I spent a good three months reading stuff that would give me a clearer idea what scholars of racial capitalism mean by that phrase. This has been a year of book burning, so far only figurative. Nikole-Hannah Jones released a book version of her 1619 Project which centers slavery in the founding of the United States and the wave of vitriol surrounding that is not just a dishonest effort by hungry politicians to distract voters from their failure to sponsor meaningful policy. (Oh! Look! Hayley's Comet!) It is an actual fear that white supremacy will be exposed, that people of all races will see the central role that race has played and continues to play in the basic norms that govern this country. (Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!)
The panicked discussions of critical race theory, and the actual legislation multiple state legislatures passed to ban its teaching in the schools have been the other example. Never mind that most voters (actually, the overwhelming majority of voters) could not tell you what critical race theory even is. They have been stampeded nevertheless into fear that their own children might be corrupted by it. And when the politicians who harp on this terror are asked for specifics, they give the most vanilla examples of barely-liberal opposition to prejudice imaginable. One state legislator wanted to ban To Kill a Mockingbird!
It is worth mentioning in passing that many of these same politicians choose to absolutize their reading of the Second Amendment. The Supreme Court in this session is considering all state laws regulating the carrying of firearms, so that an Arizonan who is in the habit of going armed to shop for groceries can do the same when he visits New York City. In late November we saw another horrific school shooting. A fifteen-year old Michigan sophomore killed four classmates and wounded another six, plus a teacher, with a semiautomatic handgun given him by his parents. But our "conservative" politicians think the danger to our kids is learning history. (I always thought conservatives loved history.) And the First Amendment? Well, apparently that doesn't apply to the teaching, reading or writing of history.
Critical race theory looks at the ways in which racial distinctions and barriers have been cooked into our Constitution and laws. Racial capitalism does something a little different. It shows how all of capitalism has been based on the moral license to abuse and exploit people who have already been set off as other. How this changes socialist theory is a discussion for another day. It certainly sheds a different light on the relationship between race and class than I have seen before.
So, back to Robert G. Parkinson's Thirteen Clocks: How Race United the Colonies and Made the Declaration of Independence. It has been less than a week since I first saw a reference to this book but I already can't remember who cited it or in what context. The book was published in May. It is a popularization (and abridgment) of his 768-page The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution. Parkinson did not uncover a new and unread archive. Instead he read every page of every newspaper published in colonial America during the period leading up to Lexington and Concord and then the following two years through the Declaration of Independence and Washington's victory over the Hessian mercenaries in New Jersey in the winter of 1776-1777.
Parkinson demonstrates the absolute centrality of racial panic in uniting colonists who were otherwise divided by fault lines of social class, north/south, and coast/frontier. Some of the hair-on-fire stories in the colonial press are still remembered today, such as the offer by the Royal Governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, to emancipate enslaved people who became soldiers of King George. Some of them, mostly forgotten now, were well known then. Some never even happened but spread from paper to paper at the time. Honestly, all of them can be summarized by the final - and in the view of the Continental Congress most egregious - grievance in the Declaration of Independence, which says:
He has excited domestic Insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes and Conditions.
"Domestic insurrections" was at that time uncoded language and it referred to rebellion by the enslaved. In other words, the American revolutionaries felt that the biggest danger facing them were Black and Native people. Remember, there were Black people in the Revolution from the beginning. That includes sailor and dockworker Crispus Attucks who was shot dead by British soldiers in the Boston Massacre of 1770. That includes Andover, Massachusetts militiaman Salem Poor who was celebrated for having killed the British commanding officer, James Abercrombie, at the Battle of Bunker Hill in June, 1775. The same can be said of Natives. Hundreds of Stockbridge Mohicans arrived to harry the British column returning to Boston from Concord and they stayed for Bunker Hill, Saratoga, and Valley Forge. None of these examples are intended to disparage the Black and Native people who fought alongside the British. The entire subsequent history of the United States argues that their skepticism of the rhetoric of freedom and rights was not misplaced.
But it is Parkinson's reading of the racial panic in the American press and in the Declaration that really got my attention. He chooses to see it as a decision by the patriot press and leadership - Adams, Jefferson, Washington, etc. - to use racial fears as a means of uniting the disparate colonies, classes, and regions around whiteness and racial fear. He contrasts it with the bogeyman of the violent Hessian mercenary, a scary figure which appeared as soon as the German troops were reported en route, but which disappeared from the patriot press immediately after Washington defeated them on Christmas 1776 at the Battle of Trenton. He argues that the Continental Congress was prepared to offer (the white) Germans citizenship in the new nation if they switched sides.
So all Parkinson's research documents the absolute centrality of race in forging the unity of the thirteen new states. More than human rights, more than republicanism, more than opposition to unfair rule, he shows that whiteness - as against Native and Black people - was the basis on which the colonies declared independence and forged a nation. But then he reduces it almost to a publicists' trick. He devotes great time and attention to the ties between the editors and the politicians and to the ways in which stories posted in one newspaper found their way to others. He calls this emphasis on whiteness a contingency, a decision by the patriot leaders.
I will simply say that they wouldn't have found it so useful if it weren't essential to their identity. I will simply say that I believe Parkinson proves that America at its founding was designed as a racial state.
