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Racism as mere excuse for greed
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Americans have struggled mightily since the nation’s birth to overcome racial prejudice. Recently, as symbolized by President Obama’s ascendancy and his message of racial reconciliation, we have basically succeeded and are now healing from our racial wounds. Or so the story goes. In “A Dreadful Deceit,” the distinguished historian Jacqueline Jones vehemently rejects this redemptive and self-congratulatory narrative. She believes that the country’s racial problems have little to do with racism and everything to do with economic exploitation. And, she claims, we have not even begun to come to terms with this.
Jones is the author of numerous books, including “Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow,” which won the Bancroft Prize in 1986. This new book, a sweeping account of the role of race in American history, is structured around the stories of six extraordinary but largely unknown individuals, each of African descent. The six stories, told in vivid detail, are fascinating. Yet Jones’ book is a call to renounce the very idea of race as a dangerous misconception. Racial ideologies, she argues, are like mob violence and discriminatory laws — merely tactics used to secure material advantages.
So the refusal of white colonists to recognize black claims to equal liberty was not premised on racial considerations, Jones argues, but on naked self-interest. She acknowledges that intellectuals like Thomas Jefferson were moved to reconcile Enlightenment values with slavery. But most propertied white men didn’t see a need to justify their dominance apart from citing their economic interests, the same interests that led them to exploit Indians, poor whites and women. A racial justification for slavery emerged only in the 19th century, in response to Northern abolitionists.
Similarly, Jones describes early-19th-century white working-class hostility to blacks as springing from economic competition. “By keeping blacks in menial jobs permanently,” she writes, “whites might reserve new and better opportunities for themselves and ensure that someone else did the ill-paying, disagreeable work.” From the colonial settlement to the Civil War, she says, racial ideologies played only a minor role in sustaining white dominance.
Jones acknowledges that “whiteness” functioned as a powerful idea during Reconstruction. But racial ideologies were “remade” at the turn of the 20th century, when blacks were imprisoned or killed as sexual and criminal deviants in order to prevent them from joining forces with poor whites against white elites.
Moving into the present, she attributes contemporary ghetto poverty and its associated ills to a lack of jobs for low-skilled workers. Black subordination no longer requires racial myths to perpetuate it. Vulnerable blacks can be defrauded, imprisoned, disenfranchised and left to die in floodwaters without appeals to race.
A core theme in “A Dreadful Deceit” is the contradictory depictions of blacks. They are at once lazy, childlike, stupid and submissive, but also murderous, calculating and subversive, intent on stealing white men’s jobs. Jones regards this lack of coherence as evidence that a conception of inherent racial difference has not been a driving factor in the way whites have treated blacks.
And she laments the preoccupation with battling these myths, which she believes too often obscure the pressing need to address material inequality.
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