Beauty without borders . . .
The Re:LODE project of 2017-18 Information Wrap for the LODE Cargo created in Gwalior, India includes these two questions:
Q. Is capitalism historically inseparable from colonialism?
Q. Does capitalism function through the expansion of frontiers?
These two questions recur in the Information Wrap pages for places where LODE Cargo was created in India, Indonesia, Australia and Colombia in the Americas. The Re:LODE project work points to the answer to both these seemingly rhetorical questions being a "yes".
These answers are significantly extended by the project, and book:
A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet by Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel
How has capitalism devastated the planet—and what can we do about it?
This Vogue cover chooses an image that supports the notion that there is no contradiction between diversity and universal values concerning beauty. The medium of photography can't help substituting itself for reality. Photography, in this same way, can also not help but suggest the presence of inclusiveness amongst human beings, even when it is an illusion. Photography dissolves borders and boundaries, while foregrounding gesture, as a non verbal visual communication system. However, when it comes to doing away with borders, extending frontiers, and building barriers, there's nothing like capitalism. And, in its wake, comes the particular European forms of slavery, slave trading and racism.
Vogue magazine (US edition) . . .
Vogue values "Beauty without Borders", and covers the funeral of George Floyd.
The Most Moving Moment of Al Sharpton’s Eulogy for George Floyd
By Stuart Emmrich
June 10, 2020
The Reverend Al Sharpton, whose phrase “get your knee off our necks” became a national rallying cry for Black Americans after he uttered it at the Minneapolis memorial for George Floyd last week, returned to the pulpit on Tuesday to give a powerful eulogy at Floyd’s funeral in Houston.
For roughly 40 minutes, Sharpton called for the four Minneapolis policemen involved in Floyd’s death to be brought to justice (“because lives like George’s will not matter until somebody pays the cost for taking their lives”). He also criticized President Donald Trump: “When some kids wrongly start violence that this family doesn’t condone, the president talks about bringing in the military. But he’s not said one word about 8 minutes and 46 seconds of police murder of George Floyd.” And Sharpton even called out the NFL for its treatment of quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who in 2016 knelt during the national anthem in protest of police brutality and has not played a game since 2017. “Don’t apologize—give Colin Kaepernick a job back,” Sharpton said. “We don’t want an apology. We want him repaired.”
But perhaps the most moving moment of the eulogy, and the one that brought all of the approximately 500 mourners in the Fountain of Praise church to their feet, was when Sharpton singled out several individuals and asked them to be recognized. Each shared a burden with the family of the man being buried, Sharpton said, explaining, “They wanted to be here to be part of this because they understand the pain better than anyone, because they’ve gone through the pain.”
“The mother of Trayvon Martin, will you stand?” Sharpton said.
“The mother of Eric Garner, will you stand?”
“The sister of Botham Jean, will you stand?”
“The family of Pamela Turner, right here in Houston, will you stand?”
“The father of Michael Brown from Ferguson, Missouri, will you stand?”
“The father of Ahmaud Arbery, will you stand?”
As the clapping grew in intensity, Sharpton added, “All of these families came to stand with this family because they know better than anyone else the pain they will suffer from the loss that they have gone through.”
The funeral aired live on broadcast and cable television, and as it began at noon, the New York Stock Exchange went silent for 8 minutes, 46 seconds—the length of time a Minneapolis police officer held Floyd’s neck under his knee before he died. It was the longest moment of silence on the stock-exchange floor in its 228-year history.
There's NO shame there then . . .
. . . while families grieve their loved ones.
Eulogy . . .
. . . & people making history!
The creation of Black Lives Matter Plaza Washington DC
Artists paint 'End Racism Now' on downtown Raleigh street
Taylor Dafoe of artnet news reports (June 8, 2020):
Cities Across the US Are Painting Massive Black Lives Matter Slogans on Their Streets, Following in the Footsteps of Washington, DC
Block-spanning text paintings appeared in Oakland, Sacramento, and Raleigh over the weekend.
In Washington, DC, the words “BLACK LIVES MATTER” appeared on Friday night in 35-foot-long yellow letters across two blocks directly north of the White House. The mural, commissioned by DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, went viral before it was even completed.
Since then, cities across the country have followed DC’s lead and painted their own massive murals on municipal property. The phrase “END RASCISM NOW” popped up in bold yellow paint on Sunday morning in Raleigh, on a street next to the Contemporary Art Museum.
In Sacramento, activists painted their own “BLACK LIVES MATTER” message in the grass across three medians on the city’s Capitol Mall, just west of the California capitol building. The project, commissioned by Sacramento city councilman Steve Hansen and coordinated by local nonprofit The Atrium, was led by artist Demetris “BAMR” Washington and executed with the help of some 300 volunteers.
Meanwhile, an hour away, hundreds of artists and activists in Oakland used 75 gallons of yellow paint to imprint the movement’s message in 25-foot-long letters on a street spanning three consecutive blocks.
The mural was organized by Poncho Kachingwe, the owner of a local bar and gallery. And while it started in guerrilla fashion, city hall ultimately granted the grassroots endeavor permission after police officers tried to intervene.
“Normally I would just go by the rules and try to make sure we’re doing everything by the book, but this was like, it’s gotta be in the moment,” Kachingwe told KCBS. “If it’s not in the moment, it’s not really showing the true spirit of Oakland.”
These video clips show projects being realized across the USA. Seattle, Washington; Albany, New York; Charlotte, North Carolina; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Demarest, New Jersey; Sacramento, California; Oakland, California; Akron, Ohio - Artists and activists are painting a mural that spells out “Black Lives Matter” on a stretch of Howard Street, near the intersection where 18-year-old Na’Kia Crawford was fatally shot Sunday while running errands with her grandmother; Atlanta, Georgia - Beltline and Edgewood Ave; Brooklyn, New York.
Black Lives Matter Murals across the USA . . .
. . . & spontaneous interaction between strangers, people coming together, is what creates public space!
"Donald Trump Put a Fence Around the White House to Keep Demonstrators Away. It Is Now Completely Covered in Protest Art" says Sarah Cascone, June 9, 2020 for artnet news.
The fence erected outside the White House by President Donald Trump to keep demonstrators at least 600 feet away has been transformed into a memorial wall for George Floyd and a protest site demanding racial and social justice.
The wall has been covered in posters commemorating the lives of Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin, Emmett Till, and other African Americans killed by the police or in other racially charged murders. Other posters bears slogans criticizing the president, or demanding that police departments be defunded.
“It’s like the whole nation is crying, and this whole fence is crying,” Kai Gamanya, who contributed a painting of a clenched fist, told NPR. “And if you were to back up and see it from beginning to end, it’s nothing but posters from all the way down.”
The protest art serves as beautiful makeshift tribute to victims of racial violence and police brutality, and a powerful rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement.
The fence outside the White House converted to a crowd sourced memorial
Apple has updated the satellite imagery in its maps app to include Washington DC’s new Black Lives Matter mural. The mural takes over two blocks of 16th Street near the White House, since renamed Black Lives Matter Plaza by DC mayor Muriel Bowser.
Thomas Ricker of THE VERGE reports (June 8 2020) that:
Notably, Apple appears to have patched its existing satellite imagery to show the new mural, leaving the surrounding area as it was, as noted by app sleuth Jane Manchun Wong. That suggests a fast-track update outside of normal refresh cycles. Google Maps shows the renamed plaza but not the new mural in its satellite imagery.
The mural was revealed on Friday as a message of support and solidarity with Americans protesting police brutality after George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis.
It’s also a highly defiant gesture by Mayor Bowser towards President Trump who has sparred with the mayor over how best to respond to protestors.
The mural ends at St. John’s Episcopal Church, where Trump staged a photo op holding a bible, immediately after officers forcefully cleared peaceful demonstrators, including the priests of St. John’s, using tear gas and riot shields.
The mural was described as;
"a powerful work of art,"
by US Representative John Lewis. The 80-year-old civil rights icon said he was so moved that he “wanted to see it in person,” reports CNN, despite his Stage 4 cancer.
Two kinds of "public" art . . .
. . . formal & informal!
The Black Lives Matter Mural, that maps the territory of Black Lives Matter Plaza, is a part of the spontaneous response to regressive and authoritarian power, and literally painting Trump into a corner, the White House.
Q. Why now?
A. It has been a long time coming! Ask John Lewis!
At 8pm (Eastern Time), June 11, 1963, John Lewis, among many United States citizens, listened to a speech broadcast on national radio and television, given by John F. Kennedy from the Oval Office, in this very same White House currently occupied by Donald Trump. This speech is commonly known as the civil rights address, and also known, more specifically, as the Report to the American People on Civil Rights.
John F Kennedy's Civil Rights Address
John Lewis was 23 years old, and as a Civil Rights activist, was one of the founding members of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) in 1960, and later in 1963, when Chuck McDew stepped down as chairman, Lewis was quickly elected to take over. Lewis's experience at that point was already widely respected. His courage and his tenacious adherence to the philosophy of reconciliation and nonviolence enabled him emerge as a leader. He was already a veteran activist at this a young age, having been arrested 24 times in the nonviolent struggle for equal justice by this time.
Lewis's recalled his reaction to Kennedy's broadcast in 2013, and it is quoted in the Wikipedia article on Kennedy's Civil Rights Address:
I think the speech that President Kennedy made was forceful. He was the first president to say that the question of civil rights was a moral issue. He reminded us what it was like to be black or white in the American South, in that speech. I listened to every word of that speech.Martin Luther King Jr. watched the address with Walter E. Fauntroy in Atlanta. When it was over, he jumped up and declared:
"Walter, can you believe that white man not only stepped up to the plate, he hit it over the fence!"He then sent a telegram to the White House:
"I have just listened to your speech to the nation. It was one of the most eloquent[,] profound, and unequivocal pleas for justice and freedom of all men ever made by any President. You spoke passionately for moral issues involved in the integration struggle."King had been working with other black civil rights leaders to organize a "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom" in August. They decided to reorient the focus of the demonstration to put pressure on Congress—and not Kennedy's administration—to take action.
Q. Naivete? or the liberal establishment in denial? . . .
Just weeks before this broadcast Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy had invited novelist James Baldwin to meet in a Kennedy apartment in New York City. Baldwin brought along with him his brother David Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, singer and activist, Edwin C. Berry, director of the Chicago Urban League, Kenneth Clark, psychologist, activist, and founder of Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, June Shagaloff, Education Director of the NAACP (attending in an "unofficial capacity"), Lorraine Hansberry, playwright best known for A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Lena Horne, musician, actor and activist, Clarence Benjamin Jones, advisor to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and civil rights lawyer, Jerome Smith, Freedom Rider associated with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and Rip Torn, a young white actor. This large and diverse group of cultural leaders, were to meet
The meeting became antagonistic and the group reached no consensus. The black delegation generally felt that Kennedy did not understand the full extent of racism in the United States.
Jerome Smith was a young black civil rights worker who had been beaten and jailed in Mississippi. Edwin Berry brought him along, and his story was not known by Robert Kennedy or most of those in attendance. As the meeting got underway and Robert Kennedy began to recount how the Justice Department had been supporting the civil rights movement, Jerome Smith suddenly began to weep "as if he'd just suffered some traumatic flashback" and said: "I've seen you guys [referring to the Justice Department] stand around and do nothing more than take notes while we're being beaten." The mood quickly became tense.
Baldwin later said:
Jerome Smith set the tone of the meeting because he stammers when he's upset and he stammered when he talked to Bobby and said that he was nauseated by the necessity of being in that room. I knew what he meant. It was not personal at all. ... Bobby took it personally. Bobby took it personally and turned away from him. That was a mistake because he turned toward us. We were the reasonable, responsible, mature representatives of the Black community.
Lorraine Hansberry said, "You've got a great many very, very accomplished people in this room, Mr. Attorney General. But the only man who should be listened to is that man over there."
Kennedy and Smith began to argue. Kennedy was particularly shocked when Smith said he would "never never never" join the military to fight against Cuba for the USA. The assembled group felt, generally, that Kennedy did not understand the depth of the problem at hand.
In the 2017 documentary about Hansberry - Sighted Eyes / Feeling Heart - which aired on the PBS series American Masters in 2018 Harry Belafonte recalled at this point Smith "bared his soul and all his pain and then said very aggressively 'Let me tell you something, in the midst of our oppression you expect to find us giddily going off to fight a war (i.e., Vietnam) that's your war, that's unjust, unfair, and so dishonorable it should shame you. I wouldn't pick up a gun to fight for this country. I'd die first.'"
Author Lorraine Hansberry told Kennedy: "Look, if you can't understand what this young man is saying, then we are without any hope at all because you and your brother are representatives of the best that a White America can offer; and if you are insensitive to this, then there's no alternative except our going in the streets ... and chaos". According to historian Arthur Schlesinger, "she talked wildly about giving guns to Negroes in the street so they could start killing white people." Jerome Smith told Kennedy: "I'm close to the moment where I'm ready to take up a gun."
Kennedy said that his family, immigrants from Ireland, suffered discrimination upon arriving in America but were able to overcome their hardships to achieve political success, and that the U.S. might have a black president in 40 years. David Baldwin observed that his family had been in the country far longer than Kennedy's, yet had barely been permitted to climb out of poverty. Kennedy later said: "They seemed possessed. They reacted as a unit. It was impossible to make contact with any of them."
The meeting ended after two and a half or three hours, when Hansberry walked out and most of the others followed.
Though billed as off-the-record, details of the meeting were recounted a few weeks later in The New York Times in an article by James Reston about the Kennedy administration's approach to race relations. Reston's summary provides only Robert Kennedy's perspective on the meeting, offering his appraisal that the problem was one of both "militant Negro and white leaders" and stating that the attorney general "apparently has little faith in the quieter moderate leaders of both races."
As Clarence Jones served as the attorney representing Martin Luther King, Jr. at the meeting, he strongly disputed Reston's account of the meeting and issued a detailed, four-page letter to the editor of the New York Times, with copy to Robert Kennedy, providing his alternative assessment of the meeting.
Directly challenging the perception given in Reston's coverage of the meeting, that "a lawyer for Dr. King had remained silent throughout the meeting (the implication being as a 'moderate' such a lawyer was intimidated from speaking)," Jones summarized four areas of discussion in which he had actively engaged with the Attorney General during the meeting.
Specifically, Jones notes that he had requested that the President personally accompany University of Alabama students as a way to help assure successful integration. He directed the Attorney General's attention to the appointment of certain judges by his administration who, in Jones' opinion, "had openly and avowedly, prior to their appointment, indicated their flagrant segregationist views." He raised the idea of the President making a series of televised speeches addressing the elimination of segregation and discrimination. Finally, he participated in the discussion of the role and effectiveness of some white Southern FBI agents in civil rights cases.
Despite feeling emotional and overwhelmed in the aftermath of the meeting, Baldwin and Clark arrived, half an hour late, to a television studio, where Clark interviewed Baldwin on tape.
"We were a little shocked at the extent of his naivete," Baldwin was quoted as saying. "We told him that though the Kennedy administration has done some things the Eisenhower administration never did, its actions have yet to affect the masses of Negro people."
After the meeting, Robert Kennedy ordered FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to increase surveillance of Baldwin and tap the home phone of Jones. A memo issued four days after the meeting asked the FBI to produce information, "particularly of a derogatory nature." A subsequent report labeled Baldwin both a "pervert" and a "communist." Actor Rip Torn discovered that he also had been placed under surveillance after the meeting. Baldwin also says he suffered retaliation from the State Department, including interference with his passport.
Harry Belafonte recalled Martin Luther King Jr. calling him the following day wanting to know the details of the meeting. When Belafonte described the "disaster," and Jerome Smith's "fighting words," King said "Maybe it's just what Bobby needed to hear."
Jones recalled Martin Luther King Jr. saying shortly after the dust-up, "Looks like the Attorney General of the United States regards you as an uppity Negro. But that's all right. We still love you. You're our uppity Negro."
To his biographer, Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy said ("his voice filled with despair"):
They don't know what the laws are—they don't know what the facts are—they don't know what we've been doing or what we're trying to do. You can't talk to them the way you can talk to Martin Luther King or Roy Wilkins. They didn't want to talk that way. It was all emotion, hysteria—they stood up and orated—they cursed—some of them wept and left the room.Schlesinger and others nevertheless describe the moment as a long-term turning point in RFK's attitude towards the Black liberation struggle. Less than one month later, President Kennedy gave his landmark Civil Rights Address. Kennedy was the only White House adviser to actively encourage his brother to give the speech, in which the president publicly proposed legislation that would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Revisiting the issue of military service, Robert Kennedy later asked the Senate Judiciary Committee: "How long can we say to a Negro in Jackson, 'When war comes you will be an American citizen, but in the meantime you're a citizen of Mississippi—and we can't help you'?"
Ultimately the meeting demonstrated the urgency of the racial situation and was a positive turning point in Kennedy's attitude towards the Civil Rights Movement. This meeting also reveals how significant is the distance between those who experience the psychological, physical and cultural violence that racism imposes, and those in power, however progressive their politics.
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom . . .
. . . the March on Washington, or The Great March on Washington, was held in Washington, D.C. a couple of months later, on Wednesday, August 28, 1963. The purpose of the march was to advocate for the civil and economic rights of African Americans. At the march, Martin Luther King Jr., standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech in which he called for an end to racism.
The march is credited with helping to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and preceded the Selma Voting Rights Movement which led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
John Lewis of SNCC was the youngest speaker at the event. His speech—which a number of SNCC activists had helped write—took the Administration to task for how little it had done to protect southern blacks and civil rights workers under attack in the Deep South. Deleted from his original speech at the insistence of more conservative and pro-Kennedy leaders were phrases such as:
In good conscience, we cannot support wholeheartedly the administration's civil rights bill, for it is too little and too late . . .I want to know, which side is the federal government on? . . .The revolution is a serious one. Mr. Kennedy is trying to take the revolution out of the streets and put it into the courts. Listen, Mr. Kennedy. Listen, Mr. Congressman. Listen, fellow citizens. The black masses are on the march for jobs and freedom, and we must say to the politicians that there won't be a "cooling-off" period.. . . We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own scorched earth policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground—nonviolently ...Lewis' speech was distributed to fellow organizers the evening before the march, garnering resistance from Reuther, O'Boyle, and others who thought it was too divisive and militant. O'Boyle objected most strenuously to a part of the speech that called for immediate action and disavowed "patience." The government and moderate organizers could not countenance Lewis' explicit opposition to Kennedy's civil rights bill. That night, O'Boyle and other members of the Catholic delegation began preparing a statement announcing their withdrawal from the March. Reuther convinced them to wait and called Rustin; Rustin informed Lewis at 2 A.M. on the day of the march that his speech was unacceptable to key coalition members. Rustin also reportedly contacted Tom Kahn, mistakenly believing that Kahn had edited the speech and inserted the line about Sherman's March to the Sea. Rustin asked, "How could you do this? Do you know what Sherman did?" But Lewis did not want to change the speech. Other members of SNCC, including Stokely Carmichael, were also adamant that the speech not be censored.The dispute continued until minutes before talks were scheduled to begin. Under threat of public denouncement by the religious leaders, and under pressure from the rest of his coalition, Lewis agreed to omit the 'inflammatory' passages. Many activists from SNCC, CORE, and even SCLC were angry at what they considered censorship of his speech. In the end, Lewis added a qualified endorsement of Kennedy's civil rights legislation, saying: "It is true that we support the administration's Civil Rights Bill. We support it with great reservation, however." Even after toning down his speech, Lewis called for activists to "get in and stay in the streets of every city, every village and hamlet of this nation until true freedom comes".
John Lewis' speech at the March on Washington and recalled in 2017
The Wikipedia article has a section headed Excluded speakers:
Author James Baldwin was prevented from speaking at the March on the grounds that his comments would be too inflammatory. Baldwin later commented on the irony of the "terrifying and profound" requests that he prevent the March from happening:
In my view, by that time, there was, on the one hand, nothing to prevent—the March had already been co-opted—and, on the other, no way of stopping the people from descending on Washington. What struck me most horribly was that virtually no one in power (including some blacks or Negroes who were somewhere next door to power) was able, even remotely, to accept the depth, the dimension, of the passion and the faith of the people.Despite the protests of organizer Anna Arnold Hedgeman, no women gave a speech at the March. Male organizers attributed this omission to the "difficulty of finding a single woman to speak without causing serious problems vis-à-vis other women and women's groups". Hedgeman read a statement at an August 16 meeting, charging:
In light of the role of Negro women in the struggle for freedom and especially in light of the extra burden they have carried because of the castration of our Negro men in this culture, it is incredible that no woman should appear as a speaker at the historic March on Washington Meeting at the Lincoln Memorial. . .The assembled group agreed that Myrlie Evers, the new widow of Medgar Evers, could speak during the "Tribute to Women". However, Evers was unavailable, having missed her flight, and Daisy Bates spoke briefly (less than 200 words) in place of her. Earlier, Josephine Baker had addressed the crowd before the official program began. Although Gloria Richardson was on the program and had been asked to give a two-minute speech, when she arrived at the stage her chair with her name on it had been removed, and the event marshal took her microphone away after she said "hello". Richardson, along with Rosa Parks and Lena Horne, was escorted away from the podium before Martin Luther King Jr. spoke.
Early plans for the March would have included an "Unemployed Worker" as one of the speakers. This position was eliminated, furthering criticism of the March's middle-class bias.
They passed a law in '64 . . .
The symbolism of the March has been contested since before it even took place. In the years following the March, movement radicals increasingly subscribed to Malcolm X's narrative of the March as a co-opting by the white establishment. Liberals and conservatives tended to embrace the March, but focused mostly on King's "I Have a Dream" speech and the legislative successes of 1964 and 1965.
The mass media identified King's speech as a highlight of the event and focused on this oration to the exclusion of other aspects. For several decades, King took center stage in narratives about the March. More recently, historians and commentators have acknowledged the role played by Bayard Rustin in organizing the event.
Soon after the speakers ended their meetings with Congress to go join the March, both houses passed legislation to create a dispute arbitration board for striking railroad workers.
The March is credited with propelling the U.S. government into action on civil rights, creating political momentum for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The cooperation of a Democratic administration with the issue of civil rights marked a pivotal moment in voter alignment within the U.S. The Democratic Party gave up the Solid South—its undivided support since Reconstruction among the segregated Southern states—and went on to capture a high proportion of votes from blacks from the Republicans.
Q. Has anything changed since '64
Two decades later in the late 80's Tracy Chapman was Talkin' 'bout a Revolution because nothing had changed. In 1986 Bruce Hornsby wrote the song The Way It Is, and it's well worth quoting these lines:
. . . hey little boy you can't go where the others go 'cause you don't look like they do . . .
. . . hey old man how can you stand to think that way. Did you really think about it before you made the rules?
He said, "son, that's just the way it is. Some things will never change. That's just the way it is"
Ah, but don't you believe them
. . . well, they passed a law in '64 to give those who ain't got a little more, but it only goes so far. Because the law don't change another's mind when all it sees at the hiring time is the line on the color bar . . .
Talkin' about the way it is
Changes
This video Talkin' about the way it is concludes with "Changes", a song by Tupac Shakur. Released over a decade on from Tracy Chapman's - Talkin' 'bout a Revolution, this song by Tupac Shakur, featuring Talent, was released in 1998. This song, along with other influential tracks, was released in the years following Tupac's death as a result of a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas on September 7, 1996, by an unknown assailant. He died six days later. The gunman was never captured. The song makes references to the war on drugs, the treatment of black people by the police, racism (explicitly the reconciliation between the black and white people in America), the perpetuation of poverty and its accompanying vicious-cycle value system in urban African American culture, and the difficulties of life in the ghetto:
Come on come onThe song was originally recorded during his tenure at Interscope Records in 1992 and was produced by Big D The Impossible (Deon Evans). "Changes" was later remixed.
I see no changes wake up in the morning and I ask myself
Is life worth living should I blast myself?
I'm tired of bein' poor and even worse I'm black
My stomach hurts so I'm lookin' for a purse to snatch
Cops give a damn about a negro
Pull the trigger kill a nigga he's a hero
Give the crack to the kids who the hell cares
One less hungry mouth on the welfare
First ship 'em dope and let 'em deal the brothers
Give 'em guns step back watch 'em kill each other
"It's time to fight back, " that's what Huey said
Two shots in the dark now Huey's dead
I got love for my brother but we can never go nowhere
Unless we share with each other
We gotta start makin' changes
Learn to see me as a brother instead of two distant strangers
And that's how it's supposed to be
How can the Devil take a brother if he's close to me?
I'd love to go back to when we played as kids
But things changed, and that's the way it is
That's just the way it is
Things will never be the same
That's just the way it is
Aww yeah
That's just the way it is
Things will never be the same
That's just the way it is
Aww yeah
I see no changes all I see is racist faces
Misplaced hate makes disgrace to races
We under I wonder what it takes to make this
One better place, let's erase the wasted
Take the evil out the people they'll be acting right
'Cause both black and white is smokin' crack tonight
And only time we chill is when we kill each other
It takes skill to be real, time to heal each other
And although it seems heaven sent
We ain't ready, to see a black President, uh
It ain't a secret don't conceal the fact
The penitentiary's packed, and it's filled with blacks
But some things will never change
Try to show another way but you stayin' in the dope game
Now tell me what's a mother to do
Bein' real don't appeal to the brother in you
You gotta operate the easy way
(I made a G today) But you made it in a sleazy way
Sellin' crack to the kid (I gotta get paid
Well hey, well that's the way it is
That's just the way it is
Things will never be the same
That's just the way it is
Aww yeah
That's just the way it is
Things will never be the same
That's just the way it is
Aww yeah
We gotta make a change
It's time for us as a people to start makin' some changes
Let's change the way we eat, let's change the way we live
And let's change the way we treat each other
You see the old way wasn't working so it's on us to do
What we gotta do, to survive
And still I see no changes can't a brother get a little peace?
It's war on the streets and the war in the Middle East
Instead of war on poverty they got a war on drugs
So the police can bother me
And I ain't never did a crime I ain't have to do
But now I'm back with the blacks givin' it back to you
Don't let 'em jack you up, back you up
Crack you up and pimp smack you up
You gotta learn to hold ya own
They get jealous when they see ya with ya mobile phone
But tell the cops they can't touch this
I don't trust this when they try to rush I bust this
That's the sound of my tool you say it ain't cool
My mama didn't raise no fool
And as long as I stay black I gotta stay strapped
And I never get to lay back
'Cause I always got to worry 'bout the pay backs
Some buck that I roughed up way back
Comin' back after all these years
Rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat that's the way it is, uh
That's just the way it is
Things will never be the same
That's just the way it is
Aww yeah
That's just the way it is
Things will never be the same
That's just the way it is
Aww yeah
Some things will never change
The song re-uses lines from "I Wonder If Heaven Got a Ghetto" which was recorded during the same year, and samples the 1986 hit "The Way It Is" by Bruce Hornsby and the Range. The chorus of "The Way It Is" was slightly reworded and sung by Talent and was used for this song.At times Tupac re-used lines from other unreleased songs because he planned to make an updated version at a later date. However, since his death many of the unreleased and unmastered songs have been officially released.
The remixed version released in 1998 has notably different percussion, and a few minor changes to the musical elements. The chorus on the original track features a notable difference in a vocal sample of the line, "It's like that and that's the way it is", from Run DMCs "It's Like That", which is also played twice during the intro. The second chorus adds the Ice Cube line, "Dope dealers, you're as bad as the police," from his song, "Us". The third chorus omits the Ice Cube sample and adds B-boy-style chant with an unknown person repeating, "Clap your hands and feel it, clap you hands and feel it!" until the song ends.
Tupac says:
Some things will never change
But then Bruce Hornsby sings
. . . don't you believe them!
This phrase functions as a coda on the Re:LODE Cargo of Questions Information Wraps, as a reminder that what we are told ain't necessarily so.
The LODE, Re:LODE and Re:LODE Radio projects span the time of the origins of Tupac's song, and nothing has changed! YET!
Q. Why?
For Re:LODE Radio an answer lies in understanding questions discussed in the Re:LODE Information Wrap relating to the creation of LODE Cargo in Puri, India, and in particular this cluster of questions:
Modernity? . . .
And, in the broad scope of the article, another set of connected issues framed by the question:
Is India Still the World's Largest Democracy?
The article points to a number of factors regarding the world's two largest democracies, India and the United States:
Q. Are the two largest democracies in the world "low intensity democracies"?
In Samir Amin's book Eurocentrism he comments on the second largest democracy:
The combination specific to the historical formation of American society, a dominant biblical religious ideology and the absence of a workers' party, ultimately produced a still unparalleled situation, in which a de facto single party, the party of capital, hold the reigns. Today, American democracy is the advanced model of what I call low intensity democracy. It operates on the basis of a total separation between the management of political life, based on the practice of electoral democracy, and that of economic life, ruled by the laws of capital accumulation. What is more, this separation is not subject to radical questioning, but is rather part of what is called the general consensus. But this separation destroys all the creative potential of political democracy. It castrates representative institutions, making them impotent when facing the market, whose dictates are accepted without question.
(pages 48-49)
Is it the case that, in some respects, India has also separated political life from economic life, and the political life is increasingly dominated by a form of communitarianism, that, under the umbrella of an Indian version of secularism, would make the formation of a workers' party an uphill struggle?
As regards Socialism in India, there have been, and are, political parties of the left in India, going back to the early years of the twentieth century, both socialist and communist, but the fractures and fractions of Indian society, with its rich cultural diversity, have been a stumbling block to the formation of a worker's party, and a working class identity.
Q. Why are there no "workers' parties" in the two largest democracies in the world, India and the USA?
This Re:LODE question echoes one of the questions in John Lewis' speech to the demonstrators at the March on Washington:
Where is our party?
The American ideology that Samir Amin identifies in Eurocentrism, and that for him is the foundation of the liberal virus that is leading to the Americanization of the world, is, according to Amin, strengthened by the successive waves of immigration that have taken place in the USA over the last two centuries. He says:
The immigrants were certainly not responsible for the misery and oppression that caused their departure. On the contrary, they were the victims of it. But circumstances led them to abandon the collective struggle to change the common conditions of their classes or groups in their own country, in favour of adhering to the ideology of individual success in the host country. This adherence was encouraged by the American system, which suited it perfectly. it delayed the development of class consciousness, which, scarcely had it started to develop, had to face a new wave of immigrants that prevented its crystallization. But simultaneously, immigration encouraged the communitarianization of American society, because individual success does not exclude strong integration into a community of origin (the Irish, the Italians, and others), without which individual isolation could become unbearable. Yet, here again the strengthening of this dimension of identity, which the American system uses and encourages, is done at the expense of class consciousness and the education of the citizen. While in Paris the people got ready to assault the heavens (here I refer to the 1871 Commune), in the United States gangs formed by successive generations of poor immigrants killed each other, manipulated in a perfectly cynical way by the ruling classes.
(pages 47-48)
The Gangs of New York . . .
Q. Is communitarianism a stumbling block?
Samir Amin continues:
In the United States, there is no workers' party and there never has been. The communitarian ideologies were not and are not a substitute for a working-class socialist ideology, even the most radical of them in the Black community. By definition, communitarianism is part and parcel of the context of widespread racism, which it fights on its own ground, but nothing more. (page 48)
Socialism in the United States began with utopian communities in the early 19th century such as the Shakers, the activist visionary Josiah Warren and intentional communities inspired by Charles Fourier. Labor activists—usually British, German, or Jewish immigrants—founded the Socialist Labor Party in 1877.
The Socialist Party of America was established in 1901. By that time, anarchism also established itself around the country while socialists of different tendencies were involved in early American labor organizations and struggles which reached a high point in the Haymarket affair in Chicago which started International Workers' Day as the main workers holiday around the world (except in the United States, which celebrates Labor Day on the first Monday of September) and making the 8-hour day a worldwide objective by workers organizations and socialist parties worldwide.
Under Socialist Party of America presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, socialist opposition to World War I led to the governmental repression collectively known as the First Red Scare. The Socialist Party declined in the 1920s, but nonetheless often ran Norman Thomas for President. In the 1930s, the Communist Party USA took importance in labor and racial struggles while it suffered a split which converged in the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party.
In the 1950s, socialism was affected by McCarthyism and in the 1960s it was revived by the general radicalization brought by the New Left and other social struggles and revolts. In the 1960s, Michael Harrington and other socialists were called to assist the Kennedy administration and then the Johnson administration's War on Poverty and Great Society while socialists also played important roles in the Civil Rights Movement. Socialism in the United States has been composed of many tendencies, often in important disagreements with each other; it has included utopian socialists, social democrats, democratic socialists, communists, Trotskyists and anarchists.
The socialist movement in the United States has historically been relatively weak.
Unlike socialist parties in Europe, Canada and Oceania, a major social democratic party never materialized in the United States and the socialist movement remains marginal,
"almost unique in its powerlessness among the Western democracies".David Oshinsky (24 July 1988). "It Wasn't Easy Being a Leftist". The New York Times.
Q. Or, is capitalism the stumbling block?
When Bob Dylan performed the song Only a Pawn in Their Game at the March on Washington, the subject of the song did not go without comment. For Bob Dylan to be singing about the man who assassinated Medgar Evers on the same evening that Kennedy made his Civil Rights Address, as being only a pawn in their game, was not excusing the murderer, but pointing to those who are truly responsible, the politicians maintaining a status quo conducive to the American model of capitalism.
Only A Pawn In Their Game
A South politician preaches to the poor white man
"You got more than the blacks, don't complain
You're better than them, you been born with white skin," they explain
And the Negro's name
Is used, it is plain
For the politician's gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game
The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid
And the marshals and cops get the same
But the poor white man's used in the hands of them all like a tool
He's taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
'Bout the shape that he's in
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game
From the poverty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracks
And the hoofbeats pound in his brain
And he's taught how to walk in a pack
Shoot in the back
With his fist in a clinch
To hang and to lynch
To hide 'neath the hood
To kill with no pain
Like a dog on a chain
He ain't got no name
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game
A civil war to end slavery . . .
The Emancipation Proclamation, or Proclamation 95, was a presidential proclamation and executive order issued by United States President Abraham Lincoln on September 22, 1862, during the Civil War.
It changed the legal status under federal law of more than 3.5 million enslaved African Americans in the secessionist Confederate states from slave to free. As soon as a slave escaped the control of the Confederate government, either by running away across Union lines or through the advance of federal troops, the slave was permanently free. Ultimately, the Union victory brought the proclamation into effect in all of the former Confederacy. The remaining slaves, those in the areas not in revolt, were freed by state action during the war, or by the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in December 1865.
With Congress' approval, in 1862 Lincoln ended slavery in the District of Columbia with partial compensation; this long-standing issue was now addressable since the Senators of the states in rebellion, who had blocked such a measure so as not to set a precedent, left Congress in 1861. As for the states, Lincoln believed that he had no authority as President to end slavery, which was a state matter. However, Lincoln was not only President, he was Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. As such, he could take military measures. His order carefully limited the Proclamation to those areas in insurrection, where civil government was not respected and his military authority, therefore, applied. As a war measure, it hurt the South economically by removing its labour force, helped the Union militarily by making Union soldiers out of freed slaves, and took an implicit statement toward black citizenship by accepting blacks as soldiers and trusting them with arms. Up until this point, there had been no blacks in combat positions in the Army.
The Proclamation also ended any chances of the Confederate government gaining recognition from England or France, which were anti-slavery and whose support for the Union it increased. It marked a major shift in the stated goals of the war, admitting what the South had claimed all along: the Union was fighting the war to end slavery. Psychologically, it was the turning point of the war.
The Emancipation Proclamation broadened the goals of the Civil War. While slavery had been a major issue that led to the war, Lincoln's only stated goal at the start of the war was to maintain the Union.
. . . or a civil war to define American capitalism through the expansion of frontiers?
One of the causes of the war was the conflicting and polarised positions of the so-called slave states and free states in what had been a more or less united set of states, and the westward expansion of United States territory across North America. Between 1803 and 1854, the United States achieved a vast expansion of territory through purchase, negotiation, and conquest and near annihalation of the Indigenous Peoples of North America.
At first, the new states carved out of these territories entering the union were apportioned equally between slave and free states. Pro- and anti-slavery forces collided over the territories west of the Mississippi.
With the conquest of northern Mexico west to California in 1848, slaveholding interests looked forward to expanding into these lands and perhaps Cuba and Central America as well. Northern "free soil" interests vigorously sought to curtail any further expansion of slave territory.
The Compromise of 1850 over California balanced a free-soil state with stronger fugitive slave laws for a political settlement after four years of strife in the 1840s. But the states admitted following California were all free: Minnesota (1858), Oregon (1859), and Kansas (1861). In the Southern states the question of the territorial expansion of slavery westward again became explosive. Both the South and the North drew the same conclusion:
"The power to decide the question of slavery for the territories was the power to determine the future of slavery itself."
. . . and the future of American capitalism coupled with the maintenance of a necessarily low intensity democracy! Despite the abolition of slavery and the post-civil war so-called Reconstruction period.
Racism and the Jim Crow laws . . .
It was the so-called Jim Crow laws that were at the heart of the civil rights grievances of John Lewis's speech at the March on Washington. This white supremacist undermining of democratic, civil and human rights is also at the heart of Bob Dylan's performance of Only a Pawn in Their Game. Southern state Democratic Party politicians, using violence, chicanery, intimidation and electoral fraud to maintain a racist status quo, while telling the poor white man:
"You got more than the blacks, don't complain. You're better than them, you been born with white skin," they explain. And the Negro's name is used, it is plain, for the politician's gain.
These Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States, 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 blacks during the so-called Reconstruction period. The Jim Crow laws were enforced until 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 of Plessy vs. Ferguson, in which the U.S. Supreme Court laid out its "separate but equal" legal doctrine for facilities for African Americans. Moreover, public education had essentially been segregated since its establishment in most of the South after the Civil War in 1861–65.
The legal principle of "separate but equal" racial segregation was extended to public facilities and transportation, including the coaches of interstate trains and buses. Facilities for African Americans were consistently inferior and underfunded compared to facilities for white Americans; sometimes, there were no facilities for the black community. As a body of law, Jim Crow institutionalized economic, educational, and social disadvantages for African Americans living in the South.
Give us the ballot . . .
Why now? And why has it taken so long? Over six decades? Some years before the March to Washington, in 1957 another demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial took place that was called the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, an early event in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. It was a significant occasion for Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. as his speech, known as the Give Us the Ballot speech, was the first time he was to address the nation.
The demonstration was planned to mark the third anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education (1954), a landmark Supreme Court decision ruling that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. The event organizers urged the government to implement that decision, as the process of desegregation was being obstructed in much of the South at local and state levels.
The march was organized by A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Ella Baker. It was supported by the NAACP and the recently founded Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (D-NY) had asked the planners to avoid embarrassing the Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower administration, and so they organized the event as a prayer commemoration.
A call for the demonstration was issued on April 5, 1957, by Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr., and Roy Wilkins. According to King, Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers, sent letters to all of his local unions, requesting members to attend the march and provide financial support.
Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom - Give Us the Ballot
This extraordinary and impressive speech sets out the political realities, injustices, and the impediments thrown in the way of change by reactionary forces bolstered by racism. In retrospect it is clear that the civil rights legislation that came into law in 1964 only went so far. And the deeper issues, incapable of being transformed through legislation, are rooted in a class and race based society and an economic system based on exploitation for profit, resulting in the spectacle of grotesque social inequalities. The political landscapes of the two largest democracies in the world, India and the US, are shaped by communitarianism, where racism and religion play their part in populist and reactionary movements. Meanwhile the economic injustices and exploitation of the most disadvantaged in society remain.
The Unfinished March
In 2013, the Economic Policy Institute launched a series of reports around the theme of "The Unfinished March". These reports analyze the goals of the original march and assess how much progress has been made. They echo the message of Randolph and Rustin that civil rights cannot transform people's quality of life unless accompanied by economic justice. They contend that many of the March's primary goals—including housing, integrated education, and widespread employment at living wages—have not been accomplished. They further argued that although legal advances were made, black people still live in concentrated areas of poverty, where they receive inferior education and suffer from widespread unemployment.
Economic Policy Institute
"All of us at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) are angered and deeply saddened by the police murder of George Floyd, and so many other senseless deaths in the Black community—incidents rooted in a long history of anti-Blackness in our nation.
This is a horrible moment for our nation—and a moment that challenges each of us to commit to lasting change.
The racism that led to these tragic and unnecessary deaths has also created tragic economic disparities between Black and white people in the United States, a reality that the pandemic has magnified and laid bare.
EPI’s staff knows this all too well. For more than 30 years, EPI researchers have used the tools of economic analysis and empirical research to expose the truth about the glaring and growing inequality in the United States impacting working families—disparities that are disproportionately experienced by Black people.
Exposing and understanding the root causes of the systemic racism, inequities, and injustice in the U.S. economy is a necessary precondition for developing, advocating for, and ultimately implementing policy solutions adequate to the scale and scope of the problem.
We have all been shaken by recent events, which are bound by a common thread of bigotry woven throughout U.S. history. We all know that derailing racism is the only way to ensure that all Black people are able to live the supposed American dream, not the American nightmare we are witnessing now."
In the print edition of the Guardian Thursday 4 June 2020 this Opinion piece by Afua Hirsch was published under the headline:
Racism killed George Floyd. It was built in Britain
Afua Hirsch writes under the subheading:
This is not just ‘horrible stuff that happens in America’. Black people know we need to dismantle the same system here
Pay attention to African Americans.
The headlines are now describing the US as a nation in crisis. As the protests against the killing of African American George Floyd by a white police officer enter their second week – curfews in more than 40 cities, the deployment of the national guard in 15 states – there is a far deeper, more important message. Because the US is not, if we are honest, “in crisis”. That suggests something broken, unable to function as planned. What black people are experiencing the world over is a system that finds their bodies expendable, by design.
African Americans told us this when they lost Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Chinedu Okobi, Michael Brown, Aiyana Jones, Tamir Rice, Jordan Davis, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and so many more.
African Americans told us this after 9/11, when headlines described the US as being in a “state of terror”. “Living in a state of terror was new to many white people in America,” said the late, great Maya Angelou, “but black people have been living in a state of terror in this country for more than 400 years.”
African Americans told us this during the civil rights movement, the last time the US knew protests on this scale. And if the world paid attention to black people, then it would know that this state of terror extends far beyond the US. The Ghanaian president, Nana Akufo-Addo, captured the trauma of so many Africans around the world when he said that black people everywhere were “shocked and distraught”.
In Australia, protesters relived the death of David Dungay, a 26-year-old Indigenous Australian man who died while being restrained by five guards in 2015. He also cried the haunting phrase, “I can’t breathe.” Meanwhile, just this week, a police commissioner in Sydney said that an officer filmed casually attacking an Indigenous teenager with brutal violence had “had a bad day.”
In the UK, black people and our allies are taking to the streets as I write to wake British people up out of their fantasy that this crisis of race is a problem that is both uniquely American, and solvable by people returning to the status quo.
The foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, said on behalf of Britain: “We want to see de-escalation of all of those tensions.” If he had bothered to listen to black British people, he might have discovered that many of us do not want de-escalation. We want protest, we want change, and we know it is something for which we must fight. Because many of us have been fighting for this all our lives.
The British government could have had the humility to use this moment to acknowledge Britain’s experiences. It could have discussed how Britain helped invent anti-black racism, how today’s US traces its racist heritage to British colonies in America, and how it was Britain that industrialised black enslavement in the Caribbean, initiated systems of apartheid all over the African continent, using the appropriation of black land, resources and labour to fight both world wars and using it again to reconstruct the peace.
And how, today, black people in Britain are still being dehumanised by the media, disproportionately imprisoned and dying in police custody, and now also dying disproportionately of Covid-19.
What the British government did instead is remarkable. First, it emerged that it may have used George Floyd’s death as an excuse to delay a report into the disparity in ethnic minority deaths from Covid-19. Although the Department of Health officially denies it, there were reports that the Public Health England review was delayed because of concerns in Whitehall about the “close proximity to the current situation in America”.
The government needn’t have worried, because instead of meeting the grief in our communities at so many deaths from Covid-19, its review fails to offer any new insight anyway. It has now emerged that a key section, containing information on the potential role of discrimination, was removed before publication.
The government’s response has been to appoint Kemi Badenoch, the minister for equalities, and a black woman, to “get to the bottom” of the problem. What do we know about Badenoch’s approach to racism in Britain? On “institutional racism” – a phenomenon that affects minorities in Britain – she has been reported as saying that she doesn’t recognise it . On former mayoral candidate Zac Goldsmith’s Islamophobic campaign? She helped run it. On the black community? She doesn’t believe that it really exists.
On American racism? “We don’t have all the horrible stuff that’s happened in America here,” Badenoch said in 2017.
For those of us who see racism for what it is, as a system that kills – both our bodies, and our humanity – this is traumatic. I listened to the health secretary, Matt Hancock, announce – as if it was his new discovery – that “black lives matter”, and offer someone as seemingly uninterested in anti-racism as Badenoch as a solution.
Meanwhile, that “horrible stuff that’s happened in America”?
Our reaction to George Floyd’s death as black British people is our expression of generations of lifelong, profound, unravelling pain. Some of us are speaking about this for the first time, in too many cases that I’m personally aware of, attracting reprimands and sanctions at work.
My own personal protest has been silence. Not silence at those protesting, with whom I am in full solidarity, and to whom I offer my support, my labour, my platform, my time and my resources. But a refusal to participate in the broadcast media, which – when racism becomes, for a few short days, a relevant part of the news cycle – call me in their dozens inviting me to painstakingly explain how systems of race are constructed.
This time I’m watching other black people graciously, brilliantly, appear on these platforms to educate hosts and viewers alike. And I know next time they will be asked to come again and repeat the same wisdom.
We do this work all the time. We have taken what we inherited and had no choice but to make sense of it. We have studied, read, written and understood the destructive power of race. And we are telling you that race is a system that Britain built here.
We are also telling you that as long as you send all children out into the world to be actively educated into racism, taught a white supremacist version of history, literature and art, then you are setting up a future generation to perpetuate the same violence on which that system of power depends.
We are telling you that we need to dismantle, not to de-escalate.
Pay attention.
In August 2017, in The Guardian, Afua Hirsch questioned whether Nelson's Column should remain in place, with the implication it might be removed. She argued that the London monument is a symbol of white supremacy because Horatio Nelson opposed the abolitionist movement.
Not long afterward, the art historian and former museum director Sir Roy Strong said the suggestion the column should be taken down was a "ridiculous" viewpoint, commenting that "Once you start rewriting history on that scale, there won't be a statue or a historic house standing....The past is the past. You can't rewrite history".
The following May, Hirsch said the idea of removing Nelson's Column distracted from her main point that Britain should look more carefully at its past to understand itself better today. In an article introducing her television documentary, The Battle for Britain's Heroes, Hirsch stated that she "wasn't actually waiting in a bulldozer, ready to storm Trafalgar Square, as some people seemed to believe".
Afua Hirsch's prescience back in 2017 on this question about history and memorial is worth appreciating now. The dubious historical nationalist account of Britain's colonial past needs challenging, along with the mythology and constructed fake memory, still peddled by the likes of Piers Morgan and much of the contemporary print media. This is especially relevant in the light of recent events in Bristol over last weekend.
'I was so happy to see it'
Archie Bland reporting for the Guardian from Bristol
(Mon 8 Jun 2020) under the headline and subheading:The fall of Colston's statue: 'It didn’t take long – about four tugs of the ropes'
A figure that had caused such division for so long was felled in minutes, bringing catharsis for some of those present
Archie Bland writes:
For Jagun Akinshegun, the toppling of a 17th-century slave trader’s statue was a moment of catharsis, making it easier to let go of the past. For his daughter Robishia Temple, it was a sign that it could be possible to imagine a more hopeful future.
“It didn’t represent Bristol,” said Temple, who is a learning and development adviser. “Now he’s at the bottom of the river. That says a lot more about who we are.”
When Akinshegun, 59, and Temple, 26, joined thousands of others on the Black Lives Matter protest in their home city on Sunday to express their anger at the killing of George Floyd in the US, they had no inkling of what was in store.
They were close to the statue of Edward Colston – erected by the city in the 19th century to mark his philanthropy, and a longstanding source of dismay to Bristol’s black community because of his undisputed role in the enslavement of around 84,000 people – when something momentous started to happen.
“My first initial thing was to duck, to keep quiet,” said Akinshegun, a building surveyor, in Temple’s back garden the following day. He looked at his daughter. “But then I thought of you, Robishia, having to walk past such a thing. And I thought: no. I’m going to stand up as a black man. I will not run away from this.”
The moments that followed are now subject to intense controversy. The organisers of the main protest have distanced themselves from the toppling of the statue and its unceremonious dumping in Bristol Harbour. Police did not intervene at the time but have since identified 17 suspects. Boris Johnson and Priti Patel condemned the demolition, as did the local council’s Conservative group leader, Mark Weston, who called it “a wanton act”. Bristol’s mayor, Marvin Rees, the son of a Jamaican migrant, said that although the statue had been an “affront” throughout his life, he could not “condone criminal damage”.
But at the time, several of those present told the Guardian, the mood was not vandalistic but righteous. After all, more formal attempts to bring about the figure’s removal had become so bogged down that even an attempt to affix a new plaque to better reflect Colston’s history had been delayed indefinitely.
“Watching it come down was just … release,” said Camerine Fearon, a bank worker. “It was getting rid of something that we’ve needed to get rid of for years. And they can’t put him back up now. That’s it. It’s gone.”
In the end, the bronze figure whose future had caused such bitter recrimination in Bristol for so long was felled in a matter of minutes. “There was some commotion,” said Temple. “People were throwing eggs, and there was a black blanket covering it. And then, suddenly, everyone united and started shouting ‘tear it down’. It didn’t even take long. It was about four tugs of the ropes.”
Briefly, and without planning it, Akinshegun found himself among those pulling. “I was so happy to see it, and so happy to help,” he said. Then he stood back and watched Colston fall.
As Temple wept, her father ran forward in jubilation and leapt up and down next to Colston’s toppled effigy. Soon afterwards he was among those pictured holding a knee on the sculpture’s neck, a bitterly ironic repeat of the brutal hold that ended George Floyd’s life.
On Monday, as the harbourmaster checked that the sunken hunk of metal presented no risk to boats nearby, a small crowd gathered, gazing intently at the space where the statue had been. The base lay skewed on the ground, and passersby took turns to pose for selfies next to it.
LaToyah McAllister-Jones, who had decided to stay away the previous day because of the mayor’s warning about physical distancing, brought a sign chosen by her young son. “SILENCE IS VIOLENCE,” it read. “This has always been a divisive place,” she said. “I wanted my son’s words to be part of how that changed.”
Nearby, Simbarashe Tongogara said he had stayed away on Sunday because he felt it was now incumbent on white people to take the lead in the fight against racism. “Black people have been marching for a long time,” he said. “I’ve been in this city since 1967, and on my first day at school I was called Sambo. That’s the reality for us.”
McAllister-Jones, the executive director of the city’s St Paul’s carnival, said she understood Rees’s refusal to celebrate the statue’s removal, because “he has to govern all of the city”. But she said it was a crucial moment for a city whose black community had been “very present and very strong and very vocal” in the face of persistent prejudice.
“There are inequalities that run through the city like a stick of rock,” she said, pointing to a 2017 Runnymede Trust report which found that Bristol’s ethnic minorities faced severe disadvantages in education and employment. “But there is a real will to move things forward. This is our city as well. Nobody won freedom by being polite.”
On Monday, most white onlookers hung back a little, offering words of support or – more rarely – complaining that the statue’s removal was nothing more than vandalism. “I thought it was disgusting,” said Gillian Shutt. “It’s criminal damage. What happened happened, and you have to accept it. Bristol was built on the slave trade and you shouldn’t go round destroying your heritage.”
To versions of the claim that the statue’s removal was an act of historic erasure, the protesters’ defenders have pointed out that the city has always been free to choose who to celebrate. (One option floated by an online petition is the civil rights campaigner Paul Stephenson, who organised the Bristol bus boycott of 1963.)
Rees said on Monday that Colston’s vexed legacy would be noted instead by placing his statue in a museum, along with some of the banners and signs left behind by those who tore it down. Meanwhile, with calls for similar monuments in Oxford, Cardiff, Derbyshire and London to face a reckoning of their own, the implications of the statue’s removal may spread far beyond Bristol itself.
Akinshegun and Temple recognised that wider impact. But considering the weight of the moment on Monday, they thought of something smaller and more personal: the “dates” the pair hold to talk about politics and the legacy of the past.
“We speak a lot about our history,” said Temple. “About what we can do to make a difference. And as much as all this pain and hurt is a part of our history, it isn’t all of it. We’re starting to have the right conversations now. It feels like the start of something.”
The question of who owns history is relevant in a context of "a state of ignorance", where "ignoring" suits the dominant narratives!
Q. Who owns history?
The consequence of the images are the images of the consequences!
In an Opinion piece for the Guardian's Black Lives Matter movement (Mon 8 Jun 2020) David Olusoga says:The toppling of Edward Colston's statue is not an attack on history. It is history
The slave trader’s figure loomed over Bristol for 125 years. Now a multiracial protest has achieved what past campaigns couldn’t
David Olusoga writes:For people who don’t know Bristol, the real shock when they heard that the statue of a 17th-century slave trader had been torn from its plinth and thrown into the harbour was that 21st-century Bristol still had a statue of a slave trader on public display. For many watching the events unfold on social media, that was the real WTF moment.
Edward Colston, the man in question, was a board member and ultimately the deputy governor of the Royal African Company. In those roles he helped to oversee the transportation into slavery of an estimated 84,000 Africans. Of them, it is believed, around 19,000 died in the stagnant bellies of the company’s slave ships during the infamous Middle Passage from the coast of Africa to the plantations of the new world. The bodies of the dead were cast into the water where they were devoured by the sharks that, over the centuries of the Atlantic slave trade, learned to seek out slave ships and follow the bloody paths of slave routes across the ocean. This is the man who, for 125 years, has been honoured by Bristol. Put literally on a pedestal in the very heart of the city. But tonight Edward Colston sleeps with the fishes.
The historical symmetry of this moment is poetic. A bronze effigy of an infamous and prolific slave trader dragged through the streets of a city built on the wealth of that trade, and then dumped, like the victims of the Middle Passage, into the water. Colston lies at the bottom of a harbour in which the ships of the triangular slave trade once moored, by the dockside on to which their cargoes were unloaded.
Slave ship captains were often permitted to bring one or two enslaved people back to Britain and sell them privately for their own profit. The practice offered successful captains an additional bonus and the Africans enslaved in this manner were called “privilege negroes”. Many were young boys who were sold as exotic servants: fashion accessories. They appear as commodities for sale in advertisements in 18th-century Bristol newspapers, publications that also carried notices offering rewards for the recapture of enslaved people who had absconded from the grand homes of the city’s elite. Metres from where Colston’s statue now rests runs Pero’s Bridge, named after Pero Jones, one of those enslaved people who lived and died in Bristol. A man who may well have taken his first steps on British soil on the docks from which Colston’s statue was hurled.
The crowd who saw to it that Colston fell were of all races, but some were the descendants of the enslaved black and brown Bristolians whose ancestors were chained to the decks of Colston’s ships. Ripped from his pedestal, Colston seemed smaller: diminished in both size and potency. Lying flat, with his studied pensive pose, he looked suddenly preposterous. It was when the statue was in this position that one of the protesters made a grim but powerful gesture. By placing his knee over the bronze throat of Edward Colston, he reminded us of the unlikely catalyst for these remarkable events.
The fact that a man who died 299 years ago is today on the front pages of most of Britain’s newspapers suggests that Bristol has not been brilliant at coming to terms with its history. Despite the valiant and persistent efforts of campaigners, all attempts to have the statue peacefully removed were thwarted by Colston’s legion of defenders. In 2019, attempts to fix a plaque to the pedestal collapsed after Bristol’s Society of Merchant Venturers, the high priests of the Colston cult, insisted on watering down the text, adding qualifications that, it was felt, had the effect of minimising his crimes. Yet what repulsed many about the statue was not that it valorised Colston but that it was silent about his victims, those whose lives were destroyed to build the fortune he lavished upon the city.
The long defence of the figure and Colston’s reputation was overt and shameless, but not unique. In other British cities other men who grew rich through the trafficking of human beings or who defended the “respectable trade” are venerated in bronze and marble. In Edinburgh’s St Andrew Square, on a pedestal 150 feet high, stands Viscount Melville, Henry Dundas, another of history’s guilty men. His great contribution to civilisation was to water down and delay attempts to pass an act abolishing the slave trade. Historians struggle to estimate how many thousands died or were transported into slavery because of his actions. Already social media is ablaze with calls for Dundas to be thrown into the Forth.
Today is the first full day since 1895 on which the effigy of a mass murderer does not cast its shadow over Bristol’s city centre. Those who lament the dawning of this day, and who are appalled by what happened on Sunday, need to ask themselves some difficult questions. Do they honestly believe that Bristol was a better place yesterday because the figure of a slave trader stood at its centre? Are they genuinely unable – even now – to understand why those descended from Colston’s victims have always regarded his statue as an outrage and for decades pleaded for its removal?
If they do not confront such questions they risk becoming lost in the same labyrinth of moral bewilderment in which some of Colston’s defenders became entrapped in 2017. That year Colston Hall, Bristol’s prime concert venue, and one of the many institutions named after the slave trader, announced that it was to change its name. In response, a number of otherwise reasonable decent people announced that they would be boycotting the hall. Think about that for a moment. Rational, educated, 21st-century people earnestly concluded that they were taking a moral stance by refusing to listen to music performed within the walls of a concert hall unless that venue was named after a man who bought, sold and killed human beings.
Now is not the time for those who for so long defended the indefensible to contort themselves into some new, supposedly moral stance, or play the victim. Their strategy of heel-dragging and obfuscation was predicated on one fundamental assumption: that what happened on Sunday would never happen. They were confident that black people and brown people who call Bristol their home would forever tolerate living under the shadow of a man who traded in human flesh, that the power to decide whether Colston stood or fell lay in their hands. They were wrong on every level. Whatever is said over the next few days, this was not an attack on history. This is history. It is one of those rare historic moments whose arrival means things can never go back to how they were.
Q. Is this the beginning of what people are calling "a conversation"?
Such conversations will certainly involve references to Wikipedia, just as all the posts and pages of Re:LODE and Re:LODE Radio do to provide some kind of common and shared understanding. The Racial views of Winston Churchill article includes a quotation that will no doubt appear in many other information contexts:
I do not admit for instance that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race or at any rate a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, 'American continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here'. They had not the right, nor had they the power."
Roberts, Andrew (2018). Churchill: Walking With Destiny. London: Allen Lane. pp. 414–15.
Churchill was also an imperialist as well as a colonialist, along with the majority of those individuals who made up the British ruling class. In the colonial history of India the effective, or more accurately stated, ineffective policy of Winston Churchill's War Cabinet in regard to the Bengal famine of 1943, contributed to the beginning of the end of British colonial rule.
The Bengal famine of 1943 was a famine in the Bengal province of British India during World War II. An estimated 2,100,000 to 3,000,000 lives that apparently did NOT matter, were lost during this man made disaster, out of a population of 60.3 million. They died of starvation, malaria, or other diseases aggravated by malnutrition, population displacement, unsanitary conditions and lack of health care, and imperial policy. Millions were impoverished as the crisis overwhelmed large segments of the economy and catastrophically disrupted the social fabric. Eventually, families disintegrated; men sold their small farms and left home to look for work or to join the British Indian Army, and women and children became homeless migrants, often travelling to Calcutta or other large cities in search of organised relief. Historians usually characterise the famine as anthropogenic (man-made), asserting that wartime colonial policies created and then exacerbated the crisis.
Beginning as early as December 1942, high-ranking government officials and military officers including, John Herbert, the Governor of Bengal; Viceroy Linlithgow; Leo Amery the Secretary of State for India; General Claude Auchinleck, Commander-in-Chief of British forces in India, and Admiral Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Commander of South-East Asia, began requesting food imports for India through government and military channels, but for months these requests were either rejected or reduced to a fraction of the original amount by Churchill's War Cabinet. The colony was also not permitted to spend its own sterling reserves, or even use its own ships, to import food. Although Viceroy Linlithgow appealed for imports from mid-December 1942, he did so on the understanding that the military would be given preference over civilians. The Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, was on one side of a cycle of requests for food aid and subsequent refusals from the British War Cabinet that continued through 1943 and into 1944. Amery did not mention worsening conditions in the countryside, stressing that Calcutta's industries must be fed or its workers would return to the countryside. Rather than meeting this request, the UK promised a relatively small amount of wheat that was specifically intended for western India (that is, not for Bengal) in exchange for an increase in rice exports from Bengal to Ceylon.
The tone of Linlithgow's warnings to Amery grew increasingly serious over the first half of 1943, as did Amery's requests to the War Cabinet; on 4 August 1943 Amery noted the spread of famine, and specifically stressed the effect upon Calcutta and the potential effect on the morale of European troops. The cabinet again offered only a relatively small amount, explicitly referring to it as a token shipment. The explanation generally offered for the refusals included insufficient shipping, particularly in light of Allied plans to invade Normandy. The Cabinet also refused offers of food shipments from several different nations. When such shipments did begin to increase modestly in late 1943, the transport and storage facilities were understaffed and inadequate. When Viscount Archibald Wavell replaced Linlithgow as Viceroy in the latter half of 1943, he too began a series of exasperated demands to the War Cabinet for very large quantities of grain. His requests were again repeatedly denied, causing him to decry the current crisis as "one of the greatest disasters that has befallen any people under British rule, and [the] damage to our reputation both among Indians and foreigners in India is incalculable". Churchill wrote to Franklin D. Roosevelt at the end of April 1944 asking for aid from the United States in shipping wheat in from Australia, but Roosevelt replied apologetically on 1 June that he was "unable on military grounds to consent to the diversion of shipping".
Experts' disagreement over political issues can be found in differing explanations of the War Cabinet's refusal to allocate funds to import grain. Lizzie Collingham holds the massive global dislocations of supplies caused by World War II virtually guaranteed that hunger would occur somewhere in the world, yet Churchill's animosity and perhaps racism toward Indians decided the exact location where famine would fall. Similarly, Madhusree Mukerjee makes a stark accusation: "The War Cabinet's shipping assignments made in August 1943, shortly after Amery had pleaded for famine relief, show Australian wheat flour travelling to Ceylon, the Middle East, and Southern Africa – everywhere in the Indian Ocean but to India. Those assignments show a will to punish." In contrast, Mark Tauger strikes a more supportive stance: "In the Indian Ocean alone from January 1942 to May 1943, the Axis powers sank 230 British and Allied merchant ships totalling 873,000 tons, in other words, a substantial boat every other day. British hesitation to allocate shipping concerned not only potential diversion of shipping from other war-related needs but also the prospect of losing the shipping to attacks without actually [bringing help to] India at all."
Michael Safi in Delhi reporting for the Guardian (Fri 29 Mar 2019) under the headline and subheading:
Churchill's policies contributed to 1943 Bengal famine – studyStudy is first time weather data has been used to argue wartime policies exacerbated famine
Michael Safi writes:
The Bengal famine of 1943 was the only one in modern Indian history not to occur as a result of serious drought, according to a study that provides scientific backing for arguments that Churchill-era British policies were a significant factor contributing to the catastrophe.
Researchers in India and the US used weather data to simulate the amount of moisture in the soil during six major famines in the subcontinent between 1873 and 1943. Soil moisture deficits, brought about by poor rainfall and high temperatures, are a key indicator of drought.
Five of the famines were correlated with significant soil moisture deficits. An 11% deficit measured across much of north India in 1896-97, for example, coincided with food shortages across the country that killed an estimated 5 million people.
However, the 1943 famine in Bengal, which killed up to 3 million people, was different, according to the researchers. Though the eastern Indian region was affected by drought for much of the 1940s, conditions were worst in 1941, years before the most extreme stage of the famine, when newspapers began to publish images of the dying on the streets of Kolkata, then named Calcutta, against the wishes of the colonial British administration.
Media coverage of the 1943 Bengal famine
Calcutta's two leading English-language newspapers were The Statesman (at the time British-owned) and Amrita Bazar Patrika (edited by independence campaigner Tushar Kanti Ghosh). In the early months of the famine, the government applied pressure on newspapers to "calm public fears about the food supply" and follow the official stance that there was no rice shortage. This effort had some success; The Statesman published editorials asserting that the famine was due solely to speculation and hoarding, while "berating local traders and producers, and praising ministerial efforts". News of the famine was also subject to strict war-time censorship – even use of the word "famine" was prohibited – leading The Statesman later to remark that the UK government "seems virtually to have withheld from the British public knowledge that there was famine in Bengal at all".
Beginning in mid-July 1943 and more so in August, however, these two newspapers began publishing detailed and increasingly critical accounts of the depth and scope of the famine, its impact on society, and the nature of British, Hindu, and Muslim political responses.
A turning point in news coverage came in late August 1943, when the editor of The Statesman, Ian Stephens, solicited and published a series of graphic photos of the victims. These images made world headlines.
This publication marked the beginning of domestic and international consciousness of the famine. The next morning, "in Delhi second-hand copies of the paper were selling at several times the news-stand price," and soon "in Washington the State Department circulated them among policy makers". In Britain, The Guardian called the situation "horrible beyond description". The images had a profound effect and marked "for many, the beginning of the end of colonial rule". Stephens' decision to publish them and to adopt a defiant editorial stance won accolades from many,including the Famine Inquiry Commission, and has been described as "a singular act of journalistic courage without which many more lives would have surely been lost". The publication of the images, along with Stephens' editorials, not only helped to bring the famine to an end by driving the British government to supply adequate relief to the victims, but also inspired Amartya Sen's influential contention that the presence of a free press prevents famines in democratic countries.
The photographs also spurred Amrita Bazar Patrika and the Indian Communist Party's organ, People's War, to publish similar images; the latter would make photographer Sunil Janah famous.
Women journalists who covered the famine included Freda Bedi reporting for Lahore's The Tribune, and Vasudha Chakravarti and Kalyani Bhattacharjee, who wrote from a nationalist perspective.
A contemporary sketchbook of iconic scenes of famine victims, Hungry Bengal: a tour through Midnapur District in November, 1943 by Chittaprosad, was immediately banned by the British and 5,000 copies were seized and destroyed. One copy was hidden by Chittaprosad's family and is now in the possession of the Delhi Art Gallery.
As for the UK prime minister Churchill Tribute Act, Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-the-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Girly-Swot Big-Girl’s-Blouse Chicken-frit Hulk-Smash Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Dog-Whistle Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ 88%-lies Get-Brexit-Done Bung-a-Bob-for-Big-Ben’s-Bongs Cocaine-Event Spiritual-Worth Three-Men-and-a-Dog Whatever-It-Takes Johnson . . .
. . . he's much less racist than he used to be!
The Indian Communist Party's publication People's War articles covering the famine, include a text and photo essay on the famine's impact upon the state of Orissa (Odissa). This is where two of the LODE 1992 locations for creating cargo, Dhauli and Puri, were made, and then documented and wrapped in newspaper pages of the particular day and dateline.
LODE 1992
LODE in Liverpool
1992
The slave trade and the maritime cities of Liverpool and Hull
Two of the primary LODE nodal locations for Re:LODE Radio are Liverpool and Hull, functioning as both points of departure and places of return in the LODE project of 1992. These two maritime cities have a huge share in the story of the slave trade and its abolition.
An Island Story
This image is a detail from a map that sets out what it claims to represent in its title:
The Age of Discovery 1340 -1600
This title could be changed to:
“The Great Work of Subjugation and Conquest”
A few excerpts from the first Chapter of: Year 501 The Conquest Continues by Noam Chomsky tells the story. This text was significantly influential in the framing of research for the LODE project in 1992:
The year 1992 poses a critical moral and cultural challenge for the more privileged sectors of the world-dominant societies. The challenge is heightened by the fact that within these societies, notably the first European colony liberated from imperial rule (the United States), popular struggle over many centuries has achieved a large measure of freedom, opening many opportunities for independent thought and committed action. How this challenge is addressed in the years to come will have fateful consequences.
October 11, 1992 brings to an end the 500th year of the Old World Order, sometimes called the Colombian era of world history, or the Vasco da Gama era, depending on which adventurers bent on plunder got there first.
The major theme of this Old World Order was a confrontation between the conquerors and the conquered on a global scale. It has taken various forms, and been given different names: imperialism, neocolonialism, the North-South conflict, core versus periphery, G-7 (the leading state capitalist industrial societies) and their satellites versus the rest. Or, more simply, Europe’s conquest of the world. By the term “Europe,” we include the European-settled colonies, one of which now leads the crusade (the United States).
That there may be more than coincidence in the correlation of independence and development is suggested further by a look at Western Europe, where parts that were colonized followed something like the Third World path. One notable example is Ireland, violently conquered, then barred from development by the “free trade” doctrines selectively applied to ensure subordination of the South—today called “structural adjustment,” “neo-liberalism,” or “our noble ideals,” from which we, to be sure, are exempt.
“The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind,” Adam Smith wrote in 1776: “What benefits, or what misfortunes to mankind may hereafter result from those great events, no human wisdom can foresee.” But it was possible for an honest eye to see what had taken place. “The discovery of America...certainly made a most essential” contribution to the “state of Europe,” Smith wrote, “opening up a new and inexhaustible market” that led to vast expansion of “productive powers” and “real revenue and wealth.”
In theory, the “new set of exchanges...should naturally have proved as advantageous to the new, as it certainly did to the old continent.” That was not to be, however. “The savage injustice of the Europeans rendered an event, which ought to have been beneficial to all, ruinous and destructive to several of those unfortunate countries,” Smith wrote, revealing himself to be an early practitioner of the crime of “political correctness,” to borrow some rhetoric of contemporary cultural management. “To the natives...both of the East and West Indies,” Smith continued, “all the commercial benefits, which can have resulted from those events have been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which they have occasioned.” With “the superiority of force” the Europeans commanded, “they were enabled to commit with impunity every sort of injustice in those remote countries.” Smith does not mention the indigenous inhabitants of North America: “There were but two nations in America, in any respect superior to savages [Peru, Mexico], and these were destroyed almost as soon as discovered. The rest were mere savages”—a convenient idea for the British conquerors, hence one that was to persist, even in scholarship, until the cultural awakening of the 1960s finally opened many eyes.
Over half a century later, Hegel discoursed authoritatively on the same topics in his lectures on philosophy of history, brimming with confidence as we approach the final “phase of World-History,” when Spirit reaches “its full maturity and strength” in “the German world.” Speaking from that lofty peak, he relates that native America was “physically and psychically powerless,” its culture so limited that it “must expire as soon as Spirit approached it.” Hence “the aborigines... gradually vanished at the breath of European activity.” “A mild and passionless disposition, want of spirit, and a crouching submissiveness...are the chief characteristics of the native Americans,” so “slothful” that, under the kind “authority of the Friars,” “at midnight a bell had to remind them even of their matrimonial duties.” They were inferior even to the Negro, “the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state,” who is beyond any “thought of reverence and morality—all that we call feeling”; there is “nothing harmonious with humanity...in this type of character.” “Among the Negroes moral sentiments are quite weak, or more strictly speaking non-existent.” “Parents sell their children, and conversely children their parents, as either has the opportunity,” and “The polygamy of the Negroes has frequently for its object the having many children, to be sold, every one of them, into slavery.” Creatures at the level of “a mere Thing—an object of no value,” they treat “as enemies” those who seek to abolish slavery, which has “been the occasion of the increase of human feeling among the Negroes,” enabling them to become “participant in a higher morality and the culture connected with it.”
The conquest of the New World set off two vast demographic catastrophes, unparalleled in history: the virtual destruction of the indigenous population of the Western hemisphere, and the devastation of Africa as the slave trade rapidly expanded to serve the needs of the conquerors, and the continent itself was subjugated.
Much of Asia too suffered “dreadful misfortunes.” While modalities have changed, the fundamental themes of the conquest retain their vitality and resilience, and will continue to do so until the reality and causes of the “savage injustice” are honestly addressed.
The Spanish-Portuguese conquests had their domestic counter-part. In 1492, the Jewish community of Spain was expelled or forced to convert. Millions of Moors suffered the same fate. The fall of Granada in 1492, ending eight centuries of Moorish sovereignty, allowed the Spanish Inquisition to extend its barbaric sway.
The first major competitor was Holland, with more capital than its rivals thanks in large part to the control of the Baltic trade that it had won in the 16th century and was able to maintain by force.
The Dutch East India Company (VOC), formed in 1602, was granted virtually the powers of a state, including the right to make war and treaties. Technically, it was an independent enterprise, but that was an illusion. “The apparent autonomy from metropolitan political control that the VOC enjoyed,” M.N. Pearson writes, resulted from the fact that “the VOC was identical with the state,” itself controlled by Dutch merchants and financiers. In highly simplified form, we see already something of the structure of the modern political economy, dominated by a network of transnational financial and industrial institutions with internally managed investment and trade, their wealth and influence established and maintained by the state power that they mobilize and largely control. “The VOC integrated the functions of a sovereign power with the functions of a business partnership,” a historian of Dutch capitalism writes: “Political decisions and business decisions were made within the same hierarchy of company managers and officials, and failure or success was always in the last instance measured in terms of profit.”
The Dutch established positions of strength in Indonesia (to remain a Dutch colony until the 1940s), India, Brazil and the Caribbean, took Sri Lanka from Portugal, and reached to the fringes of Japan and China. The Netherlands, however, fell victim to what was later called “the Dutch disease”: inadequate central state power, which left the people “rich perhaps, as individuals; but weak, as a State,” as Britain’s Lord Sheffield observed in the 18th century, warning the British against the same error.
The Iberian empires suffered further blows as English pirates,marauders and slave traders swept the seas, perhaps the most notorious, Sir Francis Drake. The booty that Drake brought home “may fairly be considered the fountain and origin of British foreign investments,” John Maynard Keynes wrote: “Elizabeth paid out of the proceeds the whole of her foreign debt and invested a part of the balance...in the Levant Company; largely out of the profits of the Levant Company there formed the East India Company, the profits of which...were the main foundations of England’s foreign connections.” In the Atlantic, the entire English operation prior to 1630 was a “predatory drive of armed traders and marauders to win by fair means or foul a share of the Atlantic wealth of the Iberian nations” (Kenneth Andrews).
The adventurers who laid the basis for the merchant empires of the 17th-18th centuries “continued a long European tradition of the union of warfare and trade,” Thomas Brady adds, as “the European state’s growth as a military enterprise” gave rise to “the quintessentially European figure of the warrior-merchant.” Later, the newly consolidated English state took over the task of “wars for markets” from “the plunder raids of Elizabethan sea-dogs” (Christopher Hill). The British East India Company was granted its charter in 1600, extended indefinitely in 1609, providing the Company with a monopoly over trade with the East on the authority of the British Crown. There followed brutal wars, frequently conducted with unspeakable barbarism, among the European rivals, drawing in native populations that were often caught up in their own internal struggles. In 1622, Britain drove the Portuguese from the straits of Hormuz, “the key of all India,” and ultimately won that great prize. Much of the rest of the world was ultimately parcelled out in a manner that is well known.
Rising state power had enabled England to subdue its own Celtic periphery, then to apply the newly honed techniques with even greater savagery to new victims across the Atlantic. Their contempt for “the dirty, cow keeping Celts on [England’s] fringes” also eased the way for “civilised and prosperous Englishmen” to take a commanding position in the slave trade as “the gradient of contempt...spread its shadow from nearby hearts of darkness to those far over the sea,” Thomas Brady writes. From mid-17th century, England was powerful enough to impose the Navigation Acts (1651, 1662), barring foreign traders from its colonies and giving British shipping “the monopoly of the trade of their own country” (imports), either “by absolute prohibitions” or “heavy burdens” on others (Adam Smith, who reviews these measures with mixed reservations and approval). The “twin goals” of these initiatives were “strategic power and economic wealth through shipping and colonial monopoly,” the Cambridge Economic History of Europe relates. Britain’s goal in the Anglo-Dutch wars from 1652 to 1674 was to restrict or destroy Dutch trade and shipping and gain control over the lucrative slave trade.
The focus was the Atlantic, where the colonies of the New World offered enormous riches. The Acts and wars expanded the trading areas dominated by English merchants,who were able to enrich themselves through the slave trade and their “plunder-trade with America, Africa and Asia” (Hill), assisted by “state-sponsored colonial wars” and the various devices of economic management by which state power has forged the way to private wealth and a particular form of development shaped by its requirements. As Adam Smith observed, European success was a tribute to its mastery of the means and immersion in the culture of violence. “Warfare in India was still a sport,” John Keay observes: “in Europe it had become a science.”
Q. Is capitalism historically inseparable from colonialism?
A. Yes!
Q. Does capitalism function through the expansion of frontiers?
A. Yes! A bounty without borders!
A detail from The Toilette, the fourth scene in William Hogarth's Marriage à-la-mode
Beauty with borders! 18th century British barriers of social class and racial classification!
Afua Hirsch interviews the editor of British Vogue magazine Edward Enninful for the Guardian Weekend magazine (Sat 21 Sep 2019).
Vogue's Edward Enninful: ‘Was the criticism of Meghan Markle racist? Some of it, yes’
When the time came, the final proof pages of the magazine had to be transported from Vogue HQ to the printers face down. But perhaps the most challenging step in the process came afterwards – when Enninful revealed his secret to the world, and the culture war began. Enninful and Markle’s collaboration, the cover of which was a grid of 15 women jointly selected as “Forces For Change”, quickly became a proxy battle about modern, diverse Britain. Its ferocity was not something the editor saw coming. “I was so engrossed in these women, and in the magazine,” he tells me. “We were not trying to create an issue that was shocking – we were shining a light on incredible women, some who are not famous at all.”
The September Vogue, which Markle has described as having her “thumbprint” all over it, reportedly sold out in just two weeks, and is currently being auctioned for more than five times its £3.99 cover price on eBay. The very fact of its publication became a news story around the world, generating interest and an audience that went far beyond Vogue’s usual constituency. “For a magazine like Vogue to still cause a debate, especially at a time when it’s supposed to be ‘the end of magazines’ – it’s pretty incredible,” Enninful says. “I just can’t believe that so many people wanted to talk about it. That’s what magazines did best when we were growing up, back in the day.”
But the backlash was equally loud. Markle was, according to critics, being unduly political, “divisive” for celebrating transgender women, and “leftwing” for supporting progressive causes. One entertainment writer even professed to know the inner thoughts of the monarch, claiming: “The Queen will think this is an absolutely idiotic, ridiculous decision, as do I.”
After the dust settled, Markle’s noisiest rightwing critics – Melanie Phillips and Sarah Vine among them– moved on to their next target, leaving only the trolling dregs. “Was the criticism racist? Some of it, yeah,” Enninful says. “Actually it was more than racism,” he adds. “I thought it was personal – attacking someone you don’t know, attacking her.”
The double standard at work was hard to ignore. While Enninful and Markle’s collaboration prompted sneers, Prince Charles’s two-time guest editorship of Country Life magazine, and stints by Prince Harry at Radio 4’s Today programme and Kate Middleton at Huffington Post, had been quietly praised at the time. Many of the criticisms aimed at Markle – she was branded “uppity” for assuming the role, and accused of being “anti-white” for focusing on diversity – are familiar tropes aimed at people of colour who enter white spaces and fail to seek white approval, or who celebrate their heritage and diversity.
Vogue Magazine (UK) September 2019
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