Revisiting the Jordan Thesis: 'White over Black' in Seventeenth-Century England and America

Abstract

Karl E. Westhauser [*] seems natural that African-American studies and global studies should invigorate and reinforce each other. After all, it was globalization that led the enslavement of Africans in the Americas in the first place, while Americans were among the first recognize how much global thinking could contribute social progress, through the Pan-African vision of Du Bois, Garvey and others. Yet one scholar has recently lamented a provincialism in analyses of the global African experience and says that scholar-activists should begin take note of what has happened those communities in the African diaspora that have a long history of settlement in Europe. [1] This article takes up that challenge by comparing and contrasting early developments in race relations in England and America, presenting original research in the light of works published in the last thirty years, especially Winthrop D. Jordan's classic 1968 study, White over Black: American Attitudes towards the Negro 1550-1812. [2] Comparison with England demonstrates that the development of racism was not a phenomenon unique America. Racism spread virulently during the early modem era and became pervasive throughout the Atlantic world. Yet there also developed in England an alternative way of seeing race relations, best described as a multicultural vision. Multicultural vision, past as well as present, affirms some fundamental truths about race that continue challenge racism. One of these truths is that race is not a biological fact of human difference but a cultural artifact, a way of seeing ourselves. Another is that racism contains an element of choice on the part of those who would see themselves as white. If whites have failed make other choices, it is not because alternatives have been lacking, even in the seventeenth century. It only gradually dawned on me, writes Winthrop Jordan, that discover the origins of American racism, he would first have trace the development of English attitudes toward Africans. Out of this necessity comes one of White over Black's great virtues. Jordan demonstrates that English ideas about people were fluid well into the seventeenth century, grounding the rise of racism in contingency rather than the certainty of hindsight. He thereby enlarges awareness of the of human About the 1620s, English attitudes toward blacks began crystallize and a stereotype began emerge. The critical step, however--the debasement of blacks and the equation of blacks with slavery--came only as a result of the American colonial experience. The concept of over black became law in Barbados in the 1630s, in New England in the 1640s, and in the Chesapeake in the 1660s. According Jordan, the concept of white over triumphed throughout the English-speaking world in t he second half of the seventeenth century. [3] Jordan's Bancroft-prize-winning study tells only part of the story, however, for it remains the story of American attitudes only. Although the story begins in England, Jordan provides no comparative perspective on the Americas once the cycle of debasement in slavery and prejudice in the mind was underway. As white Americans settled down the business of importing and working slaves without effective challenge or even effective questioning of the rationale underlying the institution, so Jordan settles down to obtain satisfactory answers as the way it operated. Since Jordan did not presume write a history of racism on both sides of the Atlantic, it is understandable that he leaves us infer that further developments in England were of no consequence the catastrophe unfolding in America. We would be wrong, however, suppose them of no consequence our understanding of that catastrophe. So overwhelming does the triumph of American racism seem in isolation that it obliterates any sense of t he possibilities of human experience. …