Global History of White Supremacy and Anti-Blackness.
By Dr. Nicole Caridad Ralston and Alisha Keig
Dr. Isabel Wilkerson calls the U.S. a caste system because of the racial hierarchy people in power invented. In this hierarchy, Black people and people close to Blackness are positioned at the bottom, white people and those in proximity to whiteness at the top, and all other racial groups are categorized according to this dichotomy. In this country, there are real life and death consequences related to the darkness of one’s skin or the lack of European features and characteristics. Because of these arbitrary categorizations and man made hierarchies, communities of color experience discrimination within discrimination as they manage colorism amongst their own racial groups while coping with racism across American institutions. Colorism is a tool of White Supremacy meant to divide communities of color by pitting light-skinned people against their peers with darker complexions to distract from the real oppressor: white people in power. For the Black community in America, this is a vestige of slavery, where enslaved light skinned people typically worked in the house, closer to the master, while enslaved dark skinned people worked out in the fields. Colorism is central to the establishment and maintenance of caste systems in places like modern day India, these systems dating back thousands of years. There are examples of this in the Latinx, Asian, Indigenous, and Caribbean communities as well. The roots of colorism are deeply entwined with the roots of anti-Blackness and White Supremacy, a carefully constructed mythology that has long lasting impacts in our world.
In order to understand America’s present-day racial hierarchies, we have to take a trip back to 15th century Portugal. In the mid 1400s, Prince Henry the Navigator desired to dabble exclusively in African slave trading so he commissioned Gomes de Zurara, to write “The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea”. In his writing, Zurara describes skin color from “fair to look upon” to “black...and ugly”. Zurara was clever as he deliberately grouped all enslaved Africans from different tribes and ethnicities into one single race to create his hierarchy. According to Dr. Ibram X Kendi, to create a racial hierarchy all one has to do is create a race and establish it as “good” or “bad”. Zurara plainly associated blackness with negative qualities to justify African enslavement.
When white people colonized North America they adopted this racialized caste system and further developed it. The British “founded” Jamestown, Virginia in 1607 and a mere 3 years later massacred the indigenous Paspahegh people by destroying their entire village and killing over 65 Paspaheghs. Several years later, history tells us that after Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, Virginian lawmakers legally distinguished between white and Black people giving poor white people new rights and status and permanently enslaving Africans (including their descendants) through “hereditary slavery”. In 1671, the Oxford English Dictionary began referring to “white” as an adjective, and in the early 1700s Carl Linnaeus “locked in” racial hierarchy in “Systema Naturae” by“color-coding” races as white, yellow/tawny, red, and black placing white at the top of the hierarchy.
White colonialists in America devoured these theories and used them as justification for unthinkable acts: enacting some of the deadliest forms of African enslavement in the world and the systematic genocide and forced removal of North American Indigenous communities. All of this to “clear the land” for white communities to claim what never belonged to them. Many immigrants (including those from predominantly European countries and those fleeing countries destabilized by U.S. imperialism) that entered the United States in the 19th century experienced xenophobia. Immigrants coming to the United States were fleeing to a colonized land riddled with unwritten societal norms for systematically disenfranchised people in proximity to Blackness. These immigrant communities were feared, despised, and hated until they eventually learned the patterns of assimilation: actively distance oneself from communities with dark skin toward communities closest to whiteness. One of the (many) groups that experienced the more violent ramifications of xenophobia were (and continue to be) our Asian, Pacific Islander, and Desi American (APIDA) community members.