Race and ethnicity
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KimslectureonCapitalismandRacelesson2.docxLESSON 2 COURSE MATERIALS: Capitalism and Race
Protestant Work Ethic Lecture
You’ve been reading about the connections between capitalism and racism, as well as classism, sexism and heterosexism in Allan Johnson’s Privilege Power and Difference, so I thought that I might make that connection a bit clearer for you by helping you to
think about the conditions that led to the founding of our nation.
The mythology of our nation says that we are a nation that was founded by European
immigrants, who leaving the tyranny of the Roman Catholic Church, came to what is
now called the North American Continent and settled the rough and woolly land the
native inhabitants had not appreciated enough to develop. The story we tell about who
we are does not treat the indigenous peoples (Native Americans) as if they had been
here for thousands of years before Europeans ‘discovered’ this land. (How one can
discover someone’s living room I’ll never understand.) But there were people living here
when the Puritans (this is the term that the European settlers used for themselves,
referring to their religious practice) were red, and the Europeans brought Africans with
them as part of sailing crews, so right from the beginnings of what became the United
States, there was a multi-racial, multi-cultural population, contrary to what most of us
are taught to conceive.
These Puritans left so that they could find a place where they would no longer
experience what they perceived to be religious discrimination from the Church, and so
when they landed, they formed their governmental structures based on their religious
beliefs. So we must understand a bit about these beliefs if we are to understand how
our current belief system (beliefs about what it means to be an American) began. Have
you ever heard of the phrase The Protestant Work Ethic? Let me explain a bit about this
concept.Under theology of reformers or protesters against the Catholic Church’s corruption, thinkers like John Calvin of Calvinism fame, really hated that the Catholic Church had spent centuries by this time selling “places in heaven.” In response to this practice, Calvin and others developed a theory which we refer to as Predestination. According to the theory of predestination, there is something like only 144,000 (I’m not being precise here on purpose) places in heaven. Along with this understanding, comes the belief that when God created the world, being omniscient—knowing everything that ever has happened and ever will happen—He knows who will end up in heaven and who will not. The thing is, we humans on earth don’t know. But if you are setting up a society based on religion, knowing who will end up with God and who will end up with Satan could be valuable. But they also believed that God’s ways are not known to man, so they had to come up with a human way of telling who was good and who was bad.
Now think for a minute. If you had moved to a new continent covered with forest that the indigenous peoples had just left in their natural state, (a sure sign of the natives’
laziness and lack of progress), what would your community need more than anything
else? The community would need labor to clear the land and turn it into farms and cities.
So if the land was ‘just there for the takin,’ ‘cause the indigenous people had not divided it up among themselves in terms of lots of land, then any land that a European settler cleared became his. He owned what he could work. Thus, work became the prime commodity and the prime quality upon which a person could be judged worthy or not.
This is the basis of the term Protestant Work Ethic. This ethic says that good people
value their relationship with God, family and their community, and that there were ways
to show that you valued these and ways to show you didn’t. If you truly valued these
things, you would spend the majority of your time doing one of two activities, working
and praying. It was easy to tell if you were working—land would be cleared, buildings
would be built, crops would be planted and raised. We still have sayings today like, “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” It was not as easy to see who was praying effectively, except to watch people coming and going from Church. So the good people went to Church very publicly—often drawing attention to their attendance—and they showed signs of hard work—they cleared/owned lots of property. This easily began to be understood as the good work hard, the bad are lazy.
Pretty soon, what began to matter more than whether or not you actually prayed was
that public attendance at church, and what began to matter more than whether or not
you actually cleared all that land yourself was how much you owned. Soon, we began to judge whether or not you earned one of those 144,000 seats in heaven by how much
you owned—the good are rich, the poor are bad. These attitudes were transferred not
only to individual people, but to entire groups of people. Those groups of people who
tend to be rich are generally thought of to be good people and are generally understood to have earned their money through hard work, and therefore are moral, upstanding people. Those groups of people who have historically not been rich are generally thought of to be bad people and are generally understood to be lazy and therefore immoral, evil people. And because of the racialized nature of labor in the early history of what has become the U.S.A., these assessments of who is good and who is bad as also been racialized. We can all name stereotypes for Blacks, Asians, Indians, Latinos. What about for Whites?
We can see that here in the old US of A we still judge people according to this standard. ‘The homeless are just lazy. They could get a job if they wanted to.’ ‘I work for a living. I’m not going to give out my hard earned money to those bums.
But getting back to the concept of labor and goodness, if you no longer had to do the
work yourself to be deemed good, then the best people became rich without doing
much at all but sitting in the church and socializing. How did they do this? Servants!
At first there were indentured servants of all creeds and colors. The poor or criminals
back in Europe were often offered the chance to a new life in the colonies if they first
worked for a rich person for a number of years without pay. This went for Africans, and
indigenous people were also turned into servants. But once there were several
settlements up and down the coast, the white servants could run away to another
settlement and blend in with the other settlers, the indigenous knew the land and could
leave and not be found. But with Africans, they weren’t on their home turf, so they didn’t know the land, and their skin made them stick out, so there was no blending in with the next settlement. Blacks offered the perfect solution. At first African servitude as indentured—after the agreed upon period of time was up, the servants gained their
freedom. But eventually the nature of African servitude was changed. Blacks were not
being granted their freedom after the agreed upon time period and were not being
enslaved for the duration of their individual lives, but the institution of chattel slavery
was born. Under chattel slavery, not only was an individual slave a slave for life, but so
were the offspring of that enslaved person.
The first laws instituting slavery were laws against women and Blacks. British Common
Law was patriarchal in nature—things were passed down from father to son throughout
the ages. But new laws were passed in the new lands that stated that in the case of a
child being produced from the mixing of races, that the status of the child shall follow the case of the mother. This allowed for a White man to buy one Black woman and create his own labor force by having as many offspring as he could by raping her, raping her daughters and raping her granddaughters. This is the main reason that African Americans come in so many different ranges of skin shade. Not only were these
children of their masters a ready labor force, but they were property that could be sold
for monetary gain. White men could legally sell their own children. White women were
for the most part ‘protected’ and watched so closely by White men that there often were not opportunities for the women to have relations with men of color, particularly Black men. We still create in White women the myth that Black men are out to get them. This still works to the advantaged of White men.
