Slavery and Trump: the poison lingers

We’re about to commemorate, because celebrate really isn’t the right word, the fourth centenary of the introduction of slavery on the North American continent, in 1619.

The first permanent European settlement in Virginia was established in 1608. So it took just eleven years before they were importing slaves from Africa. 

Anyone in Britain who feels any sense of superiority over their American cousins over this should think again. Those settlers in Virginia were decidedly and entirely British.

By a curious coincidence, as a Brit myself, I’m reminded of this dismal past regularly in my new home in the suburbs of the Spanish city of Valencia. Not far from where we live, in a wheat field, stand the ruins of a farm building. On the intact wall, an artist has painted a black man raising his fist as he looks at a field in which he has, no doubt, been working and will soon be working again.

Even today, even in Spain, still yearning to be free

It’s a curious sight not only because it reminds me of the Africans taken to America, but also because Africans come to Spain each year for the kind of work the man in the painting does. They’re paid, of course, and they go home afterwards, so they’re not slaves. But free? I’m not sure men driven by economic necessity so far from where they live can really be said to be free.

The institution of slavery marked American culture profoundly. If you believe that a group of people is so debased, so inferior that it is perfectly possible to buy and sell individuals from it, and you treat them as cattle for the best part of two and a half centuries, how long will it take you to understand that they are no different from you and certainly no less valuable?

There is something shocking in the fact that a movement has to be called ‘Black Lives Matter’, as though that were some kind of surprising new discovery. The United States was founded on the proposition that all men are created equal. How is it a shock to discover that it really applies to all women as much as all men, and all blacks as well as all whites?

However, it seems that this truth is still a shock. The L A Times recently reported that one in a thousand black men and boys can expect to die at the hands of police violence. That’s two and half times more than their white equivalents.

In passing, those figures are bad enough entirely independent of race. Something like three people are killed by police each day in the US. So far in 2019, two have been killed in the UK, 1 in 2018. US police kill as many people in a day as the UK police killed in each of the last two years.

But above all, it is the contrast between black and white deaths that is particularly striking. It underlines why a movement called ‘Black Lives Matter’ had to be set up. There is still an indifference to the value of black life permeating US society, and in particular its power structures such as the police. I’ve quoted these words before but they’re worth quoting again, since they reflect how that indifference came from the very top of US society. This is Roger Taney, Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court in 1857, talking about slaves and their descendants, whether free or not, who, at the time of the Declaration of Independence:

…had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect…

Why is all this of any particular interest now? Well, it isn’t just because of the commemoration of the introduction of slavery. It’s also because, by an ironic coincidence, this is the week in which Donald Trump made his offer to buy Greenland from Denmark.

The Danes, sensible in their adoption of twenty-first century standards, and sensitive to the needs of the Greenlanders, dismissed this proposal as absurd. And Trump, far from admitting his error – and when will he ever? – responded by cancelling his planned visit to Denmark.

To him, what he was proposing was “essentially a large real estate deal”. That’s a far more telling statement than he and even most of his critics realised. Because he wanted to buy an entire country, including its 50,000 inhabitants. And that to him is just “real estate”.

Trump: buying and selling a nation and its people
is just a real estate deal

People who look or sound different from the ruling Anglos in the US just don’t matter to a certain section of those Anglos. They can be bought and sold like real estate, or indeed like cattle. They can no longer be enslaved as they once were, but it seems they’re still viewed as inferior can still be shot with casual frequency.

The poison that entered the US soul four centuries ago hasn’t yet been worked out of the system. It’s interesting that it still drives Trump’s attitudes. And isn’t it appropriate that this should be revealed in the week we commemorate its four hundredth anniversary?