AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDIESpower-conflict perspective, sociologist Bob Blauner
(1972) argued that there are major differences
between black Americans and the white immi-
grant groups at the center of assimilationist analy-
sis. Africans brought across the ocean became part
of an internally subordinated colony; white
slaveowners incorporated them against their will.
Black labor built up white wealth. European immi-
grants, in contrast, came more or less voluntarily.
More recently, sociologist Molefi Kete Asante
(1988) has broken new ground in the development
of a new power-conflict perspective, termed
afrocentricity, that analyzes the Eurocentric bias in
U.S. culture and rejects the use of the concepts
such as ‘‘ethnicity,’’ ‘‘minority,’’ and ‘‘ghetto’’ as
antithetical to developing a clear understanding of
racism and to building antiracist movements. Simi-
larly, anthropologist Marimba Ani (1994) has shown
how from the beginning European colonialism
was supported by a well-developed theory of white
supremacy, a worldview that attempted to destroy
the cultures of other non-European peoples. Yet
other analysts (Feagin 2000) have argued for a
power-conflict framework that understands white
oppression of black Americans—with its racist
ideology—as the foundation of U.S. society from
the beginning. From this perspective much in the
unfolding drama of U.S. history is viewed as a
continuing reflection of that foundation of system-
ic racism.
THE ENSLAVEMENT OF AFRICAN
AMERICANSResearch on slavery emphasizes the importance of
the power-conflict perspective for understanding
the history and conditions of African Americans.
Manning Marable (1985, p. 5) demonstrates that
before the African slave trade began, Europeans
were predisposed to accept slavery. Western intel-
lectuals from Aristotle to Sir Thomas More de-
fended slavery.
Research by sociologists, historians, and legal
scholars emphasizes the point that slavery is the
foundation of African-American subordination.
Legal scholar Patricia Williams has documented
the dramatic difference between the conditions
faced by enslaved Africans and by European immi-
grants: ‘‘The black slave experience was that of lost
languages, cultures, tribal ties, kinship bonds, and
even of the power to procreate in the image of
oneself and not that of an alien master’’ (Williams
1987, p. 415). Williams, an African American, dis-
cusses Austin Miller, her great-great grandfather, a
white lawyer who bought and enslaved her great-
great-grandmother, Sophie, and Sophie’s parents.
Miller forced the thirteen-year-old Sophie to be-
come the mother of Williams’s great grandmother
Mary. Williams’s white great-great grandfather was
thus a rapist and child molester. African Ameri-
cans constitute the only U.S. racial group whose
heritage involves the forced mixing of its African
ancestors with members of the dominant white group.Eugene Genovese (1974) has demonstrated
that the enslavement of African Americans could
produce both servile accommodation and open
resistance. Even in the extremely oppressive slave
plantations of the United States, many peoples
from Africa—Yorubas, Akans, Ibos, and others—
came together to create one African-American
people. They created a culture of survival and
resistance by drawing on African religion and
values (Stuckey 1987, pp. 42–46). This oppositional
culture provided the foundation for many revolts
and conspiracies to revolt among those enslaved,
as well as for later protests against oppression.In all regions many whites were implicated in
the slavery system. Northern whites built colonies
in part on slave labor or the slave trade. In 1641,
Massachusetts was the first colony to make slavery
legal; and the state’s merchants and shippers played
important roles in the slave trade. Not until the
1780s did public opinion and court cases force an
end to New England slavery. In 1786 slaves made
up 7 percent of the New York population; not until
the 1850s were all slaves freed there. Moreover,
an intense political and economic subordination
of free African Americans followed abolition
(Higginbotham 1978, pp. 63–65, 144–149). As
Benjamin Ringer (1983, p. 533) puts it, ‘‘despite
the early emancipation of slaves in the North it
remained there, not merely as fossilized remains
but as a deeply engrained coding for the future.’’
This explains the extensive system of antiblack
discrimination and ‘‘Jim Crow’’ segregation in
northern states before the Civil War. Later, freed
slaves and their descendants who migrated there
from the South came into a socioeconomic system
already coded to subordinate African Americans.