Encyclopedia of Sociology

AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDIES

THE DEVELOPMENT OF AN ANTIBLACK

IDEOLOGY

Truly racist ideologies—with ‘‘race’’ conceptual-
ized in biologically inferiority terms—appear only
in modern times. St. Clair Drake (1987) has shown
that in the Greek and Roman periods most Euro-
peans attached greater significance to Africans’
culture and nationality than to their physical and
biological characteristics. Beginning with Portu-
guese and Spanish imperialism in the fifteenth
century, a racist ideology was gradually developed
to rationalize the brutal conquest of the lands and
labor undertaken in the period of European impe-
rialism (Snowden 1983).

The system of antiblack racism that developed
in the Americas is rooted deeply in European and
Euro-American consciousness, religion, and cul-
ture. Europeans have long viewed themselves, their
world, and the exploited ‘‘others’’ within a paro-
chial perspective, one that assumes European cul-
ture is superior to all other cultures, which are ripe
for exploitation (Ani 1994). For the colonizing
Europeans it was not enough to bleed Africa of its
labor. A well-developed anti-African, antiblack ide-
ology rationalized this oppression and thus re-
duced its moral cost for whites. As it developed,
this ideology accented not only the alleged physi-
cal ugliness and mental inferiority of Africans and
African Americans, but also their supposed im-
morality, family pathologies, and criminality. No-
tions that African Americans were, as the coloni-
al settlers put it, ‘‘dangerous savages’’ and ‘‘de-
generate beasts,’’ were apparently an attempt by
those who saw themselves as civilized Christians to
avoid blame for the carnage they had created. As
historian George Frederickson put it, ‘‘otherwise
many whites would have had to accept an intoler-
able burden of guilt for perpetrating or tolerating
the most horrendous cruelties and injustices’’
(Frederickson 1971, p. 282).

CREATING WHITE WEALTH WITH

BLACK LABOR

In his masterpiece The Souls of Black (1903), the
pioneering sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois anticipat-
ed current research on the significance of African
Americans for U.S. prosperity and development:

‘‘Your country. How came it yours? Before the

Pilgrims landed we were here. Here we have

brought our three gifts and mingled them with

yours: a gift of story and song—soft, stirring melo-

dy in an ill-harmonized and unmelodious land; the

gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilder-

ness, conquer the soil, and lay the foundations of

this vast economic empire two hundred years

earlier than your weak hands could have done it;

the third, a gift of the spirit’’ (Du Bois 1989 [1903],

pp. 186–187). The past and present prosperity of

the nation is substantially the result of the en-

forced labor of millions of African Americans

under slavery and segregation.

Under common law, an innocent individual

who benefits unknowingly from wealth gained

illegally or by unjust actions in the past generally

cannot, if the ill-gotten gains are discovered, claim

a right to keep them (Cross 1984, p. 510; Williams

1991, p. 101). A coerced taking of one’s posses-

sions by an individual criminal is similar to the

coerced taking of one’s labor by a white slaveholder

or discriminator. Over centuries great wealth was

unjustly created for white families from the labor

of those enslaved, as well as from the legal segrega-

tion and contemporary racist system that came

after slavery.

Some researchers (see America 1990) have

examined the wealth that whites have unjustly

gained from four hundred years of the exploita-

tion of black labor. Drawing on James Marketti

(1990, p. 118), one can estimate the dollar value of

the labor taken from enslaved African Americans

from 1620 to 1861—together with lost interest

from then to the present—as between two and five

trillion dollars (in current dollars). Adding to this

figure the losses to blacks of the labor market

discrimination in place from 1929 to 1969 (plus

lost interest) would bring the total figure to the

four to nine trillion dollar range (see Swinton

1990, p. 156). Moreover, since the end of legal

segregation African Americans have suffered more

economic losses from continuing discrimination.

For more than two decades now the median family

income of African-American families has been

about 55 to 61 percent of the median family

income of white families. Compensating African

Americans for the value of the labor stolen would

clearly require a very large portion of the nation’s