1989, and Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, 2010):
In her studies of colonial history, Ann Stoler observes a long line of European colonial fantasies and fears about Indigenous sexualities that sat atop some very rigid ideas about order and power: "Who wedded and bedded whom in the colonies of France, England, Holland and Iberia was never left to chance." Recent archaeology has suggested just how central the policing of sexuality and bodies was to the imperial project. As Barbara Voss notes, the "violent suppression of two-spirits and same sex sexuality was only part of the program of sexual control implemented by missionaries and military officials. With military support, missionaries also targeted premarital and extramarital sex, polygamy , and the use of birth control. as much as 25 percent of the annual mission budget for the Californias was used to purchase clothes to cover the Native [Californians'] 'indecency.'"(Voss, Barbara, Domesticating Imperialism: Sexual Politics and the Archaeology of Empire, 2008)
Balboa found the Pacific, and on the trail one day, he met some friendly Indians whom he was told were gay.
So he had them torn apart by dogs, on religious grounds, they say.
The great nations of Europe were quite holy in their way.
Now they're gone, they're gone, they're really gone. You've never seen anyone so gone.
Some bones hidden in the canyon, some paintings in a cave
There's no use trying to save them. There's nothing left to save.
Famous for the"discovery"of the Pacific Ocean, what he supposed to be a"South Sea", was Vasco Núñez de Balboa, a Spanish explorer, governor, and conquistador. He is best known for having crossed the Isthmus of Panama to the Pacific Ocean in 1513, becoming the first European to lead an expedition to have seen or reached the Pacific from the New World.
In his own day he was notorious for his acts of barbarous cruelty.
Meanwhile he was exploring rivers, mountains, and sickly swamps, and always greedily searching for gold and slaves while enlarging his territory. He was also able to quell revolts among those of his men who challenged this authority, and, through force, diplomacy, and negotiation, he earned a certain respect and fear among the natives. In a letter addressed to the King of Spain, he expressed, somewhat ironically, that he had to act as a conciliatory force during the course of his expeditions.
He succeeded in planting corn, received fresh supplies from Hispaniola and Spain, and got his men used to life as explorers in the new territories. The acquisition of gold was a driving force for Balboa, and he managed to collect a great deal of this precious resource, much of it taken from the ornaments worn by the native women through "trading", and the rest obtained by violence.
Peter Martyr d'Anghiera in his De orbe novo decades, wrote how Balboa had fed forty local homosexual men to his dogs. Balboa, upset with "a brother of the king and other young men, obliging men, [who] dressed effeminately with women's clothing [... of those which the brother of the king] went too far with unnatural" temerity, threw forty of them as food to the dogs.
D'Anghiera continues his story saying that the indigenous people's "natural hate for unnatural sin" drove them so that, "spontaneously and violently, they searched for all the rest that they would know who were infected". After all, D'Anghiera mentions that "only the nobles and the gentlemen practiced that kind of desire. [... The] indigenous people knew that sodomy gravely offended God. [... And that these acts provoked] the tempests that with thunder and lightning so frequently afflicted them, or the floods that drowned their fruits that had caused hunger and sickness."
The massacre described by Peter Martyr d'Anghiera was one among countless other atrocities, carried out by men whose actions reflected and amplified early modern Christian ideas of sex and power. In their chapter on Cheap Care, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore make the larger point of how, at the origins of capitalism, the "strategies used to corral Indigenous peoples into the pen of Nature were also used to create and manage a category of humans who would perform unpaid care work; women."
The work of cooking, teaching, nurturing, healing, organising, and sacralising predates capitalism. Modern humans' first large-scale ecological transformations were caused by the work of care, particularly through the application of fire. But at capitalism's frontier, care activities underwent dramatic changes, reflecting and amplifying early modern Christian ideas of sex and power. Almost from the beginning, sex mattered in the colonial encounter. the word Columbus used to talk about the Arawak men was mancebo, suggesting adolescence and presexuality. Indigenous men were emasculated in Columbus's telling of them, and future colonial wars were characterised by the notion that the defeat of Indigenous warriors by the Spanish involved their sexual as well as military subjugation. Consider for instance, the 1519 letter to King Charles V of Spain from the council of Veracruz suggesting that he seek the pope's permission to punish Indigenous People because "such punishment [might] serve as a further occasion of warning and dread to those who still rebel, and thus dissuade them from such great evils as those which they work in the service of the devil. For in addition to children and men and women [being] killed and offered in sacrifice, we have learned and have been informed that they are doubtless all sodomites and engage in abominable sin."
In setting out their rationale for the chapter on Cheap Care, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore pose a rhetorical question:
Q. What does this have to do with world-ecology?
A. Everything.
Indigenous systems of gender were far more capacious and inclusive than the ones brought from Europe, but they were incompatible with capitalism's ecology. For the order of cheap nature and cheap work to be created, other work needed to happen without being paid at all - most of all, the creation and management of bodies to do that work. This chapter looks at what's called reproductive labour, the work of caring for , nurturing, and raising human communities. such work is overwhelmingly unpaid because it makes the whole system of wage work possible. Without unpaid work, especially care work, wage work would simply be too expensive. As partially quoted above, they write:
At the origins of capitalism, strategies used to corral Indigenous Peoples into the pen of Nature were also used to create and manage a category of humans who would perform unpaid care work;
women!
Human bodies were forced, sometimes medically and always juridically, into one of two inescapable categories: man and woman. The resulting entangled binaries - of Society-Nature, Man-Woman, and paid work-unpaid work - have left us with a way of thinking that has committed humans in capitalism's world-ecology to making spectacular oversights: we continue to think of "real work" solely as wage work and forget the care work that makes it all possible.
This Black Lives Matter story published byRemezcla, connects the everyday struggle against racism with the everyday struggle against patriarchy.
Racism and patriarchy?
This article by Victoria Leandra raises a number of questions regarding race and identity, with Puerto Rico providing a nexus of the different systems of racial identification and classification imposed upon the Americas by European colonists. Victoria Leandra writes:
“It’s not just the killing of [George Floyd,] that’s the tip of the iceberg,”Alexa Figueroa, from Caguas, tells Remezcla. “Racism is structural, it’s taught to us at school and by our families at home.”
Like Figueroa, hundreds of Puerto Ricans are fed up with the idea that Afro-Latinos don’t experience racism at the same rate Black people do in the United States.
Black and white and the Americanization of the world . . .
In the LODE and Re:LODE projects the issue of the "Americanization of the world", and notions of value, arose in relation to the particular Information Wrap and newspapers used to pack the crate of cargo created in Santa Fe de Antioquia, Colombia, and unpacked in LODE 1992 in Liverpool and Hull. In the Re:LODE project the cargo was re-opened in Liverpool in 2017 at the Yellow House.
The LODE 1992 poster/leaflet included this text:
April 24,
1992 was 'Secretaries Day' in Colombia. A full page colour advertisement
for Superley uses 64 images of women. Whether they are models, or
secretaries, only one has dark skin, only six faces suggest a woman over
30 years old, the rest conform to a North American stereotype of beauty
and "glamour".
And was followed by these questions:
To what image do you aspire?
How can you see yourself through the image of another culture?
What
is the purpose in a society where the majority are poor of constantly
showing images of glamour, wealth and white middle-class power?
Colombia is a nation of many and mixed peoples. About half the population are mestizos (a person of European and Amerindian descent), about a fifth mulattos (a person of mixed white and black ancestry) and another fifth white, mostly descendants of the Spaniards. The remaining indigenous peoples (called Amer-Indians?) consist of over 50 different tribal societies scattered in small enclaves in almost all regions of the country. They represent between 1% and 1.5% of the population. Very recently, half a millenium later, the new Constitution of Colombia recognises the rights and independent existence of the indigenous peoples of this land. Accomanying this recognition, various economic priorities have been instituted by the Colombian state to promote and preserve the culture and traditions of these peoples. For those people, imported into the continent as cargoes of slaves and left to inhabit the poorest regions of the country, there have been no equivalent provisions in the Constitution. They are not descended from European or indigenous people, and they are forgotten. Here is a relevant extract from the Re:LODE article
Black and/or white? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder!
These
Colombian women are members of a feminist and pacifist international
organisation that has worked for peace and disarmament since 1915, WILPF continues to work to the end the longest armed conflict in the American continent.
This
photograph of a group of young and beautiful Colombian women is a
photograph of Americans. Latin Americans are Americans too. The
persistent reference to citizens of the United States of America as
"Americans" and the habit across much of the northern and eastern
hemispheres to refer to Mexicans as Mexicans, Colombians as Colombians,
Panamanians as Panamanians etc., but not to refer to these Americans as
American, must be, for the majority of Americans, annoying, to say the
least.
Then there is this
United States of America based website which is all about the commodification of
sexuality and the embodiment of this in an objectification that in this
case is applied to, or imposed upon "Colombian women"!
This is what the website story starts with, a date in Colombia's history that marks independence from Spanish colonial rule.
Today,
Colombians remember the victory with a sense of hope for a peaceful
resolution to the violence and drug crimes that have continued to plague
the country. They commemorate the day by celebrating their country's
rich history, culture and people.
That's why, here in the states,
we're recognizing the South American country's victory with our own
tribute to their people; namely, their beautiful female population. If
there's anything Colombians can always proudly laid claim to, it's their
population of strikingly gorgeous ladies. Thus, let us celebrate the
country's independence by saluting the 50 Hottest Colombian Women.
Shakira is No 1.
Jeymmy Vargas was the only black woman and 45th on this list of the 50 hottest Colombian women.
Vargas was the third Colombian and the first black woman to win Miss Internationalin 2004.
Colombia
is ethnically diverse, its people descending from the original native
inhabitants, Spanish colonists, Africans originally brought to the
country as slaves, and 20th-century immigrants from Europe and the
Middle East, all contributing to a diverse cultural heritage. Afro-Colombians
make up 10.6% of the population, almost 5 million people, according to a
projection of the National Administrative Department of Statistics
(DANE), most of whom are concentrated on the northwest Caribbean coast
and the Pacific coast in such departments as Chocó, whose capital,
Quibdó, is 95.3% Afro-Colombian as opposed to just 2.3% mestizo or
white. Considerable numbers are also in Cali, Cartagena, and
Barranquilla. Colombia is considered to have the fourth largest
Black/African-descent population in the western hemisphere, following
Haiti, Brazil and the USA. Where are the other four black Colombian women?
The
2% representation of Afro-Colombians in the United States of America
based website celebrating the relative "hotness" of 50 Colombian women
clearly reflects the deep-level racial stereotyping present in this
particular sector of the cultural environment within the USA. Is it the
case that, visually, the physical appearance of Jeymmy Vargas
corresponds to a North American stereotype of beauty and "glamour"? In
other words, does she have a European "look", and if so then this
correlates with the observation made in the LODE project of 1992
concerning the newspaper full-page advertisement where out of 64 images
of secretaries only one had dark skin, and she too had the look of a
European.
There are benefits to looking European in Colombia and across the world.
Self-identifying and "colour" in the Puerto Rican population
The history of Puerto Rico, and the Puerto Rican population, reflects a complexity, a matrix that emerges in the mix of the Latin American cultural history of the European conquest of a New Spain, and the peculiar contradictions, alongside blind hypocrisy, of the British, and later, American colonies of North America, when it comes to defining the human and the "other". And, it is worth "the reminder", that Puerto Rico still remains the world's oldest colony, while the US stands as the oldest colonial power.
In the 1899 census, one year after the United States invaded and took control of the island, 61.8% of the people self-identified as White.
In the 2010 United States Census the total of Puerto Ricans that self-identified as White was 75.8% or 2,825,100 out of the 3,725,789 people living in Puerto Rico. This figure was down from 80.5% in the 2000 Census.
Self-identifying as White in Puerto Rico must, in some respects at least, relate to the fact that, in the context of the Americanization of the world, being White, or looking White, has its benefits. When it comes to the fact of lineage in Puerto Rico it is the case that the average Puerto Rican is of "mixed race", but in the context of a social hierarchy, and the categorization of people according to the Spanish notion of Casta (or caste), where people were ranked according to their blood.
Puerto Ricans of "Some other race alone" or "Two or more races" constituted 11.1% of the population in the 2010 Census, but few actually identify as multiracial; only 3.3% did so in the 2010 Census.
The Puerto Rican tendency is to more often self-identify with their predominant heritage, and most have significant ancestry from two or more of the founding source populations of Spaniards, Africans, and Tainos. Although Spanish ancestry is predominant in a majority of the population, according to the National Geographic Genographic Project, "the average Puerto Rican individual carries 12% Native American, 65% West Eurasian (Mediterranean, Northern European and/or Middle Eastern) and 20% Sub-Saharan African DNA."
Very few self-identified white Puerto Ricans are of unmixed European ancestry, and in genetic terms, even many of those of pure Spanish origin may have North and West African ancestry brought from founder populations originating in the Canary Islands.
Afro-Puerto Ricans form a significant minority of the Puerto Rican population. In the 2010 United States Census, 12.4% of people self-identified as Black. The vast majority of the Africans who were brought to Puerto Rico did so as a result of the slave trade taking place from many groups in the African continent, but particularly the West Africans, the Yoruba, the Igbo, and the Kongo people.
Very few self-identified Black Puerto Ricans are of unmixed African ancestry, while a genetically unmixed Amerindian population in Puerto Rico is technically extinct despite a minuscule segment of self-identified Amerindian Puerto Ricans due to a predominant Amerindian component in their ancestral mixture. Research data shows that 60% of Puerto Ricans carry maternal lineages of Native American origin.
The history of Puerto Ricans of African descent begins with free African men, known as libertos, who accompanied the Spanish Conquistadors in the invasion of the island.
AsRandy Newman points out in his song "The Great Nations of Europe", the Spaniards enslaved the indigenous TaÃnos people, many of whom died as a result of new infectious diseases and the Spaniards' oppressive colonization efforts. However, Spain's royal government needed labourers and so began to rely on slavery to staff their mining and fort-building operations. The Crown authorized importing enslaved West Africans, so consequently, the majority of the African peoples who arrived in Puerto Rico did so as part of the forced migration of the Atlantic slave trade.
When the gold mines in Puerto Rico ran out of gold, the Spanish Crown no longer considered the island to be a high colonial priority. Its chief ports served primarily as a garrison to support naval vessels, and as part of this new role, the Spanish encouraged free people of colour from British and French possessions in the Caribbean to come to Puerto Rico, to provide the necessary population base to support the Puerto Rican garrison.
The Spanish decree of 1789, known as the "Royal Decree of Graces of 1789", which set new rules related to the slave trade and added restrictions to the granting of freedman status. The decree granted its subjects the right to purchase slaves and to participate in the flourishing slave trade in the Caribbean. Later that year a new slave code, also known as El Código Negro (The Black Code), was introduced.
Under "El Código Negro," a slave could buy his freedom, in the event that his master was willing to sell, by paying the price sought. Slaves were allowed to earn money during their spare time by working as shoemakers, cleaning clothes, or selling the produce they grew on their own plots of land. Slaves were able to pay for their freedom in installments, and likewise, to pay in installments for the freedom of newborn children, not yet baptized, at a cost of half the going price for a baptized child. Many of these freedmen started settlements in the areas which became known as Cangrejos (Santurce), Carolina, Canóvanas, LoÃza, and Luquillo. Some became slave owners themselves.
Despite these paths to freedom, from 1790 onwards, the number of slaves more than doubled in Puerto Rico as a result of the dramatic expansion of the sugar industry in the island. Every aspect of sugar cultivation, harvesting and processing was arduous and harsh. Many slaves died on the sugar plantations. allowed slaves to earn or buy their freedom; however, this did little to help their situation. The expansion of sugar cane plantations drove up demand for labour and the slave population increased dramatically as new slaves were imported.
In 1791, the slaves in Saint-Domingue (Haiti), revolted against their French slave owners. Many of the French escaped to Puerto Rico via what is now the Dominican Republic and settled in the west coast of the island, especially in Mayagüez.
After the successful slave rebellion against the French in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) in 1803, establishing a new republic, the Spanish Crown became fearful that the "Criollos" (native born) of Puerto Rico and Cuba, her last two remaining possessions, might follow suit. The Spanish government issued the Royal Decree of Graces of 1815 to attract European immigrants from non-Spanish countries to populate the island, believing that these new immigrants would be more loyal to Spain than the mixed-race Criollos. However, they did not expect the new immigrants to racially intermarry, as they did, and to identify completely with their new homeland.
However, the decree also encouraged the use of slave labour to revive agriculture and attract new settlers. The new agricultural class immigrating from other countries of Europe used slave labour in large numbers, and harsh treatment was frequent.
As a consequence of the Royal Decree of Graces of 1815, thousands of Corsicans immigrated to Puerto Rico, along with German immigrants as well as Irish immigrants who were affected by the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s. They were followed by smaller waves from other European countries and China.There even some
Puerto Ricans of British heritage, most notably Scottish people and
English people who came in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Throughout the years, there were many slave revolts in the island. Slaves who were promised their freedom joined the 1868 uprising against Spanish colonial rule in what is known as the Grito de Lares.On March 22, 1873, slavery was abolished in Puerto Rico.
Racism and Colourism
The systems of racial identification and classification imposed upon the Americas by European colonists have their origins in the social frameworks of European societies. These were, and are, essentially patriarchal frameworks that, in the initial period of colonisation were undergoing transformations in the processes and adjustments that led to the emergence of a capitalist system.Capitalism as a system, necessarily produces various, and different, ways of defining humanity in a set of classes, classes that range from a material resource to exploit, through to a commodity to trade, and most horrifically, if and when expedient, to eliminate entirely. In A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore present the historical sources of this process as part of their chapter on Cheap Lives: Keeping things cheap is expensive. The forces of law and order, domestic and international, are a costly part of the management of capitalism's ecology. We've titled this chapter "Cheap Lives" not "Expensive State" because we want to focus not on the institutions of government but on their processes and consequences.
Understand how capitalism has made "cheap lives" a strategy of cheap nature, and you understand not only the forces required to keep money, work, care, food, and energy cheap but also how the most sophisticated and subtle modern institution, the nation-state, still draws on early modern roots and natural science to manage modern life.
More important still, as states confront the limits of their ability both to manage the lives in their charge and to provide conducive environments for liberal capitalism, we're reaching the end of an era of cheap lives.
We make this argument not with relish for the successor to the liberal nation-state but out of concern for what may follow. We're astute enough students of history to know that what comes next might be far worse. (page 182)
Thoughts on hierarchy and bodies are old. It takes special kinds of institutions to circulate and weaponize them. The nation-state is just such an institution, one that emerged through capitalism and contingency. To understand we return to the Black Death
In late medieval Europe, Jewish communities in a range of cities and states had negotiated ways to practice their faith under laws that were not from Rome and interpreted by local bishops but from the Torah and interpreted by rabbis. These truces were always precarious. During the Crusades, Pope Innocent III (r. 1198-1216) issued a Constitutio Judaeorum requiring monarchs to respect Jews.
At the same time, however, came the requirement that, to receive protection, Jews be distinguishable. They had to wear a badge "made of red felt or saffron yellow cloth"- for their own safety, and to prevent intermarriage with Christians. This policing of blood came to matter a great deal when people with that blood were accused of mass murder. (page 183)
Enter the Black Death in 1347. Louis Sanctus suggested that the plague was sent as divine retribution for the actions of Queen Joanna of Naples, who'd murdered her husband, Andrew of Hungary.
More important than the fear of Oriental contagion or the particular horror of a woman killing her legal owner were theories that put the blame on the newly conspicuous community of Jews.
In response to the pestilence, Jews were tortured and confessed to poisoning cities. Although pope Clement VI (r. 1342-52) prohibited extrajudicial killing, forced conversion, and desecration of Jewish property in 1348, the slaughter spread throughout Europe as the plague burned through the population.
Among many horrors, consider that on January 9, 1349, all of Basel's Jewish children were separated from their parents and forcibly baptized and then the city's six hundred adult Jews burned at the stake "on a sandbank on the Rhine."
Thousands were immolated in the city-state-sponsored pogroms, and the members of some Jewish communities took their own lives before they could be tortured and killed by their neighbors. These atrocities happened despite repeated mandates from Rome.
The Catholic Church's power over Europe's commercial centers was starting to wane, while the precedent that some people might be transformed into things had been set.(page 184-5)
Blood purity, the state's increasing power relative to Rome, and a body of literature sanctioning the idea of natural orders of humans were all in place. They were used to inform and propel new kinds of governance, and once again the site where new kinds of social-scientific control were practiced was the colonial frontier.
In New Spain, the sistema de castas emerged as a way of policing citizens, taxes, and labor requirements, as well as proximity to god. It ranked people according to their blood, with categories emerging like answers to a combinatorial mathematics problem.
From the original African slaves, Indigenous People, and Spanish emerged categorieslike españoles (Spaniards),peninsulares (Spaniards and other Europeans born in Europe), criollos (Spaniards and other Europeans born in the Americas, indios (Native Americans), mestizos (people of unknown Native American and Europeanheritage), castizos (people with 75% European and 25% Indigenous heritage),cholos (people with Native American and some mestizo heritage), pardos (people of European, African and Native Americanheritage), mulatos(people of African and European heritage), zambos (people of Native American and African heritage), and negros (Africans). In fact the complexities of gender, sex and history demanded their own vocabulary and arithmetic:
We get the term "caste", or "Caste System", as, for example, applied by a colonial administration in India, from the Spanish "Casta", a term which means "lineage" in Spanish. This term has been used and interpreted by certain historians during the 20th century to describe mixed-race individuals in Spanish America. Racial category labels had legal and social consequences, since racial status was a key organizing principle of Spanish colonial rule. Often called the sistema de castas or the sociedad de castas, there was, in fact, no fixed system of classification for individuals, as careful archival research has shown.
There was considerable fluidity in society, with individuals being identified by different categories simultaneously or over time. Individuals self-identified by particular terms, often to shift their status from one category to another to their advantage. For example, Mestizos were exempt from tribute obligations, but were as subject to the Inquisition as Spaniards were. Indios, on the other hand, paid tribute yet were exempt from the Inquisition. A Mestizo might try to "pass" as an Indio to escape the Inquisition. An Indio might try to pass as a Mestizo to escape tribute obligations. In the historical literature, how racial distinction, hierarchy, and social status functioned over time in colonial Spanish America has been an evolving and contested discussion.
Although the term sistema de castas (system of castes) or sociedad de castas ("society of castes") are utilized in modern historical analyses to describe the social hierarchy based on race, with Spaniards at the apex, archival research shows that there is not a rigid "system" with fixed places for individuals. Rather, a more fluid social structure where individuals could move from one category to another, or maintain or be given different labels depending on the context, seems to be the actual case.
In the eighteenth century, "casta paintings," imply a fixed racial hierarchy, but this genre may well have been an attempt to bring order into a system that was more fluid. "For colonial elites, casta paintings might well have been an attempt to fix in place rigid divisions based on race, even as they were disappearing in social reality."
This painting depicts a Spanish father, together with Torna atrás(De Español y Albina, nace Torna atrás) mother, with a child designated as Tente en el aire ("floating in mid air"). This is perhaps an example of how a granular approach to distinctions in "racial" lineage also includes, contradictorily, an almost poetic ability to capture something of the fluidity of the actual social reality.
The idea of "purity of blood", limpieza de sangre, originating under Moorish rule, developed in Christian Spain to denote those without the "taint" of Jewish (or, later Muslim/Moorish) heritage ("blood"). So, this ideology was directly linked to religion and notions of legitimacy, lineage and honour following Spain's reconquest of Moorish territory.
It became institutionalized during the Inquisition. The Inquisition only allowed those Spaniards who could demonstrate not to have Jewish and Moorish blood to emigrate to Latin America, although this prohibition was frequently ignored and a number of Spanish Conquistadors were Jewish Conversos. Others, such as Juan Valiente, were Black Africans.
The idea in New Spain that native or "Indian" (indio) blood in a lineage was an impurity may well have come about as the optimism of the early Franciscans faded about creating Indian priests trained at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, which ceased that function in the mid-sixteenth century. In addition, the Indian nobility, which was recognized by the Spanish colonists, had declined in importance, and there were fewer formal marriages between Spaniards and indigenous women than during the early decades of the colonial era.
Is racial distinction a part and parcel of a class society?
In the seventeenth century in New Spain, the ideas of purity of blood became associated with "Spanishness and whiteness, but it came to work together with socio-economic categories", such that a lineage with someone engaged in work with their hands was tainted by that connection.
The Wake - An emblematic picture of Puerto Rican familial,multicultural and multiracial society
"El Velorio" - 'The Wake' - (1893) by Puerto Rican artist Francisco Oller. This painting has become a a Puerto Rican national treasure and is not allowed to leave the Museum of History, Anthropology, and Art at the University of Puerto Rico's RÃo Piedras campus.
This is, perhaps, because the painting is emblematic, in some profound way, of Puerto Rican identity.And,
at the same time, it is an image of a social reality that has to some
extent been lost in the tide of so-called progress and economic
development.
Francisco Oller is described as both a Realist and an Impressionist
artist, and he did indeed work alongside Realist and Impressionist
artists while living, studying and working in France. In 1858, he had
moved to Paris, France where he studied under Thomas Couture. Later he
enrolled to study art in the Louvre under the instruction of Gustave Courbet,
who would have influenced his artistic purpose during his Realist
period. Having returned to Puerto Rico from Paris in 1866 he found
himself face-to-face with slavery. His response was tocreate a number of works including El negro flageado (The negro being flogged), El castigo del negro enamorado (the punishment of the negro in love), along with other works that were unsparing in their depiction of the violence and dehumanizing cruelty of slavery in Puerto Rico.
Returning to Francein 1874Oller
spent nearly two decades in Europe working alongside the pioneers of
Impressionism, and, through his travels, participated in a vibrant
exchange of aesthetic ideas, forging his own brand of international
modernism while engaging with the social issues unique to the Caribbean.
As an Impressionist artist his artistic purposes were similar to his fellow Caribbean artist Camille Pissaro, who was by the 1880s, beginning to explore new themes and methods of painting to break out of what he felt was the artistic "mire" that "Impresionism" and "art" was, for him, becoming.
As a result, Pissarro went back to his earlier themes by painting the
life of country people, which he had done in Venezuela in his youth.
Degas described Pissarro's subjects as "peasants working to make a living".
However, this period also marked the end of the Impressionist period due to Pissarro's leaving the movement. As Joachim Pissarro points out, "Once
such a die-hard Impressionist as Pissarro had turned his back on
Impressionism, it was apparent that Impressionism had no chance of
surviving ..."
Re:LODE Radio chooses to quote the following section of paragraphs from this thesis to call out an undercurrent identified in this post;
the benefits of being White!
“… para mejorar la raza.”
The phrase, “in order to improve the race,” is commonly used throughout LatinAmerica to express the sentiment that African,Amerindian, or other non-White culturalcharacteristics and phenotypes are inferior to thoseof European descent. This expressionis often used out of ignorance; it is an unconsciouspreference for that which isconsidered Iberian, perfectly revealing a way ofthinking that has been ingrained in theindiscernible desires of many. The use of the phrase,and the thinking it conveys,commonly appears in regard to relationships. If aperson is dating someone of a lighterskin tone, then others will be complimentary, supportthe relationship, and encouragemarriage and reproduction “in order to improve therace.” In reverse, marrying someoneof darker features is discouraged
Black people - both slave and free - occupied different roles in Puerto Rico.
Proportionally, there were more free Blacks than in other countries such as the U.S.A.,Cuba, and Brazil. Because the island did not hold as much importance to Spain until thelate eighteenth century, White colonists often left for better opportunities in Cuba, NuevaEspaña (present-day Mexico), and South America. This led to a consistently sizeablepopulation of negros libertos (free Blacks) and free mulattos.
Not all Blacks whoworked on the plantations were slaves either. In need of work, many free Blacks worked onplantations as day laborers, a job that allowed them to maintain their freedom andreceive pay, but which included treatment hardly better than that of a slave.
The desire to Whiten oneself or others is in some sense a type of self-imposedeugenics ingrained in the ethos of many PuertoRicans. This is not solely because ofslavery but also because of other laws and decrees intended to ensure the success ofSpanish colonization, to be outlined here.
From early on in Spain’sgovernance of the island there was concern over racialmixing. In 1551, Carlos V issued a law prohibiting the union of Whites with Blacks andBlacks, whether free or slave, with Amerindians.
This prohibition is the most explicitexample of the social thinking in Puerto Ricoinfluenced by blood purity ideology. Still,the intermixing of races was unavoidable. For one,early on the majority of womenpresent on the island were either Black orAmerindian, given that only the few Spanishelite were able to travel to Puerto Rico with their wives. Furthermore, with the largenumber of free Blacks on the island, there was a certain level of tolerance for Blackpeople.
But still, as Benedictine monk Fray Iñigo Abbad y Lasierra stated in
his 1788 published history of Puerto Rico, “There is no thing more
insulting than to be Black or adescendant of them.”
The decree was issued at a time when Spainhad already lost or wasmaintaining a tenuous grip on its other possessions throughoutLatin America. While some small independencemovements were forming, Puerto Ricoand Cuba were the only two colonies that were notactively fighting for independence.Additionally, Puerto Rico was one of the least settled and advanced colonies, a positionthat resulted from its being largely ignored by Spain before the coffee, tobacco, and sugarplantation boom of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
The desired intent of the decree was, in essence;
toWhiten the country.
A censustaken in 1812 revealed that the majority of the islandwas non-White. Less than fiftypercent (79,662) of the population was White,compared to 103,352 Blacks and mulattos(of which 17,536 were slaves).
As the continuedimportation of slaves to support thegrowing agriculture continued to augment the coloredpopulation on the island, thedecree
was intended to make immigration to PuertoRico attractive to Whites
from European countriesand other colonies. At this time, the government
was in desperateneed of addressing the deficit in its treasury, and theRoyal Decree of Graces was thesolution that could strengthen Spain’s political controlof Puerto Rico and improve theisland’s commerce.
Katherine Bowman writes, “Puerto Rican ports were opened to trade,duties on the importation of slaves and machinery foragricultural production werereduced, and, perhaps most significantly,immigration from allied Catholic countries wasencouraged through generous land grant policies.”
The Spanish Crown, with little trustin free Blacks and mulattos, saw this decree as alucrative opportunity for foreigners toinvest in the island through their immigration, andthey did. By 1834, 52% of thepopulation was White.
In effect, the RoyalDecree of Graces of 1815 achieved two ends: it Whitened the island and helped tostagnate the fear of a Black insurrection.
The Royal Decree of Graces of 1815 had a profound effect on the racialcomposition of Puerto Rico. While certainly not thesole or greatest cause of racialinequalities in Puerto Rico, it sent a message thatWhite foreigners, not Blacks ormulattos were needed in order for the island and itseconomy to prosper.
Accordingto DÃaz Soler, the Church maintained baptismal books in parish archives in which therewere decrees certifying limpieza de sangre. Incertifying blood purity, Blacks,Amerindians, andmulattos were all considered to be of a bad race.
As the grantors ofmarriages licenses and baptismal records, twoimperative documents in legitimizing aperson’s Whiteness, the role the Church played in thesocial constructions of Whitenessand
Blackness was deliberative. In sum, the Churchperformed a complicit
role in the socially-constructedWhitening of Puerto Ricans by
controlling how people shouldcomport themselves religiously and by givingcredence to claims of Whiteness, negatingthe positive contribution Black religiosity could add tohow people express themselvesand their relationship to God.
As Olupona states, “Because the deadare still spiritually very much alive, the family of theliving makes every effort duringfuneral rites to make sure that their new ancestor in pleased.” In many of these Africantraditions, the death of a loved one is even treated asa reason for celebration. This wasalso the case on plantations in Puerto Rico.
As Idalia Llorens Alicea states:
The slave did not partake in the funerarybereavement the same as the European olonizers. For Africans death is something like are-conquered liberty, a finalreturn to their homeland; it was a cause for joy. Forthat reason, when a slave diedthey went to their outhouses to play the drums as ifit were a great party.
During thecelebration the child is placed on a table or in a coffinat the center of the living room intheir home. As the deceased child lies there, thegathered family and friends sing songs,play music, dance, eat food, and consume alcohol.
Remeneate, remeneate, remeneate casco ‘e juey Remeneate, remeneate, remeneate casco ‘e juey Si te faltan las patitas, como tu te va menear Si te faltan las patitas, como tu te va menear Le pregunto a usted señora como lo puede bailar Le pregunto a usted señora como lo puede bailar
“Shake yourself, shake yourself, shake yourself shell of crab Shake yourself, shake yourself, shake yourself shell of crab If you are missing the feet, how are you going to shake If you are missing the feet, how are you going to shake I ask you lady how are you able to dance I ask you lady how are you able to dance.”
Puerto Rico's status as a colony of the United States, and with its rich and complex history, so closely connected to the Spanish colonial experience, provides a complex and living example of a cultural and ideological interface, exposing in a localized way specific features of the cultural, ideological and economic forces, that are currently operating on a global scale.
Culturally, Puerto Rican sentiment for the U.S. tends to vary between emulation and opposition, a result of the complicated socio-political relationship between the two. Since establishment as a United States Commonwealth in 1898, traditional economics, social structure, nationalism, and culture has been affected in Puerto Rico.
Before the United States captured Puerto Rico from Spain in 1898, the colony was agriculture based, with most people working on sugar cane, tobacco, or coffee plantations, and continuing in this way through the beginning of the 20th century as an agricultural society.
This was all about to change!
Re:LODE Radio considers the following information, and resisting the pressure to be concise, is important in framing the US colonial policies and attitudes that were imposed upon the peoples and culture of Puerto Rico, especially in the period of the mid twentieth-century.
White supremacism, and the American racist and colonial mindset.
In order to understand the interface between racial identity in a Latin American culture and the racialised institutions found inthe United States, it is important to acknowledge the White supremacist dimension of the American racist and colonial mindset. This became particularly evident in the aftermath of the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery, with the reactionary response of the defeated anti-abolitionists merging with a widespread neo-Malthusian and pseudo-Darwinian view of the exceptional superiority of a white, and European, race.
A foreigner! Different! Black Africans become the "other"!
This ideology of American and European exceptionalism and racial superiority has its origins in the experience of the particular constitutional state institutions that legalised slavery among the thirteen British North American colonies.
Re:LODE Radio considers the legal doctrine pertaining to "property", Partus sequitur ventrem (Latin for '"that which is brought forth follows the belly (womb)"'), as reflecting a cultural process validating the de-humanising of the "other".
Partus sequitur ventrem, often abbreviated to partus, was a legal doctrine concerning the slave or free status of children born in the English royal colonies. It was borrowed from the civil law of Europe, which applied throughout the Americas in colonies of Spain, Portugal, France and the Dutch, among others.
Incorporated into legislation in the British American colonies, partus held that the legal status of a child followed that of his mother. Thus, any child born to an enslaved woman was born into slavery, regardless of the ancestry or citizenship of the father. This principle was widely adopted into the laws regarding slavery in the colonies and the following United States, eliminating financial responsibility of fathers for children born into slavery, while securing the slave-owner's property right in the children. Prior to the adoption of the doctrine in England's colonies, English common law had held that among English subjects, a child's basic legal status followed the father, based on the concept that a married couple were a unit headed by the father. The community could require the father to acknowledge illegitimate children and provide some support for them, and arrange for apprenticeships so the children were assured of learning a means of self-support.
Courts wanted the fathers to take responsibility so the community did not have to support the children. At the same time, common law regarding chattel (personal property) held that the natural increase from personal property, including domestic animals, accrued to the owner. According to British jurist William Blackstone, the common law agreed with the civil law concept of partus sequitur ventrum, but had not generally applied it to humans.
In 1658 Elizabeth Key was the first woman of African descent to bring a freedom suit in the Virginia colony, seeking recognition as a free woman of colour, rather than being classified as a Negro (African) and slave. Her natural father was an Englishman and a member of the House of Burgesses. He had acknowledged her, had her baptized as a Christian in the Church of England, and arranged for her guardianship under an indenture before his death. Her guardian returned to England and sold the indenture to another man, who held Key beyond its term. When he died, the estate classified Key and her child (also the son of an English subject) as Negro slaves. Aided by a young English lawyer working as an indentured servant on the plantation, Key sued for her freedom and that of her infant son. She won her case.
The legal scholar Taunya Lovell Banks suggests the early cases in the colonies dealing with mixed-race children of ethnic Africans and English had more to do with determining "subjecthood" than with modern ideas about race or citizenship. English colonists were considered subjects of the Crown, but Africans and others, in England and the colonies at the time, were considered foreigners and not eligible for the rights of subjects. The fact that they were not Christians also caused the Africans to be classified as foreigners.
The colonies had no process for naturalizing them as subjects, and citizenship had not been fully defined. The courts struggled to define the status of children born to couples of whom;
one was an English subject and the other a foreigner.
The demands of labour led to importing more African slaves as the number of indentured servants declined in the late seventeenth century, related to conditions both in England and the colonies. The legal doctrine of partus was part of colonial law passed in 1662 by the Virginia House of Burgesses, and by other colonies soon afterward. It held that:
"all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother. . . "
As at the time, most bond women were African and considered foreigners, their children likewise were considered foreigners and removed from consideration as English subjects.
The racial distinction made it easier to identify them as "other."
Slavery became a racial caste associated with Africans regardless of the proportion of English or European ancestry that children inherited from paternal lines. The principle became incorporated into state laws when the colonies achieved independence from Great Britain.
Some historians suggest the partus doctrine was based in the economic needs of a colony with perpetual labor shortages. Conditions were difficult, mortality was high, and the government was having difficulty attracting sufficient numbers of indentured servants. The change also legitimized the sexual use of slave women by white planters, their sons, overseers and other white men. Resulting illegitimate mixed-race children were "confined" to slave quarters unless fathers took specific legal actions on their behalf. The new law in 1662 meant that white fathers were no longer required to legally acknowledge, support, or emancipate their illegitimate children by slave women. Men could sell their children or put them to work.
Sex between white male masters and their female slaves, coupled with the partus law, resulted in generations of slaves of mixed-race ("mulatto") and even primarily European ("quadroon") ancestry, as European visitors noted in Virginia by the eighteenth century.
Such was the case in Monticello, the plantation household of US President Thomas Jefferson. In 1773, his wife Martha inherited more than 100 slaves from her father John Wayles, including the eleven mixed-race members of the Hemings family. Betty Hemings, daughter of an enslaved African woman and an English sea captain, was taken as a concubine by the widower Wayles after he buried three wives, and they had six mixed-race children during a 12-year relationship. The children, the youngest of whom was Sally Hemings, were three-quarters white, and half-siblings to Martha Wayles.
Most historians believe that Jefferson, a widower in his 40s, repeated this pattern, taking Sally Hemings as his concubine. They were believed to have a 38-year, monogamous, stable relationship; and Jefferson fathered her six children, four of whom survived to adulthood. With seven-eighths European ancestry, they were legally white under Virginia law of the time, although born into slavery. After moving to the North, three of the four entered white society as adults. Some of them and their descendants changed their names and disappeared into history. One direct male descendant was shown in 1998 to have Y-DNA that matched that of the Jefferson male line. Jefferson's only known male descendants were the three Hemings sons.
Along the Gulf Coast in Latin colonies, there arose an elite class of free people of colour, descendants originally of African women and European colonists, especially in New Orleans, Savannah and Charleston. Many of these Creoles of colour married among their own class, became educated and owned property; some held slaves of their own.
In the two decades after the Revolution, numerous slaveholders in the Upper South were moved by its ideals to free their slaves ("manumission"), so that the percentage of free blacks rose from less than one percent in 1780 to more than 10 percent by 1810. In Virginia, 7.2 percent of the population were free blacks by 1810. In Delaware, three quarters of the blacks were free by 1810. Soon, the demand for slave labour increased as cotton cultivation expanded, and manumissions dropped markedly. Virginia and other state legislatures in the early nineteenth century made manumissions more difficult to obtain.
The author Mary Chesnut wrote of her South Carolina society at the time of the Civil War,
This only I see: like the patriarchs of old our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, the Mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children—every lady tells you who is the father of all the Mulatto children in every body's household, but those in her own, she seems to think drop from the clouds or pretends so to think . . .
Fanny Kemble, an English actress married to an American planter in the antebellum era, wrote about what she saw as the disgrace of elite white fathers abandoning their mixed-race children in her Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation in 1838-1839. She did not publish the book until 1863.
In the antebellum years, not all white fathers abandoned their children by slave or free black mistresses. Some lived in common-law relationships with slave women, protecting them and their children by manumission when possible, by passing on property to them, or by arranging apprenticeships or education for the children, and sometimes settlement in the North. Some wealthy planters paid to have their mixed-race children educated in the North, in colleges such as Oberlin, which was open to all races. For example, by 1860, most of the 200 subscription students at Wilberforce University in southern Ohio, established in 1855 by the Methodist and African Methodist Episcopal churches for the education of black youths, were mixed-race, "natural" sons, whose education was paid for by their wealthy Southern planter fathers. These were exceptions to the many mixed-race children who were abandoned.
Methodism has its own historical complicity in the institution of colonial enslavement of Africansto generate profits for their owners through their work.
No slave labour and the founding of the English colony Georgia
Owing
to the colony's primary role as a military buffer between English and
Spanish-held territories, the original model for the colonisation of
Georgia excluded the use of slave labour, fearing that runaway slaves
could internally weaken the colony and assist the enemy at St.
Augustine, Florida. But, instead of slaves defecting southwards to the
Spanish, runaways from the Carolinas found refuge in Georgia, thus
irritating its northern neighbour. The banning of slavery also reduced
the work force, and this was felt to be a constraint on Georgia's early
economic growth. Many settlers thus began to oppose the colony's founder Oglethorpe,
regarding him as a misguided and "perpetual dictator". Many new settlers
soon set their eyes on South Carolina as a less restrictive and, they
hoped, a more profitable place to settle. In 1743, after Oglethorpe had
left the colony, the ban on slavery was lifted. Various forces united
including the English who always urged it and as a result large numbers
of slaves were soon imported.
One
of these "forces" was the oratory and rhetorical persuasive power of
George Whitefield, an English Anglican cleric who was one of the
founders of Methodism and the evangelical movement.
In
1739, he returned from Savannah in Georgia to England to raise funds to
establish the Bethesda Orphanage, the oldest extant charity in North
America.
Whitefield's endeavor to build an
orphanage in Georgia was central to his preaching. The orphanage and
preaching comprised the "two-fold task" that occupied the rest of his
life. On 25 March 1740, construction began. Whitefield wanted the
orphanage to be a place of strong Gospel influence, with a wholesome
atmosphere and strong discipline.
Having
raised the money by his preaching, Whitefield"insisted on sole control
of the orphanage." He refused to give the Trustees a financial
accounting. The
Trustees also objected to Whitefield's using "a wrong Method" to
control the children, who "are often kept praying and crying all the
Night".
On returning to North America in 1740, he
preached a series of revivals that came to be known as the Great
Awakening of 1740. In 1740 he engaged Moravian Brethren from Georgia to
build an orphanage for Negro children on land he had bought in the
Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania. Following a theological disagreement, he
dismissed them but was unable to complete the building, which the
Moravians subsequently bought and completed.
He preached nearly
every day for months to large crowds of sometimes several thousand
people as he traveled throughout the colonies, especially New England.
His journey on horseback from New York City to Charleston was the
longest then undertaken in North America by a white man.
Like his
contemporary and acquaintance, Jonathan Edwards, Whitefield preached
staunchly Calvinist theology that was in line with the "moderate
Calvinism" of the Thirty-nine Articles. While explicitly affirming God's
sole agency in salvation, Whitefield freely offered the Gospel, saying
at the end of his sermons:
"Come poor, lost, undone sinner, come just as you are to Christ."
The
defence of slavery was common among 18th-century Protestants,
especially missionaries who used the institution to emphasize God's
providence. Whitefield was at first conflicted about slaves.
It
appears that Whitefield believed that African slaves were "human", but
he also believed that they were "subordinate Creatures".
It
was a source of irritation to many colonists in Georgia that slavery
had been outlawed in the establishment of the Georgia colony in 1735. In
1747, Whitefield attributed the financial woes of his Bethesda
Orphanage to Georgia's prohibition of slavery. He argued that;
"the
constitution of that colony [Georgia] is very bad, and it is impossible
for the inhabitants to subsist without the use of slaves."
Between
1748 and 1750, Whitefield campaigned for slavery's legalisation. He
said that the colony would not be prosperous unless farmers had slave
labour. Whitefield wanted slavery legalized not only for the prosperity
of the colony, but also for the financial viability of the Bethesda
Orphanage.
"Had
Negroes been allowed", he said, "I should now have had a sufficiency to
support a great many orphans without expending above half the sum that
has been laid out."
Whitefield's
push for the legalization of slavery "cannot be explained solely on the
basics of economics." It was also that "the spectre of massive slave
revolts pursued him."
Slavery was legalized in 1751. Whitefield
saw the "legalization of slavery as part personal victory and part
divine will."Whitefield now argued a scriptural justification for
slavery. He increased his number of slaves, using his preaching to raise
money to purchase them.
Whitefield
became "perhaps the most energetic, and conspicuous, evangelical
defender and practitioner of slavery." By propagating such "a
theological defense for slavery" Whitefield "participated in a tragic
chapter of the nation's experience."
Stephen J. Stein, "George Whitefield on Slavery: Some New Evidence" (Church History Vol. 42, No. 2, Jun., 1973), p. 256.
Though Louverture died betrayed before the final and most violent stage of the armed conflict, his achievements set the grounds for the black army's absolute victory. Suffering massive losses in multiple historic battles at the hands of the Haitian army and losing many men of their forces to yellow fever, the French capitulated and withdrew permanently from Saint-Domingue that very year.
The Haitian Revolution continued under Louverture's lieutenant, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who declared independence on 1 January 1804, thereby establishing the sovereign state of Haiti.
This is an edited sequence from Burn! or Queimada a political film directed by Gillo Pontecorvo and starring Marlon Brando, Evaristo Márquez and Renato Salvatori. The music was composed by Ennio Morricone. The fictional story is an allegorical and double layered view of the colonial policy of a Great Nation of Europe coming through, and the contemporary policy of the United States in South East Asia, during the Vietnam War. While the film focuses on the creation of a tropical republic in the Caribbean, and the events that follow it, it is also a critique of American policy in Indochina. Marlon Brando plays a British secret government agent, named after the American filibusterWilliam Walker, who manipulates a slave revolt to serve the interests of empire and the sugar trade. The screenwriters also drew on the intelligence agent Edward Lansdale, who served the United States government in the Philippines and Indochina in the 1950s through to the 60s.
Twentieth-century racial segregation in the United States
The so-called Jim Crow laws that were introduced in the aftermath of the American Civil War were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. These laws were enacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by white Democratic-dominated state legislatures to disenfranchise and remove political and economic gains made by Black people during the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. The Jim Crow laws were enforced until the Civil Rights movement in the US led to their abolition in 1965.
In practice, Jim Crow laws mandated racial segregation in all public facilities in the states of the former Confederate States of America and in some others, beginning in the 1870s. Jim Crow laws were upheld in 1896 in the case ofPlessy vs. Ferguson, in which the U.S. Supreme Court laid out its "separate but equal" legal doctrine for facilities for African Americans. While the U.S. Supreme Court majority in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case explicitly permitted "separate but equal" facilities (specifically, transportation facilities), Justice John Marshall Harlan, in his dissent, protested that the decision was an expression of white supremacy; he predicted that segregation would "stimulate aggressions … upon the admitted rights of colored citizens", "arouse race hate", and "perpetuate a feeling of distrust between [the] races."
Many U.S. states banned interracial marriage. This became a particularly contradictory legal situation in therms of ethics, principles and practical realities. Surprisingly for some, it was the case that even while opposed to slavery in the U.S, in a speech in Charleston, Illinois in 1858, Abraham Lincoln stated:
"I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people. I as much as any man am in favor of the superior position assigned to the white race".
In 1967, Mildred Loving, a black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, were sentenced to a year in prison in Virginia for marrying each other. Their marriage violated the state's anti-miscegenation statute, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which prohibited marriage between people classified as white and people classified as "colored"(persons of non-white ancestry). In the Loving v. Virginia case in 1967, the Supreme Court invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage in the U.S.
The problem of classifying persons as non-white
The definition of being "white" in this white supremacist order of things found some difficulty in legally defining the pure blooded white race in a country where much of the population had mixed-race heritage, especially in the states where slavery was institutionalized. The term"Children of the plantation" was a euphemism used during the time of slavery in the United States, to identify the offspring of enslaved black women and white men, usually the owner or one of his sons or the plantation overseer. Such children were born into slavery, and were classified as mulattoes, a historic term for a multiracial person.
Although racial segregation was adopted legally by southern states of the former Confederacy in the late 19th century, legislators resisted defining race by law as part of preventing interracial marriages. In 1895 in South Carolina during discussion, George D. Tillman said: It is a scientific fact that there is not one full-blooded Caucasian on the floor of this convention. Every member has in him a certain mixture of... colored blood...It would be a cruel injustice and the source of endless litigation, of scandal, horror, feud, and bloodshed to undertake to annul or forbid marriage for a remote, perhaps obsolete trace of Negro blood. The doors would be open to scandal, malice, and greed. Both before and after the American Civil War, many people of mixed ancestry who "looked white" and were of mostly white ancestry were legally absorbed into the white majority. State laws established differing standards. For instance, an 1822 Virginia law stated that to be defined as mulatto (that is, multi-racial), a person had to have at least one-quarter (equivalent to one grandparent) African ancestry. Social acceptance and identity were historically the keys to racial identity. Virginia's one-fourth standard remained in place until 1910, when the standard was changed to one sixteenth.
In 1924, under the Racial Integrity Act, even the one sixteenth standard was abandoned in favor of a more stringent standard. The act defined a person as legally "colored" (black) for classification and legal purposes if the individual had any African ancestry.
Although the Virginia legislature increased restrictions on free blacks following the Nat Turner Rebellion of 1831, it refrained from establishing a one-drop rule. When a proposal was made by Travis H. Eppes and debated in 1853, representatives realized that such a rule could adversely affect whites, as they were aware of generations of interracial relationships. During the debate, a person wrote to the Charlottesville newspaper:
[If a one-drop rule were adopted], I doubt not, if many who are reputed to be white, and are in fact so, do not in a very short time find themselves instead of being elevated, reduced by the judgment of a court of competent jurisdiction, to the level of a free negro.
The state legislators agreed. From the late 1870s on, white Democrats regained political power in the former Confederate states and passed racial segregation laws controlling public facilities, and laws and constitutions from 1890 to 1910 to achieve disfranchisement of most blacks. Many poor whites were also disfranchised in these years, by changes to voter registration rules that worked against them, such as literacy tests, longer residency requirements and poll taxes. No such law was passed until 1924, apparently assisted by the fading recollection of such mixed familial histories.
Q. Was this all about a "White" denial, the racist guilt and shame of mixed race ancestry?
The
one-drop rule was not adopted as law until the 20th century: first in
Tennessee in 1910 and in Virginia under the Racial Integrity Act of 1924
(following the passage of similar laws in several other states). This was decades after the Civil War, emancipation, and the Reconstruction era, butit followed restoration of white supremacy in the South and the passage of Jim Crow racial segregation laws.
As a social and legal principle of racial classification
that was historically prominent in the United States in the 20th
century, it verges on the pathological. The principle asserted that any person with even one ancestor of black
ancestry, just "one drop" of black blood would be considered black, "Negro" or "coloured" in historical terms.
In the 20th century, it was also associated with the rise of eugenicsand ideas of racial purity. This concept was associated with
the principle of "invisible blackness" that developed after the long
history of racial interaction in the South, which had included the
hardening of slavery as a racial caste and later segregation. It is an
example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed
union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with
the lower status, regardless of proportion of ancestry in different
groups.
The "one drop rule" meant that mulattoes could never be part of white society.
In the 21st century, such interracial family histories are being revealed as individuals undergo DNA genetic analysis.
Q. Why has the reality of widespread interracial family histories in America been denied, covered up, mythologized?
In Louisiana many free people of colour were part of a culture and society that had been more accepting of interracial relationships and so allowing the mythologizing of the quadroon and octoroon women of mixed race into an exoticized male fantasy, and subsequently into a contested history. This brings us to the contested history ofPlaçage.
A reference in the Wikipedia article on Plaçage links to this interview by Stacy Parker Le Melle with the historian Emily Clark (09/04/2013) published on HUFFPOST:
“As a historian, I knew that mixed race women and interracial families were everywhere in America from its earliest days. And I knew that most of the free women of color in antebellum New Orleans bore no resemblance to the quadroons of myth.” - Dr. Emily Clark
The discussion . . .
Stacy Parker Le Melle: Yes, The Strange History of the American Quadroon was a pageturner for me, for how could I not be hungry to keep reading when I felt that so much history was being revealed? Upon finishing, I asked Dr. Clark to share more about these hidden women, these heroines often unaccounted for when we think about the great American survivors or race in our country. I grew up in Michigan reading next to nothing about them in mainstream history texts. If you read Dr. Clark’s work, you will be moved by the ways our ancestors coped with much that was raw and horrific in our nation’s past, and how many did so with refinement and uncommon grace. For those who know little about free women of color, consider the following Quadroons for beginners. I thought I was past the “beginner” stage, but reading Dr. Clark made me realize I still had much to learn.
How do you define an “American Quadroon”?
Dr. Clark: There are really two versions. One is the virtually unknown historical reality, the married free women of color of New Orleans who were paragons of piety and respectability. The other is the more familiar mythic figure who took shape in the antebellum American imagination. If you asked a white nineteenth-century American what a quadroon was, they would answer that she was a light-skinned free woman of color who preferred being the mistress of a white man to marriage with a man who shared her racial ancestry. In order to ensnare white lovers who would provide for them, quadroons were supposedly schooled from girlhood by their mothers to be virtuosos in the erotic arts. When they came of age, their mothers put them on display at quadroon balls and negotiated a contract with a white lover to set the young woman up in a house and provide enough money to support her and any children born of the liaison. The arrangement usually ended in heartbreak for the quadroon when the lover left her to marry a white woman. If this sounds like a white male rape fantasy, that is exactly what it was. There is one other key characteristic of the mythic American Quadroon: she was to be found only in New Orleans.
What did it mean to be a free woman of color in antebellum New Orleans?
Dr. Clark: There’s no simple answer to that question. If you were born after 1790 to parents who had themselves been born in New Orleans, you were likely to marry a free man of color and have children and see them grow up to marry and have children. In the 1820s you would have been as likely to marry as white women in the city. But the story was different for women who were refugees of the Haitian Revolution and their daughters. Different practices in pre-revolutionary Haiti, known as Saint-Domingue, coupled with the economic and social trauma of dislocation made it less likely that these free women of color would marry.
One thing that both native-born and refugee women shared, however, was the burden of a racist legal system that stigmatized them, discriminated against them, and made it easy to humiliate them.
New Orleans became world famous for its “Quadroon Balls”. In your book, you argue that many descriptions of these balls were just repetitions of one 1826 eyewitness account. What was it really like to attend a quadroon ball? How did these balls change over time to accommodate tourists looking for the legend?
Dr. Clark: The earliest reliable account of a quadroon ball that we have comes from a German count who visited New Orleans in the 1820s. He describes an extremely sedate affair where the young women were “well and gracefully dressed, and conducted themselves with much propriety and modesty. Cotillions and waltzes were danced, and several of the ladies performed elegantly.”Ten years later a man visiting from Virginia describes women dancing in their night garments, which suggests that the “propriety and modesty” of the 1820s had been replaced by something very different, a spectacle that catered to the sexual fantasies aroused by the earlier accounts. By the 1840s the quadroon balls had moved to a rowdy dancehall near the docks. Male patrons were warned that they were likely to be robbed if they took money in with them and evenings often ended in violent brawls.
Let’s talk plaçage. Why would a free woman of color enter into such a relationship?
Dr. Clark: Let me say first that “plaçage” as a notion is as problematic as the mythic quadroon. There was really no such thing — even the term itself comes from a 20th-century Haitian practice, not from 19th-century New Orleans. There was no system of mothers brokering placements for their daughters with white men they had met at a quadroon ball. Instead, there was a broad range of relationships between free women of color and white men that originated in a variety of ways and often lasted for life. For an enslaved woman in late colonial New Orleans, entering into a sexual relationship with a white man who was not her owner could sometimes be a path to freedom, as it was for one of the women I write about, Agnes Mathieu.
The legal prohibition against interracial marriage in antebellum Louisiana was an attempt to stigmatize free women of color who made families with white men. I feel that we somehow do the same when we lump them all together under the imaginary rubric of plaçage.
Tell us about the “fancy trade”. How common was it to purchase light-skinned enslaved women for sex and domestic service? How much do we know about how these women fared? How does this practice connect to Storyville, and later day New Orleans’s culture of prostitution? (Or does it?)
Dr. Clark: We don’t really know how common this practice was. It is a hard thing to pin down in terms of real numbers. There are some court cases that illuminate the seamy workings of the trade in “fancy maids.” They reveal that there were several slave traders from the upper south who specialized in bringing light-skinned enslaved women to New Orleans. And that suggests that these men scoured the upper south in search of women who looked like what people expected to find in New Orleans, the home of the quadroon. The picture that comes through from the court cases is grim: teenaged girls, some of them in very poor health, kept in squalid living conditions. Emily Landau has written an excellent book, Spectacular Wickedness, that discusses the link between the quadroon/“fancy maid” fantasy and the popularity of brothels that featured light-skinned women of color in Storyville, the red light district in post-bellum New Orleans.
How is the quadroon myth alive today?
Dr. Clark: Take one of the popular horse-drawn carriage tours of New Orleans and I’ll bet you that you’ll hear about the quadroons and their balls. A hotel in the city that occupies the site of one of the ballrooms in which dances for free women of color were held promotes itself with advertising copy about quadroon balls. In a way, the city of New Orleans is itself seen by the rest of the country as a quadroon, a city given over to the exotic, transgressive qualities that defined the myth.
What drew you to the history of quadroons? Why did you feel compelled to devote your attention to their stories?
Dr. Clark: The short answer is Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans was misrepresented and maligned by so many in the storm’s aftermath, and much of that sprang from people’s perception that the city was not really American. The myth of the quadroon was part of that: supposedly she only existed in New Orleans, could only survive in New Orleans because it was the only place that could tolerate such a supposed aberration from American racial and sexual norms. But as a historian, I knew that mixed race women and interracial families were everywhere in America from its earliest days. And I knew that most of the free women of color in antebellum New Orleans bore no resemblance to the quadroons of myth. The women I write about can’t set the record straight about themselves and the city they lived in. In the aftermath of the storm, I couldn’t not take on that work.
As a high school student in Michigan in the late 80s, I remember learning precious little about mixed race people, and absolutely zilch about free women of color. Do you think it’s important for history curricula to include their stories? If so, what should textbook makers stop the presses and include right this minute?
Dr. Clark: Yes, I do think it’s important. The system of slavery depended on a pair of binaries: slave or free, black or white. Mixed race people challenged that binary at every turn, and still do. I think that one of the reasons that free women of color are absent from the history taught in schools is in part because their stories have for so long been presumed to be universally tragic and shameful. The presumption has been that sexual exploitation defined their experience, and that’s a topic that has a hard time finding space in school curricula.
Every enslaved woman and many free women of color did find themselves vulnerable to rape and sexual aggression from white men. But that is not the whole story. Some free women of color formed life partnerships or married and lived the kinds of settled, respectable, secure lives that were supposed to be attainable only by white women in antebellum America. When school textbooks talk about the 19th-century cult of true womanhood, I’d like for them to note that some of the women who exemplified it best were free women of color living in New Orleans.
Hurricane Katrina . . .
Dr. Clark's research was prompted, she explains, by reflecting on the consequences of Hurricane Katrina, and especially the misrepresenation of the history of the inhabitants of New Orleans in much of the media coverage following this extreme weather event in 2005. A couple of years later, in the 10th anniversary year of Hurricane Katrina devastating the city, a number of new angles on this event emerged, including "Climate Change" and "Class".
This question was posed by Andrea Thompson of Climate Central on August 27th 2015 in this article:
In the days after Aug. 29, 2005, when the world watched Hurricane Katrina become one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history, a question reverberated through the public consciousness: Was climate change to blame?
This question arose in part because of a desire after such terrible events to understand why they occur. Katrina killed an estimated 1,200 people and caused more than $100 billion in damage. But the question was also driven by an emerging public awareness of the changes that global warming might mean for the world’s weather, including hurricanes.
At the time, scientists had few easy answers. There was clear evidence that temperatures around the globe had risen and expectations that this would shift weather patterns and make some events more extreme in the future, but no clear accounting had been done of whether those effects were discernible in the weather happening to us today.
Ten years later, there is still no straightforward answer for this or other storms. Partly this is because the question itself is flawed, belying the complexity of these weather events and their relationship to the climate. But scientists have found other ways to probe the role of warming, by asking, for example, how sea level rise has made flooding worse or how warming has influenced entire hurricane seasons.
Such studies can tell us something valuable about how climate change is impacting the world we live in, even if they can’t give us a clear “yes” or “no” answer.
The Problem With Hurricanes In 2005, when Katrina helped increase awareness of climate change, the science of what is called “extreme event attribution” was just emerging. Today it is one of the fastest growing fields in climate research, with efforts even to pinpoint the role of warming just days after an event.
While scientists can use certain statistical methods to say with a fair degree of confidence what role climate change has played in altering the odds of some types of extreme weather, such as heat waves, they are still hampered when it comes to highly complex phenomena like hurricanes.
Unlike temperature records, which tend to extend back long enough to show how the odds of heat waves have changed over time — and whether those changes are beyond the normal chaotic ups and downs of nature — reliable hurricane records extend back at most a few decades to the beginning of satellite observations. That isn’t long enough for scientists to say with confidence that any changes to hurricane frequency or intensity over that time aren’t from natural variability alone. In fact, some work has shown that any expected trends in increased hurricane intensity may not be detectable for several decades.
With relatively straightforward events like heat waves, it is also fairly simple to use computer models to compare how often an extreme event occurs with and without anthropogenic warming. But hurricanes are too small-scale and complex for broad climate models to faithfully reproduce, and relatively rare enough that it would take too much computer power and time to complete enough model runs to see any potential changes at this point.
“I don’t think it’s yet doable for a hurricane,”Adam Sobel, an atmospheric scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said.
Finding the Link But there are still ways for scientists to get some idea of the role of warming in hurricane activity and particular storms through other approaches.
A 2013 study published in the journal Climatic Change found that Katrina’s impact on the Gulf Coast would have been significantly less damaging under the climate and sea level conditions of 1900 when its storm surge would have been anywhere from 15 to 60 percent lower.
While sea level rise from warming played a noticeable role in Katrina, the main issue was another man-made problem: local land subsidence and wetland degradation that have left parts of the coast much more vulnerable to flooding. Any effect of warming on the intensity of the storm was relatively minor, the researchers found.
As this study illustrates, sea level rise has so far been the clearest link that can be made between climate change and storms today.
Another modeling study in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, conducted just a year after the storm, found that warmer ocean temperatures in Katrina’s path would help boost the intensity of the storm by changing the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere.
That finding is broadly in line with what is expected from climate change, Gabriel Vecchi, a climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who was not involved with the work, said. But in the years since, researchers have noticed that the exact patterns of ocean warming can create differences in how hurricanes in different regions might respond to climate change, so studies like this don’t necessarily give the whole picture.
Another avenue researchers have recently pursued is to broaden their view and look at how warming may have impacted an entire hurricane season or particular hurricane trends. A study to be published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in September has found that manmade warming upped the odds of the uptick in hurricane activity around Hawaii in 2014, for example.
And while the record is too short for any role of warming to be clear yet for trends in hurricane intensity or frequency overall, some particular trends could lend themselves toward detecting and attributing a warming influence. Tom Knutson, one of Vecchi’sNOAA colleagues and frequent collaborators, cited the recent finding that warming could shift hurricane tracks poleward, as one possibility. Another candidate could be any increase in hurricane rainfall which hasn’t shown up yet in observations, but is a robust projection in climate models, he said.
The bottom line a decade out from the devastation of Katrina is that while questions on the impacts of climate change in today’s world don’t always have easy answers, it doesn’t mean researchers can’t say anything at all.
Ten years on!The human dimensions of race gender, and class remain . . .
Hurricane Katrina exposed the vast social inequalities in US society, particularly as they are exposed along racial, gender and class lines. The absence of any concrete class analysis indicates the nonchalant attitude toward class concerns within race, gender and class studies. The recent katrina disaster can be viewed as a physical microcosm of a larger social disaster of how race, gender and class structures the lives of all of us.
So Jean Alt Belkir and Lenus Jack Jr. of Southern University at New Orleans, introduce the special issue in 2007 of Race Gender & Class Volume 14.
The results of researches undertaken much closer in time to the events of this natural and man-made catastrophe included the essay: Race, Gender and Class Lessons from Hurricane Katrina, by Jean Ait Belkhir and Christiane Charlemaine. They say:
In the public imagination, natural disasters do not discriminate, but are instead "equal opportunity" calamities. Hurricanes may not single out victims by their race, or gender or class but neither do such disasters occur in historical, political, social, or economic vacuums. Instead, the consequences of such catastrophes replicate and exacerbate the effects of extant inequalities, and often bring into stark relief the importance of political institutions, processes, ideologies, and norms.
In the words of New York Times' columnist David Brooks, storms like Hurricane Katrina "wash away the surface of society, the settled way things have been done. They expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequalities." The last two decades alone have provided a series of examples that demonstrate the vast inequalities of U.S. democratic system, particularly as they are manifested along racial, gender and class lines. A truly race, gender and class left would want to eliminate class inequality. But, in the race, gender and class trinity class is the odd factor. Mainstream race, gender and class social and academic activists want to get rid of race and gender inequality but "forget" class inequality.
Also included in this Volume was the essay entitled “America through the Eye of the Hurricane Katrina - Capitalism at its ‘Best’ What are we Prepared to Do? by Jerome Scott and Walda Katz-Fishman, and written in the months immediately after the human-made disaster of Hurricanes Katrina and rita devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005, and contextualising the destruction of human life, community, and environment in history, economy, power, and people’s struggles.
The “horror” (a word, borrowed here, from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness), particular to the federal government response to the the Hurricane, was the intentional abandonment and criminalization of the poor, working class, communities of color - African American, Indigenous immigrant - especially women, children, elders, in the face of the challenge of an environmental crisis.
In a survey conducted of 680 evacuees taken to various shelters in the Houston area, a vast number of respondents, a full 70%, faulted President George W. Bush and the Federal Government for their handling of the problem, while 58% and 53% blamed Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin respectively. Sixty eight percent felt the response would have been quicker if those trapped had been white and wealthier and 61% indicated that they felt the government did not care about them. Ninety-three percent of the respondents were African-Americans.
Reverend Jesse Jackson claimed that racism was a factor in the slow government response, stating that "many black people feel that their race, their property conditions and their voting patterns have been a factor in the response."
When some people, left behind in the evacuation, began taking advantage of the abandoned stores, it was claimed by some that the media referred to African Americans as "looters" while white victims were labeled "survivors" and "victims".
On September 2, 2005, during a benefit concert for Hurricane Katrina relief on NBC, A Concert for Hurricane Relief, rapper Kanye West was a featured speaker. Controversy arose when West was presenting, as he deviated from the prepared script, criticizing the slow federal response. Actor Mike Myers, with whom West was paired to present, spoke next and continued to read the script. Once it was West's turn to speak again, he said "George Bush doesn't care about black people." At this point, telethon producer Rick Kaplan cut off the microphone and then cut away to Chris Tucker, who was unaware of the cut for a few seconds. Still, West's comment reached much of the United States. West also went on to say that America has been set to help the poor as slow as possible.
A video clip of this scenario, and supported by facts onthe abandonment of the poor to their fate by the government, facts that had prompted Kanye West'sanger and concern, is featured in aVox article by German Lopez(Aug 28, 2015) ten years on from Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans.
Vox has compiled a webpage of seven essential facts and No. 3 was:
About 1.3 million people left southeast Louisiana and 400,000 evacuated from New Orleans itself, culminating in one of the largest evacuations in US history, according to Jed Horne in the Washington Post. But as the New York Times'sDavid Gonzalez reported as the storm battered the region, tens of thousands of people remained in the city — not necessarily by choice, but rather because they were too poor to afford a car or bus fare to leave.
It was common during and after Katrina to hear people asking why everyone didn't just leave New Orleans. But the truth is that many of them couldn't leave — as the Times reported — and the government did little to nothing to help them get out of Katrina's path before the hurricane hit.
This is one of the reasons Kanye West infamously said that "George Bush doesn't care about black people." Local, state, and federal officials were simply way too slow in helping largely poor, black populations, leaving them stranded to bear the brunt of the storm. And while New Orleans has reportedly made improvements in its evacuation plans since 2005, the inadequate response at the time of Katrina led to more deaths and pain that could have otherwise been avoided — particularly among impoverished, minority communities.
"Is this what the pioneers of the Civil Rights Movement fought to achieve, a society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were by segregation laws?"Mark Naison, a white professor of African-American studies at Fordham University, wrote at the time. "If September 11 showed the power of a nation united in response to a devastating attack, Hurricane Katrina reveals the fault lines of a region and a nation rent by profound social divisions."
Fact No. 7 . . .
. . . is that New Orleans is now prepared to meet the challenge of a One in a Hundred Year Storm, but Hurricane Katrina was a One in Four Hundred Year extreme weather event.
The singer’s newest video is an inherently political and a deeply personal look at the black and queer bodies who have most often borne the brunt of our politics
Formation is both provocation and pleasure; inherently political and a deeply personal look at the black and queer bodies who have most often borne the brunt of our politics. All shapes and shades of black bodies are signaled here and move – dare we say “forward”? – in formation. Even the song’s title is subversive, winking at how we have constructed our identities from that which we were even allowed to call our own.
The potency of Formation doesn’t come from its overt politics: it comes from the juxtaposition of lyric with the images, which organically present black humanity in ways we’ve haven’t seen frequently represented in popular art or culture.
Formation is a protest and celebration, concerned with and in love with the very particular paradox of the black American identity and experience. The images, which are deeply layered and particular to a black Southern vernacular and aesthetic, beg to be catalogued: Creole and Black American, Mardi Gras Indian, crawfish, Black cowboys, wig shops, socks and slippers, corsets and parasols, parades, high school basketball, step team moves, bounce queens Big Freedia and Messy Mya, cotillions, “twirl on dem haters”, braids, “bama”, black spirituality (church and hoodoo, maybe even a nod to Mami Wata), black mama side eyes, drawls, Blue Ivy black girl magic fierceness.
It’s old and new south; it’s dark and dirty south; it’s Chantilly lace and denim jacket south; it’s baby afro, baby hair and pink and purple wig south; it’s second line and pentecostal holy ghost south; it’s southern gothic and bounce south; it’s my granny, grandaddy, auntie, uncle, cousin south. It is us, it’s for us, and it’s not concerned if white people understand.
I can’t help, while watching and re-watching Formation, being reminded of this Nina Simone interview, in which she defines her role as an artist aligned with activism and black cultural aesthetics.
I think what you are trying to ask is why am I so insistent in giving out to them that blackness that black power that black … pushing them to identify with black culture. I think that’s what you’re asking … my job is to somehow make them curious enough or persuade them by hook or crook to get more aware of themselves and where they came from and what they are into and what is already there and just to bring it out. This is what compels me to compel them.
In this spirit, Formation compels its viewers to acknowledge the beautiful complexity of history, culture and customs, with levity and passion. It compels us to reclaim the black American narrative from its margin and make it center.
Both were considered formative moments for the women and gay men who have been at the forefront of Black Lives Matter and, more broadly, the movement for black lives.
Formation as a work of popular art is clever in its acknowledgment of the labor of black women as soldiers and leaders in social justice movements, even though popular culture has been more interested in the role of men and of male performing artists – like Usher, Kendrick Lamar, Common, Pharell, J Cole, and John Legend, Run The Jewels – in the wider conversation and activism around the crisis of police violence and black community.
The Oxford English Dictionary cites the play The Octoroon with the earliest record of the word "mashup" with the quote: "He don't understand; he speaks a mash up of Indian, French, and Mexican." The playwright Boucicault's manuscript actually reads "Indian, French and 'Merican." The last word, an important colloquialism, was misread by the typesetter of the play.
The play by Dion Boucicault that opened in 1859 at The Winter Garden Theatre, New York City was extremely popular, and kept running continuously for years by seven road companies. Among antebellum melodramas, it was considered second in popularity only to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852).
Boucicault adapted the play from the novel The Quadroon by Thomas Mayne Reid (1856). It concerns the residents of a Louisiana plantation called Terrebonne, and sparked debates about the abolition of slavery and the role of theatre in politics.
The island of Puerto Rico is devastated, with millions lacking power, infrastructure destroyed, homes damaged, and an entire year’s worth of agricultural output essentially ruined. Like any disaster-struck place, it will be in need of supplies brought it from elsewhere in the country.
But getting goods from the US mainland to Puerto Rico is much more expensive than sending them to Texas or even to other Caribbean islands as a result of a century-old man-made disaster that’s been crippling the island’s economy for a long time.
Meet the Jones Act, an obscure 1920 regulation that requires that goods shipped from one American port to another be transported on a ship that is American-built, American-owned, and crewed by US citizens or permanent residents.
For most Americans, this isn’t a big deal — it enriches a small number of American shipowners while introducing some weird distortions into the overall pattern of economic activity in the United States.
For the residents of the island of Puerto Rico, though, the Jones Act is huge. Basic shipments of goods from the island to the US mainland, and vice versa, must be conducted via expensive protected ships rather than exposing them to global competition. That makes everything Puerto Ricans buy unnecessarily expensive relative to goods purchased on either the US mainland or other Caribbean islands, and drives up the cost of living on the island overall.
A temporary waiver the Trump administration granted under pressure after the hurricane struck has expired with no apparent continuation on the agenda.
But a short-term waiver doesn’t address the law’s real damage to the island. Puerto Rico faces a staggering array of long-term economic challenges beyond the hurricane, and the Jones Act serves as a major impediment to addressing any of them. If it can’t be simply repealed altogether, exempting Puerto Rico from the law would be an easy way for Congress to boost the island’s fortunes at no cost to the average American.
The Jones Act is a 97-year-old law protecting American shipbuilding and is the shorthand name for the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, whose primary author was Sen. Wesley Jones of Washington. The goal of the legislation was to ensure the existence of a thriving US-owned commercial shipping industry, a topic that had become salient during World War I, when blockades underscored the close link between maritime commerce and warfare.
One section of the law requires goods transported by ship from one US destination to another to be carried on US-flagged ships that were constructed in the United States, owned by US citizens, and crewed by US legal permanent residents and citizens. The idea, basically, is that in case of war there should always be a big supply of American-made, American-owned, American-crewed ships that could be counted on (and, if necessary, conscripted) to supply American commerce even in hazardous conditions.
One could certainly imagine an alternative universe in which the law was a smashing success. Protectionism for US merchant shipbuilding and US-owned and US-crewed merchant ships could have nurtured an infant industry and turned the United States into a globally competitive maritime powerhouse.
That’s not what happened. Instead, global oceanic shipbuilding is dominated by Asian countries, with China, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan dwarfing American production. US output of merchant ships is even fairly tiny compared to combined European production. According to Daniel Pearson of the Cato Institute, US merchant vessels carry about 2 percent of the world’s cargo, far down from the 25 percent they carried 60 years ago.
Rather than nurturing the creation of a global shipping powerhouse, protectionism for US shipbuilders has allowed the industry to survive despite being laughably uncompetitive in global terms. In most cases, that works out okay in practice because the United States has one of the world’s most robust networks of freight rail. The problem is that when disaster strikes, it would often be useful to mobilize boats quickly. And of course you can’t ship anything by train to Puerto Rico.
For the contemporary world's oldest colony the US came up with "Operation Bootstrap"! You couldn't make it up!
Operation Bootstrap, an operation of the United States and the Puerto Rico Economic Development Administration, began in 1942 and was put in place to transform Puerto Rico into an industrial colony. Government owned factories were built to shift development to industrial factory work and, eventually, education of the factory work force.
Operation Bootstrap (Spanish: Operación Manos a la Obra - Hands on Work) was the name given to a series of projects which transformed the economy of Puerto Rico into an industrial and, according to plan, a "developed economy". The federal government of the United States together with what is known today as the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company set forth a series of ambitious economical projects that evolved Puerto Rico into an industrial high-income territory.
The island's traditional economy was based around sugarcane plantations. By the middle of the twentieth century it remained one of the poorest in the Caribbean. In May 1947, the Puerto Rican legislature passed the Industrial Incentives Act eliminating all corporate taxes, to encourage U.S. investment in industry. This was proposed by Senator (and future governor) Luis Muñoz MarÃn of the Popular Democratic Party, and became known as Operation Bootstrap, and based on the 1930s New Deal economic relief reforms and investment in infrastructure. This was provided for by programmes such as the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration, that intended to move Puerto Rico away from its agrarian system and into an industrial economy. The government's Administration of Economic Development — today known as the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company (PRIDCO) — encouraged the establishment of factories.
The US government in Puerto Rico created attractive conditions for US capitalists to invest in the capitalizing of projects by providing labour at costs well below those on the mainland, along with direct access to US markets, but without import duties. On top of this, all profits could be transferred to the mainland free from federal taxation.
The Administration of Economic Developmentencouraged the investment of external capital, the importing of raw materials, and the exporting of the finished products to the mainland, with tax exemptions and differential rental rates offered for industrial facilities. The result was that Puerto Rico's economy changed the nature of work across the board, shifting the majority of the population's labour from agriculture to manufacturing and tourism.
In a short period of time this manufacturing sector transformed the economy from thosetraditional labour-intensive industries, of food and tobacco production, leather and clothing, to more capital-intensive industries, such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals, machinery, and electronics.
A rural agricultural society was transformed into an industrial working class.
Although initially touted as an economic miracle, by the 1960s, Operation Bootstrap was increasingly hampered by a growing unemployment problem. As living standards and wages in Puerto Rico rose, manpower-intensive industries faced competition from outside the United States.
An American racist and colonial mindset resulted in Puerto Rican women and reproductive issues ending up in the "front line"!
This article from Women in World History tells the story:
When American forces occupied the island in 1898, the Puerto Rican economy and politics underwent a shift that had implications for labor relations. For instance, the introduction of large-scale agriculture produced opportunities for some women to work as cigar strippers. Indeed, women’s participation in this new economic order gave them the same economic opportunities as men. As changes in the economy took place, women joined their male partners in the struggle to improve working conditions. Thus, women were active participants in and key members of the labor movement from the very beginning. However, as their role in the economy became more prominent, working women became targets of gender and racial discrimination, and their struggle in many instances was interwoven with issues of race, gender, and class. Viewing women solely as workers in the agricultural economy, some industrial managers attempted to limit and control Puerto Rican women’s reproductive choices in order to increase the efficiency of the economic system.
Industrialization and Women in the Workforce Traditionally, agriculture formed the base of the Puerto Rican economy. Workers from the tobacco and sugar plantations formed gremios, or guilds, which are considered the first attempts at labor organizations. American control brought large corporations and new modes of factory production, which displaced the traditional workshops settings and artisanal apprenticeships. A focus on mass production undermined the quality-oriented mode of production of the artisans.
In 1929, the Wall Street stock market crash precipitated what came to be known as the Great Depression in the United States. Not isolated to the United States, the stock market crash was part and parcel of a worldwide economic downturn. The depression had devastating effects on the island, creating widespread hunger and unemployment that lasted for over a decade. Many banks could not continue to operate. Farmers fell into bankruptcy. As part of his New Deal efforts to restore economic stability, President Roosevelt created the Puerto Rican Reconstruction Administration (PRRA), which provided for agricultural development, public works, and electrification of the island. This improved infrastructure helped to bolster the Puerto Rican economic situation and relieve some of the devastation from the depression.
Adopting the slogan “Bread, Land, and Liberty,” in 1938 the Partido Popular Democrático (Democratic Popular Party) was founded under the leadership of Luis Muñoz MarÃn. In the insular government, Muñoz MarÃn had served as a member of the local Congress, as the President of the Puerto Rican senate, and eventually as the first elected Governor of Puerto Rico. In its beginnings the Partido Popular Democrático favored independence for the island. In addition, Muñoz MarÃn both supported the increased industrialization that American companies were bringing to the Puerto Rico and was an advocate for workers’ rights.
During this increasing industrialization, women took on a more prominent role in the new economy. The demands in the needle industry forced women to leave their homes and work in factories. They worked as seamstresses for low wages. In 1934 Eleanor Roosevelt visited the island and wrote about women’s work in the needle industry in her column “Mrs. Roosevelt’s Page” for the magazine Woman’s Home Companion. Roosevelt also criticized the employment system of those factories. She observed that seamstresses were paid “two dollars a dozen” for making handkerchief that took them “two weeks.”
These types of demands and labor exploitation made women realize that they were as oppressed as men. Thus, it is not surprising that women joined the labor movement along with their male partners as a way to resist economic exploitation.
Organizing Changes in the Puerto Rican economy altered the relationship between the worker and the economy. The result was that the artisan class developed a more defensive attitude, not only toward industrial capitalism, but also toward the political influences that American companies exercised on the island.
The labor movement in Puerto Rico organized as a political party and adopted socialist ideology to balance the power of U.S. corporate capitalism. In addition, after the United States took control of the island, workers saw an opportunity to join labor organizations such as the American Federation of Labor. Workers’ attempts to combat socioeconomic oppression were facilitated by their socialist critique of the working environment.
Organized workers used newsletters and newspapers as tools of information and empowerment. Headlines and announcements from union newspapers demonstrate that the local labor movement considered women’s issues important. Collectively, this focus on women’s issues allowed female workers from around the island to feel united, and like they had a stake in the labor movement, and the political party that represented them.
It is important to point out here that the union recognized women not only as factory workers, but also as equal partners in the struggle for fair treatment—a struggle that occasionally brought them into conflict with the police. Women strikers, however, did not always behave within the bounds of traditional gender norms. There were instances in which some women strikers “went out of control” and were put in jail.
Reproductive Issues Though female workers were active participants in the labor movement alongside male workers, primarily women bore the brunt of the coercive and discriminatory reproductive restrictions championed by American industrialists and social workers. From their initial arrival on the island, the Americans were concerned about “public order.” Often this alarm was articulated in terms of a concern about “overpopulation” - the average Puerto Rican family included five to six persons - and a perceived lack of self-control on the part of working class and poor Puerto Ricans.
In 1917, with the support of American industrialists, scientists, social workers, and middle- and upper-class Puerto Ricans influenced by neo-Malthusian arguments supporting widespread birth control, public health officials decided to put into effect a plan to control the birth rate on the island. This policy, though seemingly based on scientific principles, was based on a set of stereotypes about Puerto Ricans that characterized them as racially inferior and unable to make their own decisions about their fertility. It is in this way that the insular government developed public policy to control what they labeled as a “culture of poverty.” In this regard, the fate of the Puerto Rican women was in the hands of American scientists and demographers and local government officials. By distinguishing between superior and inferior persons in their policy of population control, these officials implemented policies based on eugenic assumptions that served the needs of U.S. business interests by disciplining the reproductive habits of their workforce.
Americans’ views about the connection between Puerto Rican racial inferiority and what they saw as an out-of-control birth rate reinforced the assumptions that justified the Americans’ presence on the island. One might agree with Nancy Stepan’s book The Hour of Eugenics, in which she observes that, for an imperial power like the United States, “Eugenics, was more than a set of national programs embedded in national debates; it was also part of international relations.” Thus, the attempt to discipline the reproductive habits of Puerto Rican women was not unusual, since they were colonial subjects and the population policy was part of the colonial experiment.
Operation Bootstrap In 1948, Puerto Rico elected its first governor. Luis Muñoz MarÃn had campaigned for economic reforms and structural changes in the political relationship between the Unied States and islanders. Muñoz and other political leaders considered agricultural countries to be underdeveloped and industrial countries developed; manufacturing was seen as the means by which Puerto Rico could develop economically.
As a result, the government launched an industrialization program known as “Operation Bootstrap,” which focused primary on inviting American companies to invest on the island. These companies would receive incentives, such as tax exemptions and infrastructural assistance, in return for providing jobs for the local population. Under “Operation Bootstrap,” the island was to become industrialized by providing labor locally, inviting investment of external capital, importing the raw materials, and exporting the finished products to the United States market.
Due to the nature of the American companies that participated in the plan, women were recruited to work these new jobs, such as those in the garment industry. In these jobs, women often functioned as the main or co-provider in their households and continued to confound the myth of the male breadwinner. Additionally, women continued to participate in the labor movement, protesting for equal wages and better treatment.
During “Operation Bootstrap,” the question of the Puerto Rican birthrate remained a public policy issue. Governor Muñoz feared that the plan for industrial modernization might be in jeopardy if he did not take steps to deal with the “overpopulation” problem. Thus, the administration set about educating the population about birth control, and encouraging surgical sterilization. In other instances, the local government fostered the migration of Puerto Ricans to the U.S. mainland and overseas possessions such as Hawaii. These measures were highly criticized by civil rights groups and the Catholic Church, who perceived this campaign as an unwarranted attempt to restrict individuals’ reproductive rights. In addition, candidates who were challenging the sitting government denounced the discriminatory nature of these public policies.
Conclusion Official documents, census data, newspaper articles, and photographs from this time period in Puerto Rico’s history shed light on the complicated roles women have played in Puerto Rican society. American companies and government officials recognized that working women were necessary for increased industrialization. Women’s participation in these new industries opened up the opportunity for them to become household breadwinners and participate in the labor movement alongside men. This participation in industry and in the labor movement, however, also brought with it a slew of government regulations about women’s health, primarily birth control and forced sterilization, often based on eugenic assumptions about the racial inferiority of Puerto Rican women. Thus, it is important to continue to reflect upon the profound ways in which gender influenced the relationship between these workers and the economic system.
The impact of industrialization upon Puerto Rican culture and society
The growth of Puerto Rican industry changed the outlook on familial social structure. Traditionally, the Puerto Rican family was a large, three generation family living in the same home or as neighbors. The family was built around a set of parents or a single mother, and the family was sustained through multiple wage earning jobs. As the industrial revolution progressed, women found factory jobs more easily than men, becoming the bread winners. The Puerto Rican family structure changed to a small, nuclear matriarchy consisting of only immediate family members.
The United States ideal of small, patriarchal families also impacted the contemporary Puerto Rican family structure in policy. In an attempt to demolish poverty in shantytowns, the Puerto Rico Housing Authority established public housing by example of United States policy. The public housing further disenfranchised the large multi-generation family by dividing nuclear families into public, single-family dwellings. Links to extended family are still an important aspect to the culture of Puerto Rican family structure, however they have been significantly weakened.
The relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico makes national identity complicated. Puerto Ricans maintain United States citizenship while aligning with a uniquely Puerto Rican heritage. Although the island's culture is not heterogeneous, Puerto Rico establishes several binary oppositions to the United States:
American identity versus Puerto Rican identity;
English language versus Spanish language;
Protestant versus Catholic;
and Anglo-Saxon heritage versus Hispanic heritage.
The image used for this Guardian article features Polish nationalists at a 2017 march in Warsaw, which was attended by far-right figures including Tommy Robinson and Roberto Fiore.
In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic attitudes to the migrants who are key workers some attitudes have shifted, perhaps only temporarily, because for many years right wing politicians, supported by some national media platforms, have found that immigration and immigrants are a useful scapegoat for feelings of loss and social dissatisfaction, because of the continuing existence of systemic and structural racism in sections of UK culture and society.
How migrants became the scapegoats of contemporary mainstream politics
The UK government proudly calls the aim of its immigration policy to be the creation of a “hostile environment,” while refugees drown in the Mediterranean and Britain votes to leave the EU against claims that “swarms”of migrants are entering Britain. Meanwhile, study after study confirms that immigration is not damaging the UK’s economy, nor putting a strain on public services, but immigration is blamed for all of Britain’s ills.
Yet concerns about immigration are deemed “legitimate” across the political spectrum, with few exceptions. How did we get here?
Maya Goodfellow offers a compelling answer. Through interviews with leading policy-makers, asylum seekers, and immigration lawyers, Goodfellow illuminates the dark underbelly of contemporary immigration policies. A nuanced analysis of the UK’s immigration policy from the 1960s onwards, Hostile Environment links immigration policy and the rhetoric of both Labour and Tory governments to the UK’s colonial past and its imperialist present. Goodfellow shows that distinct forms of racism and dehumanisation directly resulted from immigration policy, and reminds us of the human cost of concessions to anti-immigration politics.
David Lammy (MP Labour) reviews Maya Goodfellow's book 'Hostile Environment' for the Guardian (Wed 4 Dec 2019).
Nora arrived from north-east Africa in 2001 when she was 17. Desperate for their daughter to escape civil war, Nora’s family managed to sell enough of their valuables to buy her a one-way ticket to the UK. Not long after her 18th birthday, her application for asylum was rejected for the fifth time. Without a work permit, any form of identification or state support, she became homeless for the first 10 years of her adult life. About five years in, she realised that her only means of survival was to return to the place that had jeopardised it in the first place. But when Nora arrived at the embassy, she was told that she could not return without the relevant asylum status proving where she came from – the very status she had been denied. It turned out that the Home Office was not telling her to “go home”. They were telling Nora to disappear, condemning her to a life of statelessness and invisibility.
This is just one of many raw experiences that Maya Goodfellow sensitively navigates with explosive effect in Hostile Environment. From Winston Churchill to Windrush and Tony Blair to Brexit, this archival critique and collection of interviews is one of the most profound deconstructions of UK immigration policy that exists.
Goodfellow teaches us that racism does not just arise out of thin air. When a country gets high on the global enslavement of black and brown people, the least you can expect is a stinking colonial hangover. Clement Attlee signed the 1948 British Nationality Act; nationals of British colonies were given the right to live in Britain as citizens. Hailed by many as an end to the colonial treatment of labourers, in reality this was a desperate attempt to hold together what remained of the British empire. Citizenship was extended primarily as a means of facilitating free movement between “old” Commonwealth countries – the “White Dominions” such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The arrival of 500,000 non-white people from the Caribbean was merely an unintended consequence.
Successive governments did everything they could to maintain Britain’s image as a global Commonwealth power without jeopardising racial purity. The 1962 and 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Acts significantly limited their right or entry, effectively reducing those already living here to second-class citizens. And in 1971, Commonwealth citizens lost their automatic right to remain in the UK. Most significantly, the burden of proof of this status was shifted entirely on to the individual, even though it was the government who had called it into question.
By the time Theresa May said she wanted to make Britain a “hostile environment” for those whom she called “illegal migrants”, the legislation was already in place. Goodfellow forcefully dismantles the idea that the Windrush scandal was a deviance from the norm. Rather, it was the latest chapter in a longstanding quest to “Keep England White”. In explaining how the history of modern Britain is, in part, a history of white supremacy, her book is both brave and powerful.
There’s no greater proof of this bravery than the breadth of the author’s critique. Not only does Goodfellow condemn years of anti-immigrant rhetoric, she also targets the dominant discourse that has not done enough to resist it. She does this by spelling out a conundrum – and it’s done with incredible clarity. She acknowledges that progressive actors have made a compelling economic case for immigration. In doing so, they have valiantly challenged myths that seek to scapegoat immigrants for home-grown problems, the kind of falsehoods that contributed to the Brexit referendum result in 2016. However, she also delivers an urgent caution: we cannot allow immigrants’ worth to be defined by their economic contribution. That’s because, first, this does nothing to challenge the kind of system they are contributing to. If we spoke out against the way in which multinational companies seek out the most exploitable workforce, we could more powerfully resist the fable that immigrants are the ones driving down wages. Goodfellow’s writing is a rallying cry for working-class communities and people of colour to fight together against injustice, defying those who would rather they fought against each other.
Second, our political responsibility towards migrants is not dependent on fiscal value. Migrants, refugees and asylum seekers are not commodities to be imported; they are people with human rights. Goodfellow has a talent for harvesting outrage into action; she lays the foundation for an immigration policy that’s grounded in humanity – an immigration system that legislates for the needs of migrants, not just British citizens. An immigration system; that shows compassion for human beings in need, rather than illegalising their existence; that scrutinises our borders, rather than demonising those who are desperate enough to cross them.
The concluding chapter, a radical manifesto, foreshadows many of the proposals that came out of this year’s Labour party conference. Ending the hostile environment, closing down detention centres, extending the vote to migrants, reforming our curriculum and increasing legal aid. And it’s only because of such people as Goodfellow that these proposals made it into this year’s Labour manifesto – that policymakers are beginning to put humanity at the centre of immigration reform. She has proved herself a champion of migrant justice; we would be foolish not to keep listening.
A. Don't you think referring to a bureaucratic collective term for minority ethnic groups as something anyone might identify with is somewhat absurd?
When it comes to the complexities involved in processes of self-identification then you have got to listen to the artists not the bureaucrats and politicians. And you cannot do better than listen to Eminem as he explores his own journey and being "WHITE"!
"White America" is a political hip hop song by rapper Eminem released in 2002 from his fourth studio album, The Eminem Show. The song was also performed at the MTV Video Music Awards. It is the first full song on the album, and describes Eminem's rise to prominence and allegations from parents and politicians that he had influenced criminal behavior on young white Americans. "White America" is segued into by the opening skit "Curtains Up" on The Eminem Show, which involves Eminem walking up to a microphone to make a speech. It addresses the controversy stemming from Eminem's lyrical content, and impacting white youth, expressed with lines such as: "I speak to suburban kids, who otherwise would've never knew these words exist.""Eric" and "Erica" are representations of any white youth. Eminem also expressed his belief that his music is controversial only because it appeals to white kids, with lines such as, "Hip-hop was never a problem in Harlem, only in Boston / after it bothered the fathers of daughters starting to blossom." Eminem also states his belief that his skin color helped with his popularity, and in effect introduced white fans to his producer, Dr. Dre, although earlier in his career it had prevented him from being taken seriously. The song also discusses the freedom of speech of the US Constitution through attacks on the then-Second Lady of the United States Lynne Cheney and her predecessor Tipper Gore, who questioned Eminem's legitimacy to freedom of speech and introduced the Parental Advisory sticker respectively.
"White America" had an animated music video that featured imagery related to the lyrics, including Eminem on a wanted poster and later being lynched while the US Constitution is torn up in the foreground.
White America! I could be one of your kids White America! Little Eric looks just like this White America! Erica loves my shit I go to T-R-L, look how many hugs I get White America! I Could be one of your kids White America! Little Eric looks just like this White America! Erica loves my shit I go to T-R-L, look how many hugs I get So to the parents of America I am the derringer aimed at little Erica To attack her character The ring leader of the circus of worthless pawns Sent to lead the march right up to the steps of Congress And piss on the lawns of the White House To burn the casket and replace it with a parental advisory sticker To spit liquor in the faces of this democracy of hypocrisy Fuck you Ms. Cheney Fuck you tipper Gore Fuck you with the free-ness of speech this Divided states of embarrassment will allow me to have Fuck you! Ha ha ha! I'm just playin' America, you know I love you
To end this post Re:LODE Radio chooses to reference two instances of the Bernstein/Sondheim song "America" and The End by The Doors(of perception) featuring in the film Apocalypse Now.
. . . it was one of the most shocking events of the late 60s that persuaded the Nice to record the song "America" in its own right. The band – completed by guitarist Davy O’List and drummer Brian Davison – were driving back from a gig on the Isle of Wight in June 1968 when they heard the news that US Senator Robert Kennedy, the brother of murdered President John F. Kennedy, had been shot and killed while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination.
“That got me thinking,” recalls Keith Emerson. “JFK had been shot, then Martin Luther King. It seemed to me that America was ruled by the gun. It’s even in their constitution: the right to bear arms.”
It was the era of the protest song. Against a backdrop of civil rights struggles, student unrest and the war in Vietnam, the likes of Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs were channelling the mood of the times in their lyrics. But, in a novel approach, The Nice decided to turn America into what Emerson calls “the first protest instrumental”.
Released as a single on June 21, 1968 America began picking up radio airplay thanks to a few DJs who grasped what the band were trying to do, though at six-and-a-half minutes it was too long for Top Of The Pops. “They wanted us to lose about 90 seconds,”Jackson says. “We refused.” But it was a controversial incident at the Royal Albert Hall that propelled the song into the UK Top 30 – and to notoriety. The Nice had been booked to play an anti-apartheid concert at the prestigious London venue on July 7, part of a bizarre line-up that included Sammy Davis Jr, British jazz stars Johnny Dankworth and Cleo Laine, and the cast of TV comedy series Till Death Us Do Part.
Also in attendance was the US Ambassador to Britain, David K.E. Bruce, adding political gravitas to the occasion. The band decided to ramp up the drama by draping an American flag behind them during their set, which climaxed with America. “My plan was to set it on fire at the end of the set,” says Emerson, “but I couldn’t get the matches to light. So Warren Mitchell, who played Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part, lent me his lighter, and up it went. Everyone went silent. We’d been going down well until that happened.”
The band were quickly ushered off stage. Driving home, they found out via Radio Luxembourg that they’d been banned for life from the Albert Hall.
Inspired by Satan . . .
VICE
Vice is a 2018 American biographical satirical comedy-drama film written and directed by Adam McKay. The film stars Christian Bale as former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney. The film follows Cheney on his path to become the most powerful Vice President in American history. Dick Cheney's daughter and Congresswoman Liz Cheney criticized Christian Bale for his portrayal of her father in Vice, remarking during a Fox & Friends interview that "he finally had the chance to play a real superhero, and he clearly screwed it up".
Liz also responded negatively to Bale's controversial acceptance speech for winning the Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical Golden Globe for his portrayal of Cheney, in which the actor thanked Satan for inspiring him to play the role of Cheney.
Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America is a 2015 book on American foreign policy co-authored by Dick Cheney and his daughter, Liz Cheney, a former official of the United States Department of State. The book offers a vehement criticism of President Barack Obama's foreign policy, and an unwavering defense of the virtue of American exceptionalism.
The book traces the history of U.S. foreign policy and military successes and failures from Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration through the Obama administration. The authors tell the story of what they describe as the unique role the United States has played as a defender of freedom throughout the world since World War II. Drawing upon the notion of American exceptionalism, the co-authors criticize Barack Obama's and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's foreign policies, and offer what they see as the solutions needed to restore American greatness and power on the world stage in defence of freedom.
In their prologue, the authors state their purpose in the book: "We must ensure our children know the truth about who we are, what we've done, and why it is uniquely America's duty to be freedom's defender... They should learn about great men like George C. Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan." They contend that, "it is the brave men and women of the United States armed forces who defend our freedom and secure it for millions of others as well", and that America is "the most powerful, good, and honorable nation in the history of mankind, the exceptional nation."
After setting out and arguing the case for American Exceptionalism in the book, the Cheneys state: "we are, as Lincoln said, 'the last, best hope of earth'." They argue that America is not just "one more indistinguishable entity on the world stage", but that the United States has, "been essential to the preservation and progress of freedom, and those who lead us in the years ahead must remind us, as Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Reagan did, of the special role we play". The authors conclude: "we are, in fact, exceptional."
The end credits of the film VICE show a sequence of specially crafted, symbolic and highly artistic, fly fishing lures and hooks. The creditsare then followed by a much discussed mid-credits scene that has a focus group descending into chaos when a conservative panelist slams the film itself as biased and attacks a liberal panelist who defends the movie and insults him, while another younger panelist expresses her anticipation for the next Fast & Furious movie.
Scott Lucas, Professor of International Politics, University of Birmingham writes for The Conversation (Feb 13 2019) on the film from a politics perspective.
Early in Adam McKay’sVice, a famous but unattributed quote appears on the screen: “Beware the quiet man. For while others speak, he watches. And while others act, he plans. And when they finally rest … he strikes”.
And already we understand the problem with trying to make a film about a man like Dick Cheney. He will elude you at every turn.
Cheney was far from quiet before he became George W. Bush’s vice president in 2001. Perhaps he hadn’t been prominent when he became the youngest White House chief of staff in history under Gerald Ford in 1975. Maybe his political manoeuvring as congressman from Wyoming didn’t make headlines. But as secretary of defense for George H.W. Bush, and then as CEO of Halliburton, the multinational oil services company, he certainly made himself heard.
A quiet American . . .
This type of quiet American can, on occasion, give a noisy lecture. In his novel The Quiet American (1955) English author Graham Greene tells a story, narrated in the first person by a journalist, Thomas Fowler, against the background of the breakdown of French colonialism in Vietnam and the early American involvement in the Vietnamese struggle to escape European colonialism.
The novel implicitly questions the foundations of growing American involvement in Vietnam in the 1950s and is unique in its exploration of the subject topic through the links among its three main characters, Fowler, the quiet American Pyle, a CIA agent working under cover, and Phuong, a beautiful young Vietnamese woman whose character is never fully developed or revealed.
The novel has received much attention due to its prediction of the outcome of the Vietnam War and subsequent American foreign policy since the 1950s. Greene portrays Pyle as so blinded by American exceptionalism that he cannot see the calamities he brings upon the Vietnamese. The book uses Greene's experiences as a war correspondent for The Times and Le Figaro in French Indochina 1951–1954.
He was apparently inspired to write The Quiet American during October 1951 while driving back to Saigon from Ben Tre province. He was accompanied by an American aid worker who lectured him about finding a "third force in Vietnam".
The Doors and The End . . .
The Doors were an American rock band formed in Los Angeles in 1965, with vocalist Jim Morrison, keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger, and drummer John Densmore. They were among the most controversial and influential rock acts of the 1960s, mostly because of Morrison's lyrics and voice along with his erratic stage persona, and the group was widely regarded as an important part of the era's counterculture.
When it comes to apocalyptic prophecyRe:LODE Radio does NOT consider that William Blake was predicting the current global heating crisis (see his plate 14 below). The "Hell" that figures in his Marriage of Heaven and Hellis the world of workers, of miners working in the "hellish" conditions of the mines, of printers in the printing houses, working with corrosives and engaged in energetic work to reveal the infinite that was hid. His "Heaven" is the exceptionalist bubble of the owners of the land, those who enclosed the commons, taking the earth's riches from the mines, and justifying inequality with the worn out ideology of a capitalist class society. Blake's reversal of heaven and hell includes the fact that it is those who work, and that through their work, make the world. It is those who create society through their energies who understand the realities as they are. Those who own, control and make profit from the work and resources of others are locked in a closed system of perception. They can see nothing of the way things are and blindly ignorant of the consequences of a system of inequality that benefits the few and not the many.
This is the end . . .
"The End" is an epic song by the American rock band the Doors. Lead singer Jim Morrison initially wrote the lyrics about his break up with his girlfriend Mary Werbelow, but it evolved through months of performances at the Whisky a Go Go into a much longer song. The Doors recorded a nearly 12-minute version for their self-titled debut album, which was released on January 4, 1967.
"The End" was recorded live in the studio with no overdubbing. Two takes were recorded, with reportedly the second being used for the album. It was the last song the original group performed at their last concert on December 12, 1970, at The Warehouse in New Orleans.
The version used in Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now is different from the 1967 release, being a remix specifically made for the movie. The remixed version emphasizes the vocal track at the final crescendo, highlighting Morrison's liberal use of scat and expletives. The vocal track can partly be heard in the 1967 release, although the expletives are effectively buried in the mix (and the scat-singing only faintly audible), and Morrison can only be heard clearly at the end of the crescendo with his repeated line of "Kill! Kill!". This version originated with the original master copy from Elektra's tape vaults; when Walter Murch, the Sound Designer, requested copies of the song from Elektra Records for use in the film, the studio unknowingly sent him the original master tracks to use, which explains the different (some would say better) sonic quality of the song used in the film.
Apocalypse Now is the 1979 American epic war film directed, produced and co-written by Francis Ford Coppola. The screenplay, co-written by Coppola and John Milius and narration written by Michael Herr, was loosely based on the 1899 novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. The setting was changed from late 19th-century Congo to the Vietnam War. The film follows a river journey from South Vietnam into Cambodia undertaken by Captain Benjamin L. Willard (a character based on Conrad's Marlow), who is on a secret mission to assassinate Colonel Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando, with the character being based on Conrad's Mr. Kurtz), a renegade Army Special Forces officer accused of murder and who is presumed insane.
"The End", and the beginning of Apocalypse Now . . .
Famous for the "discovery" of the Pacific Ocean, what he supposed to be a "South Sea", was Vasco Núñez de Balboa, a Spanish explorer, governor, and conquistador. He is best known for having crossed the Isthmus of Panama to the Pacific Ocean in 1513, becoming the first European to lead an expedition to have seen or reached the Pacific from the New World.
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