The White Establishment - Part I

By Vusi Moloi © 2008

The White Establishment – Part II
The White Establishment – Part III

Preamble

The beautiful and enviable country of Canada is a democratic society with a thriving market economy based on the Anglo Saxon system of racial capitalism. This means three things i.e. (1) you must be capitalized in order to exploit the opportunities of this great society, (2) you must be English and male in order to gain easy access to the privileges, or failing which, (3) you must be well connected to the English establishment in order to increase your statistical probability of being inducted into a life of economic privilege. I have spent more than enough years of my life as a disenfranchised outsider, observing, researching and analyzing this great society. Come with me as I demonstrate that the original concept of the White Establishment as it exists here in Canada and USA was intended to protect and economically empower the overseas English worker while excluding the non-English like the Irish, the Scotts, the Dutch, the Indians, the Africans and others using race as a differentiator. This fundamental fact will help to peel away at what is otherwise a veiled system.

The Genesis

The current English system of racial capitalism is a relay from the previous economic system of racial slavery. The Roman Empire, which practised slavery, did not practise racial slavery. All slaves were considered equal and some of them were able to rise within their ranks to become great warriors of the Roman Empire like the celebrated African Roman General and Governor Lusius Quietus of Morocco who ruled the land of Palestine. In fact there are three African natives who became powerful Popes of the Roman Catholic Church like the Holy Father Pope Saint Gelasius I 492 AD, the Holy Father Pope Saint Miltiades 311 AD, and the Holy Father Pope Saint Victor I 189 AD. This was possible partly because the Roman system of slavery was not based on race as was the case with the English. Historical accounts also show that in a little more than 200 years after Pope Saint Gelasius I, the African natives of North Africa under the formidable African General Tariq ibn-Ziyad occupied the entire region of Iberia (Portugal, Spain, etc.) in an outright military conquest for the next 800 years.

The current DNA projects confirm that many Europeans of this region carry African genes. In fact a British DNA project in 2007 uncovered some English citizens with African genes going back more than 400 years. Another earthshaking news was the discovery that the American Nobel Prize winning molecular biologist Dr. James Watson (discoverer of DNA) has African genes even though he was fired last year from a prestigious research institution Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a position he held since 1968, for his racist views that Africans were intellectually inferior. He declined comment after this discovery which was made by Dr. Kari Stefansson of the Icelandic company deCODE based on the analysis of the DNA of Dr. Watson.

How did we then transform from a period when Africans were the most respected and proud people to the current period when they are the most reviled? It all began in the 1600s in the Americas. The British Caribbean colony of Barbados was a pioneer in ushering a system of racial slavery together with the present day State of Virginia of America whereby Africans bore the main brunt of this brutal system. It must be noted that at first, the system worked like the Roman Empire slave system whereby the poor or convicted English, the "unruly" Irish, or the "compliant" Africans became bonded for a certain period after which they gained their freedom and some even owned property as well as their own enslaved persons. There are Africans who owned both Black and White enslaved persons but the laws were later changed banning the Africans from owning White servants or enslaved persons. It's noteworthy that the word “servant” was often times used as a euphemism for an enslaved person and this complicates the task of separating obfuscation from fact.

My suspicion of Barbados as a pioneer of racial slavery was triggered by the fixation of the topic of skin color when I met many good friends of mine from Barbados in the beautiful City of Ottawa, Canada. I quickly understood that skin color was deeply embedded in this island as a result of racial slavery which existed long time ago. The effects continue to reverberate to this day.


The British Sailors Claim Barbados

The British sailors claimed Barbados for the British Empire in 1625 and the English began to settle there in 1627. At first the island relied on the indentured labour of the English, the Irish, the Scotts, and others but it was not enough to support the colonial economy. In his article A History of Barbados, John Robert Moore tells us that it was on the advice of the Dutch and the Sephardic-Jews that England turned to West Africa for slavery.

The London Company Claims Virginia

Another pioneer of racial slavery is the present day State of Virginia which was taken away from the Powhatan Indian people in 1607 with the establishment of Jamestown. The Powhatans are linguistically part of the Anishnabe whose ceremonies I attended at Georgian Bay, Perry Sound near Muskoka in Canada as well as Nippising near North Bay. I pay tribute to the Anishnabe and the Ojibwe in my book A Goodbye To My Little Troubles in the poems The Great Nippising and The Holy Water of the Ceremony.

The Virginia Colony is important because this is where we find the first documented case of racial slavery which occurred in 1640. Three indentured servants, a Dutch, a Scott and an African known as John Punch ran away from their hard English master. They were later apprehended and hauled in front of the Virginia Court. The judge ruled that the Dutch and the Scott would serve four more years of their indentured contract. When it came to the African, the judge decided that John Punch would serve his master for the rest of his natural life. This legal instrument legitimized slavery based on race and the rest is history.

Initially the concept of whiteness pertained to the English. It was motivated by the constant revolts that plagued the island of Barbados. The Irish, the Scotts, the Dutch and others rallied together with the Africans to shake off their chains of bondage. The English masters saw this as a long term strategic threat to the continuity and survival of their plantations. At first, they tried using the status of being a Christian as a differentiator. A Christian status, at the time, meant English ancestry and was not confined to religiosity as it is today. Since Africans were considered “pagan heathens” it proved to be an effective filtering device. The Christian Irish were not recognized as such but were rather dismissed as papists. However, many enslaved persons converted to Christianity and gained their freedom this way. The English decided, instead, to use skin color as a filtering tool. One of the laws passed stipulated that a Christian status would not grant an automatic freedom to an individual despite the fact that the English law said that a Christian could not be enslaved.

The idea behind skin color was to discourage an English servant or enslaved person from revolting in solidarity with his fellow Africans, Irish and others. Suddenly the English master got an aha epiphany that he owed a patriotic obligation to his English servant to accord him the same rights and privileges as in England like a British subject. Moreover, King Charles II had decreed that all enslaved persons must be converted to Christianity and so the incentive of finding another differentiator was very strong. For a while this worked but not very well.

The problem with skin color was the difficulty in excluding other Europeans like the Irish. The English reluctantly expanded this concept of Whiteness to include other Europeans and it now came down to a privileged European on the one hand and a sub-human African on the other and thus an economy based on racial slavery was born in the 1600s. One of the laws passed by the Virginia Legislative Assembly said that a person’s status with respect to being held in bondage or granted freedom was depended on the mother and not the father as was the case with the English law. This was intended to further deprive many Africans of their freedom since the English, the Irish and others fathered African children.

South African Case of Whiteness

We have observed that the concept of “White race” was intended for the English and not other people of European extraction. We see the same case in South Africa were the Afrikaaners were not regarded as White by the English but rather as a people to be oppressed and colonized like the African natives. This is one of the reasons why the Anglo-Boer War of 1899 broke out in which the Afrikaaners suffered a humiliating defeat in the hands of the English using their superior firepower to crush the Afrikaaners into obedience. This resulted in war crimes through the concentration camps.

Although predominantly Dutch in their racial heritage, the Afrikaaners included a mixture of German, French, Scottish, Irish and to some extent African blood. A good example is the late leader of the South African Conservative Party Dr. Andries Treurnicht who had African blood in his genes despite being an extreme advocator of apartheid against the Africans, Indians and Kleurlings. During the apartheid rule of the late Mr. P.W. Botha, Dr. Treurnicht was always challenged by the tricameral parliament to take a blood test to prove his Whiteness and he refused. Many of the South African racial segregation signs like Whites Only were changed to read Europeans Only during British rule to accommodate the Afrikaaners because Whites Only excluded them at a certain point in history.

Formulation Problems of the Ideology of Whiteness

On the one hand, a skin color is predicated upon a biological determinant in a form of skin pigmentation. On the other, granting privileges based on a White skin is a social construct that lacks a biological determinant. For this reason, it’s impossible with the use of science and logic to establish a functional relationship between a biological determinant and a social construct. This is because a biological determinant is concerned with the survival of the organism whereas a social construct is concerned with the control of the organism.

To help motivate this point, let's consider the mathematical properties of an animal cell. For simplicity reasons, a cell consists of a membrane and a nucleus. The mathematical properties of a cell membrane are governed by a quadratic function while the mathematical properties of a nucleus are governed by a cubic function. That’s because the cell membrane is concerned with the defence of the cell by using a square area whereas the nucleus is concerned with the cubic volume of the cell.

In my book A Goodbye To My Little Troubles a poem The Cell Membrane articulates this fact:

“The membrane continues hankering
To pledge defence to the nucleus
To be a gatekeeper at the post
Vowing loyalty to the innermost”

Suppose we want to grow a cell to some arbitrary size. We could double the size of the cell by growing the membrane by a factor of two and apply the same principle to the nucleus. The cell has now doubled in size; right? Wrong! Actually this strategy falls flat on its face. Why is that? It’s impossible to grow a cell this way because you cannot build a mathematical relation between a quadratic and a cubic function. Any use of brute force to achieve this fails for the same reason.

Faced with this kind of impossibility, the original designer of the cell devised a work around solution which says that if a cell reaches a certain mass, it must divide and this is how the organism grows. However, this brilliant solution only works for the body cells but not for the brain cells. Not to digress, we shall leave it at that.

Attempting to use scientific reasoning (as in a Darwinist theory of survival of the fittest) to justify racial capitalism, the Whiteness ideology falls apart. However, that does not discourage its adherents from espousing it.


How then Does Racial Capitalism Thrive?

To understand how racial capitalism adapts and thrives we must look at its ancestor of racial slavery of the Americas.

The Business Establishment of Racial Slavery Used The Following Principles:

1. Absolute patriotism
2. Exploitation of intensive labour
3. Preemptive strategy against revolt
4. Stark contrast master servant relationship
5. Swift and extreme punishment for infractions
6. Punitive enforcement of compliance

The Business Establishment of Racial Capitalism Uses These Principles:

1. Hybrid patriotism
2. Exploitation of skilled labour
3. Gentle suppression of dissent
4. Low contrast master servant relationship
5. Swift and sometimes delayed punishment
6. Control of communication and publishing of ideas
7. Control of learning and implementation of ideas
8. Denialist response i.e. denying the existence or validity of alternative ideas and approaches

The Purpose of Racism

The purpose of racism, as already discussed in the article Obama’s Ground Troops Tackle the Last Frontier is not about hate but economic and political control.

Interestingly, racism is not the goal of racial capitalism but rather a by product of it. This is in line with the great African Caribbean scholar and former Prime Minister of Trinidad Dr. Eric Williams who wrote that racism did not give rise to slavery but rather slavery gave rise to racism.

Tactical Advantage

This by product of racism lends a tactical advantage to racial capitalism by serving as a powerful distracter from the real issues of economic rights. When the highly competitive Boxing Champion of the World Evander Hollyfield clashed with the most feared Mike Tyson, he was told by his handlers to tie Mike Tyson down. Hollyfield won that fight. Tying somebody down is a strategy that allows a boxer to undercut his more powerful contender so that the contender never gets to unload his explosive blows upon him. This strategy is a function of time in that, if done long enough, it drains the strength out of the opponent by creating a sense of frustration and anger resulting in extreme aggravation that leads to both physical and mental exhaustion. Any explosive behaviour that vents the pent up anger lacks the discipline of strategic thinking and only serves to disadvantage the revolting individual as opposed to advancing his liberating goals. The tactical advantage of this approach of tying somebody down is that, it effectively paralyzes what is otherwise a great warrior.

Racism has the ability to achieve this by proving to be an all powerful distracter which elicits an emotional response to what is otherwise an intellectual challenge. Racism is like the white pieces on the chess board in that it goes first to occupy the center stage. The black folks are forced to react which makes it a political response and yet the motivation behind racism is not political but rather is about economics. There are two critical things about the chess board i.e. the last white square is on the right of the contending players while the first black square is on the left side and the white pieces must go first in order to occupy the center stage. Already, this represents a psychological as well as a strategic boost to the white establishment. It becomes an uphill battle on the part of the black pieces to recapture the center stage once the white pieces have advanced. That is precisely the point. It must prove too formidable for anyone to reverse what is seemingly a natural course of events.

In her book The Cress Theory of Color Confrontation an eminent African American psychiatrist Dr. Cress Frances draws an analogy between the subject of race and a game of chess. She underscores the fact that since the white pieces must go first, it reflects the white supremacist philosophical thinking on the part of the white folks. Dr. Frances attributes this to the fact that a white person is endowed with a recessive gene which is not capable of producing adequate levels of melanin and this recessive trait causes the white person to feel threatened by the possibility of becoming extinct as a race. This is because skin color is a biological adaptation that enhances the survival of the organism. To counter this strong possibility of extinction, a white person resorts to a white supremacist behaviour as demonstrated in a game of chess where it’s required, as a matter of rule, that a white piece must go first before a black piece.

The internationally acclaimed chess master and a legend in his own right was an English man Howard Staunton. The type of chess played today (particularly in a professional tournament) is modelled after him. He was the best of the best in the strategy of the game. Many rules and strategies including the English opening are credited to him. An Irish American and America’s best chess master Paul Morphy challenged Staunton in an international chess game. The English master refused to play the Irish challenger. Some observers of the day remarked that the English master could not bear the thought of the possibility of being whacked by an Irish descendent.

It was in the mid 1800s when these ideas of giving a strategic advantage to the White pieces crystallized but the concept itself of distributing privileges on the basis of color had started more than
two hundred years before.

Obfuscator

I worked on a software project that involved a virus. My task was to reverse engineer this malicious code in order to create a solution against it. I created a lab of three computers and after taking a sample of the virus from the client, I released it into the lab. While the virus performed its gymnastics, I observed its behaviour and discovered that its bytes had been packed and encrypted using an obfuscator. An obfuscator is a software that makes it impossible to discover the original code of a software. The purpose of an obfuscator is to protect the intellectual property of the software engineer. In this case, the virus creators had stolen the obfuscator to conceal their malicious code.

Racism uses this technique of obfuscation to make it impossible to discover its original design goals of economic control. The people that have no clue about its obfuscation react incorrectly while it’s accomplishing its task. The intellectual property which the architects of racial capitalism are attempting to protect is the reason for its existence.

Economic Rights

Another thrust of racism is to disclaim and deny economic rights to the employees. People are supposed to think like everything is there by fate and if it does not happen, it was never meant to be. A Canadian film maker has created a very interesting documentary of the economic struggles of the South American people. In this documentary, South American people claim a share of the company they had been working under for a certain length of time. If the company does not properly compensate the employees, then the employees can claim ownership of this company. This is a concept of economic rights where people’s labour counts for something in terms of the ownership of the company. Racism or frustration arising out of it diminishes this kind of analysis so that a victim feels disenfranchised and powerless against a powerful establishment of racial capitalism.

Conclusion

We have demonstrated that the original goal of the white establishment was to dissuade an English servant in the British colonies of Barbados and Virginia from participating in the revolt against plantations along with the non-English servants who worked on these plantations. Those goals have found their way into the modern Anglo Saxon system of racial capitalism with the exception that the non-English are heavily encouraged and co-opted to serve and defend the white establishment. Does the advent of President-Elect Barack Obama signal the beginnings of a post-racial society?

About the Author

A former South African Television Journalist, Vusi Moloi is a published author of a contextual poetry book, A Goodbye To My Little Troubles, and maintains a blog, "Zulumathabo" on the Internet. In addition to writing, Mr. Moloi also works as a software engineer.