The Truth and a Lengthy Excuse: An Essay on Winthrop Jordan and Eric Williams

The Truth and A Lengthy Excuse

An essay on Eric Williams and Winthrop Jordan

In Eric Williams’ essay, “Capitalism and Slavery”, the first thing he stresses is that racism came from slavery, not the other way around. Of course I was immediately put off by this statement after reading Winthrop Jordan’s “White over Black: American attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812”, which has quite the opposite idea stated in it.  Fortunately, Eric Williams’ essay nearly tears itself apart on its own without any help from me, as he failed to recognize his own inherent classism and racism.  It is his idea that because blacks were not the first to be used for free labor, just the cheapest form of free labor, that it was not racism that made the English, Spanish, and French use them.  That, of course, is complete bullshit.  Here’s why.

Eric Williams starts his essay by telling us about the use of Indians as slaves.  He mentions that it was attempted to only enslave those Indians that didn’t give up their heritage for Christianity.  This brings me back to Winthrop Jordan’s essay in which we recall the Christians encountering heathenism in Africa which certainly applies here:

“Heathenism was treated not so much as a specifically religious defect but as one manifestation of a general refusal to measure up to proper standards, as a failure to be English or even civilized.”  The first encounter with and eventual poor treatment of the Native Americans was all too similar to the relationship formed between the whites and blacks in Africa.  Eric Williams goes onto say: “The Indian reservoir, too, was limited, the African inexhaustible”, which sounds as if he was speaking of a resource rather than groups of human beings.  Interesting.

And as if this were to completely prove his point, Williams speaks of how “not the Negro”, but poor whites were used next to make rich whites richer.  It started off as indentured servitude, where a person would sign a contract to work for someone for a certain number of years in exchange for his passage to America.  It was later that kidnapping and forced shipment of humans was used for labor.  This might not be an example of racism, but it would be a good example of classism.  He throws out the labels: “vagrants, rogues and idlers, petty thieves, gypsies, and loose persons frequenting unlicensed brothels”, as if he considering being a slaveowner made a person higher class than said peoples.  And all of these people were treated in the same fashion as the Africans on the way across the ocean: “each servant was allowed about two feet in width and six feet in length in bed”, and continues saying that the boats were small, the food was gross, and you  were nearly guaranteed to get sick.  This is not how most people treat someone they consider to be equal.  He even says “Better black slaves on plantations than white servants in industry, which would encourage aspirations to independence”.  It is my opinion that independence is something for which everyone should have aspirations, and any attempt to squash those aspirations is an act of injustice, and in this case, an act of classism/racism.

Later on, Williams again stresses that the choice to use Africans as slaves was due to the cheapness of labor, not the color of their skin or the nature their culture.  “The features of the man, his hair, color and dentrifice, his ‘subhuman’