On Images of Savages, Part One

by Nicolette Bethel

Recently I've been exploring the idea of race. It's not because I want to cause trouble. It's because I believe I don't have much choice. Despite the happy-talk about there not being any real problem any more, ours is a society plagued by self-loathing. As "blacks", we hate ourselves for being descended from enslaved Africans; as "whites", we hate ourselves (or our ancestors) for our involvement in the slave trade. We have all, for worse and for better, been impacted by the institution of transatlantic slavery; and yet we refuse to discuss in any meaningful way the consequences of that fact.

I'm going to suggest that part of the reason for our silence on this matter -- and it's a silence that's as thick and as ominous as a summer day before a hurricane -- is that we have all been taught to believe the lies that supported the institution of slavery. These are the lies that were told to justify the enslaving of other human beings, and they are also the lies that were taught to the enslaved to keep them from fighting their state.

One of those lies was this: that slavery existed as part and parcel of a vast civilizing project that God gave the European for the betterment of all humanity.

According to this lie, slavery was a necessary evil that existed to save the "lesser races" from their savagery and to teach them how to be good human beings. The fact that the slaves were forced to work against their will, often to their deaths, and that they were bought and sold like less important horses and cows, was conveniently overlooked in this fiction. Slavery was on some levels God's blessing to the enslaved, the avenue by which He taught them how to be fully human.

Utter nonsense, of course, but powerful anyway.

This is one reason why, I believe, we're so afraid to address our past -- and one reason why I think we must. The way in which we look at the world -- at ourselves, at our relatives, our acquaintances and at strangers -- was shaped by a specific need to justify an unjustifiable system. If we let that world-view go unchallenged, we will perpetuate the lie from generation to generation.

Let me illustrate. There's an article that I relished teaching to students when I was a lecturer at the College of The Bahamas. It addresses the Africanness of Bahamian culture, and it talks about a number of things that link us with the African continent: certain habits we have, the way we bury our dead, things we do when babies are born, the way we worship, and the things we believe about the dead and other strangenesses. I liked to teach it because the students' reactions were so profound. What surprised me most was how many of them stopped reading the article before they reached the end. When we discussed it, they labelled it "heathen" or "sinful", and tried to distance themselves from the author's observations. And their reactions were in direct proportion to the truth they found in the article. The more they recognized themselves and their own actions in the piece, the more they tried to distance themselves from it.

I suspect that what was so unsettling about the article is that what they were learning about themselves -- about themselves and about this culture that we all share -- uncovered for them the fundamental Africanness of much of what we do. And this is an unsettling link, it would seem, because we are still perpetuating the lie that was told to justify the enslavement of our ancestors: that Africa was a primitive place, and it took the light of the European to guide it from its darkness to the light.

This idea of the savage -- of the being who looked like a person but who wasn't fully human, but who might potentially be able to be trained to be mostly human -- went hand in hand with the project of slavery, and it's against this backdrop that we have learned to see ourselves.

And this is why race still pulls our strings today. According to the tales told about our ancestors, civilization was considered to go along with white skin, and savagery was considered to accompany skins of different colours. The way in which we treat people whose skins are dark, as opposed to the way we treat those whose skins are light is residual.

This state of affairs is not unique to us, by the way. All of the nations that have been constructed on the ruins of slavery are fighting the same battles, from those in which the descendants of the enslaved are a minority of the population, like the USA, to those in which those descendants constitute the entire country, like some of our neighbours to the south.

I'm going to argue that we can trace the present racial and social inequalities of The Bahamas, the USA, Jamaica, Brazil, Canada, Australia, and even Africa to a single set of causes, and that one of these causes is the image of the savage, that person who was invented to help make the project of slavery more bearable to all concerned. Understanding those causes isn't necessarily going to fix the problem, but it may tell us where to look and how to approach it.

But more on that later. For now, we need to remember that our inequalities are steeped in a history that is bigger than all of us. That's why there's no shame in talking about them. Unless we talk, we'll never understand them; and without that understanding, there may be no cure at all.

Comments

[drew Roberts]

"Utter nonsense, of course, but powerful anyway."

And what precedes it...

This is a crude stating of a potentially much more nuanced argument. Should you wish to discuss this further, let me know.

On slavery in general. I think it might be helpful to consider the practice of slavery further back and compare it to the slavery which we mostly refer to when we speak of slavery in this part of the world.

It might also help to consider serfdom and even indentured servitude.

This world has some seriously nasty stuff in its past. (Let's not forget the present though.)

I am not sure that the past really is something that we have to come to grips with though. If we can get the present palatable.

How far back do we need to go in trying to correct the past to fix the present?

all the best,

drew

[Moar]

"There's an article that I relished teaching to students when I was a lecturer at the College of The Bahamas."

Show us the article.

[CheezeSammich]

I agree with drew that there are some really messed up things in our present that need to be dealt with ASAP

Thomas Chatterton Williams: Black culture beyond hip-hop
http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/198314.html

I can't shake this feeling that there is some connection between the issues covered in that article and the fact that ZERO of the young men in this years graduating class of R.M. Bailey participated in the singing of the class song.
I
s it not "Black" or too "not ghetto" for a young black man to be singing a hymn with his classmates 2 minutes before receiving his highschool diploma?

[nicob]

Drew, if the things I'm talking about in this article were part of the past, I would agree with you. But they are not. The image of the "savage" pervades all our discussions about race, even those which attempt to correct "past" wrongs.

I will probably one day look at institution of slavery in a global and panhistorical fashion. In the meantime, though, the institution of slavery that affected us most here in the new world was a slavery that was fundamentally different from the slavery that existed in the ancient world. While that had a place within the societies that practised it -- slaves were got through conquest or debt or some other process that was shared by the dominant society, and every member of the society, if they were unlucky, ran the risk of being enslaved as a result of war or misfortune -- TransAtlantic slavery involved the enslavement of other people far away from the societies of the enslavers, and enabled otherwise decent people to be complicit in a huge dehumanizing effort. What was not permissible in Europe was perfectly fine when practised on other people. In the words of "Rule Britannia": "Britons never, never, never shall be slaves"; but until 1834 people of other "races" could be, and were.

In order to justify the enslavement of other human beings in a society that was engaging in discusions of humanity and civilization and progress, a distinction had to be made between types of human beings. While the institutions that that distinction created have been officially dismantled, and while their legacies are being challenged today, the psychic residue of those instituions has not even begun to be addressed.

I would argue that the current "gangsta" culture of the Black Americas -- which calls upon and embodies much of the worst of the imagery of savagery that was developed to describe people of colour -- is a playing out, an internalization, of those ideas of savagery that were used to justify the enslaving of Africans, the indentureship of Asians, and the subordination of mestizos and mulattos throughout the Americas. The word we use to describe our own ghetto young women -- jungless -- is derived, whether we admit or not, directly from that whole battery of images of animality, brute force, and stupidity that were projected upon the so-called "lesser races" during the enslavement, forced migration, and subordination of the people who were used to build the American colonies. And the battle is on many fronts. The worst of these ideas come from outside our borders as well as from within us.

We haven't even begin to make the present palatable on any level beyond the political and the material. And as both of those levels are ripe for coopting by the larger dehumanizing activities currently being carried out by global conglomerates like Hollywood and BET, we are fighting a losing battle unless we can understand what we are really up against. The fact that young men refuse to participate in something that is designed to be a marker of pride in themselves and their school is an indication, to my mind, that the present is nowhere near "palatable" for far too many of us.

As for the article, Moar, you can find it yourself in the book "Yinna: Journal of the Bahamas Association of Cultural Studies". Go look it up.

Cheers.

[cheezesammich]

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/2003-05-21/news/rich-black-flunking/4

in relation to that other link
some people said its how RM was back in like the 90's or something.

[drew Roberts]

Nico,

great response in many ways. I think you hit the mark when you bring the distinction between the slavery we normally refer to and earlier slavery.

It is one of the most nasty parts of the whole business. The lies that had to be told to all in order to, for instance, explain how all men are created equal and with unalienable Rights:

http://www.law.indiana.edu/uslawdocs/declaration.html

" We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

and then to turn around and deny liberty to some.

And no, I was not suggesting that the present was palatable, just that perhaps we could get there without actually solving all of the past.

England still has that old Saxon and Norman issue from 1066 which is likely still not dealt with.

Are we to all clear out of the Bahamas and leave them uninhabited, waiting if per chance a new wave of american indians should sweep north again?

Much of the ills we face are inner ills.

I don't know if I have told this story before in this forum, but my father was asked what he wanted what he wanted for his eigth birthday. His choice was a can of vegetable soup that he could eat himself and not have to share with his siblings. How many Bahamians have so little materially today that they would aspire to such a gift.

Inner ills are no less serious though. I do know that.

People are people. We need to come to grips with that. We need to see ourselves as having the same worth as people as every other person.

But... the world is not fair. Others will not value us this way. They will see beauty or brains or athletic ability or artistic ability and move us up or down the value scale accordingly.

We need to fight being valued this way in our own selves though.

More later - gotta run.

drew

[Bloggy Boyz]

I find myself agreeing with Drew. Folks are folks. I cannot relate to African culture or to slavery -- it is either foreign to me or dead and gone. I am a Bahamian -- living today, with today's issues. I have no self loathing as a black. I have no white envy. Race is just another attribute, just like height. This navel-gazing about race isn't relevant to me.