What I Learned Today

As mentioned here earlier, slavery in the Americas supposedly began 400 years ago this month.  As The New York Times tells it, in August 1619, a ship arrived at the British colony in Jamestown, Virginia carrying a strange cargo: more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists.  "This is referred to as the country’s original sin," the Times writes, "but it is more than that: It is the country’s true origin."

But that's an oversimplification of the history of slavery in the Americas.  As Howard Zinn shows us, by 1619, some one million black men and women had already been brought from Africa to the Portuguese and Spanish colonies in South America and the Caribbean to work as slaves.  In Central America, the Spanish conquistadors had made slaves of captured Aztecs and Mayans, and Columbus brought Arawaks from the Bahamas back to Portugal as slaves in the 1490s.  Slavery was already thriving in the New World by the time the slave ship had arrived in Jamestown in 1619.

Last night, I was reading an article in The New Yorker about Ibram X. Kendi, a professor at American University in Washington.  Prof. Kendi traces the history of racism back to the fifteenth century and Infante D. Henrique of Portugal, the Duke of Viseu, better known as Prince Henry the Navigator. 

I did not know anything about Prince Henry; like many Americans, I was taught that the era of European exploration basically began with Columbus in 1492, and was all about The New World (my education has many peculiar gaps and omissions).  I did some research today and learned that Henry the Explorer was a central figure in the early days of the Portuguese Empire and is regarded as the main initiator of what would come to be known as the Age of Discovery.  Henry was responsible for a systematic series of expeditions along the Western Africa coast and the islands of the Atlantic.  

Ceuta, a Muslim port on the North African coast across from the Straits of Gibraltar, had long been a base for Barbary pirates who raided the Portuguese coast, depopulating villages by capturing their inhabitants to be sold in the African slave trade. Prince Henry encouraged his father, the Portuguese king John I, to conquer Ceuta and following this success, he learned of the opportunities offered by the Saharan trade routes that terminated there, and became fascinated with Africa in general. Henry began to explore the west coast of Africa, most of which was unknown to Europeans. His objectives included finding the source of the African gold trade and stopping the pirate attacks on the Portuguese coast. 

Anxious to find new trade routes to bypass the Muslim caravans in the Sahara, Henry sponsored a series of nautical voyages typically made in very small ships, mostly the caravel, a light and maneuverable vessel. The caravel used a lateen sail, the prevailing rig in Mediterranean navigation since late antiquity.  Most of the voyages sent out by Henry consisted of one or two ships that navigated by following the coast, stopping at night to tie up along some shore.

Until Henry's time, Cape Bojador, a headland on the northern coast of Western Sahara, remained the most southerly point known to Europeans on the coast of Africa. Superstitious seafarers held that beyond the cape lay sea monsters and the edge of the world. In 1434, one of Henry's expeditions was the first to finally pass Bojador.

Using the new ship type, the expeditions then pushed onwards. By 1441, expeditions reached Cape Blanco, a  headland near the southern border of Western Sahara. In 1443, the Portuguese sighted the Bay of Arguin in Mauritania. Subsequent expeditions soon came across the Senegal River and rounded the Cape Verde Peninsula at Dakar, the westernmost point on the African continent.

By this stage, the explorers had passed the southern boundary of the Sahara Desert, and from then on Henry had one of his wishes fulfilled: the Portuguese had circumvented the Muslim land-based trade routes across the western Sahara, and gold began pouring into Portugal.  This rerouting of trade devastated the Muslim trading posts at Algiers and Tunis, but made Portugal rich.   From 1444 to 1446, as many as forty vessels sailed from Portugal on Henry's behalf, and the first private mercantile expeditions began.

But in addition to gold, the expeditions also came across another lucrative commodity: African slaves.  A slave trade emerged between western Africa and the European nations, but with the discovery and colonization of the Americas in the sixteenth century, the market exploded. 

If historians have to put a pin on the exact date that racism as we know it today began, it would be 1444, when Henry the Explorer's expeditions first started treating African slaves as a commodity.  Interestingly, although there was significant trade and cultural exchange between Muslims and North Africans in the Middle East, and between West Africans and India, the interactions were not as centered around slavery as the East African/European trade was, and the racist attitudes and derision that marks European and American racism did not emerge from these other exchanges.  The racist ideologies only emerged in order to justify the dehumanizing aspects of the slave trade. 

Prof. Kendi points out that racism, then, is not even 600 hundred years old.  It only emerged in the 1440s with Henry the Explorer's exploitation of the slave market, yet still persists like a cancer to this day.  But "it's a cancer that we've caught early," Prof. Kendi explains, and just as ideologies of racial difference emerged after the slave trade in order  to justify it, anti-racist ideologies will emerge once we're bold enough to enact an anti-racist agenda.  Criminal justice reform, more money for black schools and black teachers, and a program to fight residential segregation can be like a high tide that floats all boats, black and white.

"Once they clearly benefit," Prof. Kendi writes, "most Americans will support and become the defenders of the anti-racist policies they once feared."  This awakening will be what Dr. Eddie Glaude referred to as white folks finally leaving behind a toxic history and "maybe, maybe," embracing a history that will finally set them free from "being white."

These are inspiring, optimistic ideas, and although they may sound threatening to a certain demographic of whites accustomed to their privilege and fearful of losing it, the current system is clearly unraveling and will not sustain itself for much longer.  

Something has to change and when it's finally seen that anti-racism is mutually beneficial, racism may finally become a symptom of the past.