Identity 2024: Race and Capital in the United States
Today, the United States finds itself in a perilous state; whether looking at the plight of the poor or our many communities of color (too often interchangeable), it is all but impossible to ignore the intersections that exist between the two as all except the most wealthy, educated, and socially insulated continue to slide deeper into the sucking mire of a dying nation.
The problem arises largely from a discussion we have been having for the better part of 150-years in the “Home of the Brave” and the “Land of the Free” regarding what the central identity of our nation truly is. Are we a people who have been pulling ourselves through every form of adversity with nothing but our brains, brawn, and balls? Are we a people who carved a place in the world using the bones, blood, and spirits of others as our primary tools? Are we a people who live on the crushed remains of millions who planted the first fields, followed the first buffalo, explored the high ranges and deep valleys, and established themselves some 15k-years – at least – before the first “white” man stepped foot on these rocky shores? Are we a nation of promise and purpose, or prescription and persecution? As far as we can tell, we are all the above.
This idea is what has led to the discussion we are having today: what is the identity of our nation and what does it mean that we cannot figure it out? How have we been melded and manipulated onto one side of the debate or the other throughout our lives and what are the implications for our current sociopolitical situation? What is our path forward?
Primarily, there are two conflicting premises at play in the development of the national identity of the United States: capitalist expansionism and racial independence. In terms of the former, our systems of organization are primarily and unflinchingly focused on the accumulation of unfathomably vast wealth within the highest tiers of society; the creation of an investor class of hereditary aristocrats who fulfill the executive functions of every facet of our economic, political, and social lives through sheer nepotism and inherited wealth/influence.
The latter, instead, is focused on the creation of unique racial identities (primarily regarding black and historically otherized communities) as the primary means of self-expression and in response to a domineering racial culture that stripped them of any identity other than that which they can forge for themselves. It is through racial pride and unity that marginalized communities will rise in spite of a mainstream which seeks to keep them “other.”
The interplay between the two is blatantly obvious to any who have even taken a passing glance at the affairs of the United States at any point in her short, violent tenure; the use of the African, Native, and Mexican as implements in the creation of the Aristocratic States of America, as vessels by which the labor of the poorest can be laundered into unfathomable wealth for the few at the top, is core to our history. Look today at the names which adorn every level of society – from road signs to libraries to government offices to malls; to lawyers, politicians, CEOs, and generals; cities, landmarks, and imperialist bases – the names of conquerors and occupiers an omnipresent reminder of the building blocks of the West, that which was intentionally and painstakingly stripped from the indigenous and imported Peoples to build the “Land of the Free.”
Today, we are at the headwaters of our future identity, staring down a mist-laden river that is simultaneously calm and turbulent, and attempting to negotiate what we’ve been told against what has been experienced as we venture to finally create something real from the “melting pot” that is the United States. What truly is the founding mythos on which we can develop a national identity when our founding principles were those of a unique group of ostracized lords who found themselves in a position of power and have since never relinquished it?
Race
It is undeniable and undebatable – although many often choose to do so regardless – that this country was founded on principles of racial inferiority for certain groups long before our supposed “founding” in 1776. For near two hundred years prior, European colonizers had already been developing and enforcing the fledgling racial caste system that was embraced wholeheartedly when the United States fought for its independence from England, and which we still feel the impacts of some 250 years later.
It cannot be denied that the United States would not exist as a country without chattel slavery to uplift the economic windfall that white, landowning families have since nurtured to obscene levels of incorporated wealth and influence. Slaves, stolen, sold, and imported into the Americas laid the literal foundations upon which our most “revered” institutions still stand to this day; their bones litter our monuments, homes, and fields in uncounted and immeasurable numbers, holding up the granite and marble that we ourselves hold in the highest regard.
In fact, the United States would not exist as it is today (if at all) without the explicit need to exploit the work and lives of millions of enslaved peoples. The “Revolutionary” War was indeed that, a revolt, but it is not remembered as it should be. For while we often talk about taxation and representation as our goals during that time, we intentionally leave out the aspects which still haunt us to this day: that the war was fundamentally triggered by, and fought over, the maintenance of slavery as the status quo and the importation of enslaved persons to the Americas.
Our “Founding fathers” were enslavers, owners of human beings and brutal extractors of capital. They stripped away humanity with whips and knives and laws and schools, establishing institutions that continue to hound us today such as standing armies/militias and now institutionalized, paramilitary police forces under the guise of “independence” and “self-determination.”
The question is for whom, what persons were included in the new “United” States? It sure wasn’t anyone who wasn’t a “white” (a dubious and up to that point largely nonexistent classification of person), land-owning male of economic means. So in the Revolution, who gained independence from whom? For what purposes was our founding national rending committed?
You need look no further than the context surrounding the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America to understand that race, as a novel and innovative method of social control, was a primary driver of the founding of the first United States. The most influential documents of our country – written in response to then-Royal Governor of Virginia John Murray’s threat to expand the British prohibition of slavery to her holdings in the Americas – outline a world for “all men” while the authors simultaneously espoused and realized beliefs of persons of color as literal pack animals; not, by definition, men or human at all. Our land-owning “founders,” finding England an existential threat to their fledgling empire and the socioeconomic interests of the budding aristocracy, found themselves in a situation in which all their eggs were laid in one racist basket and which their royal overseers now threatened to overturn.
These enslavers which we have enshrined in our national memory were, by even contemporary accounts, bastards who raped, pillaged, and subjugated those they deemed to be both racially and socially inferior. They created the slave codes which would eventually turn into the black codes which would turn into Jim Crow laws which would turn to drug and “community-safety” laws today. They used anxieties of weakened economic and racial superiority to stir fear in the aristocracy, committing them to a devastating war for continued ownership of human beings, the continuation of their importation, and the development of complex slave breeding programs to further insulate the practice in the economic destiny of the country.
Much as the Civil War is falsely recalled by some as a war for self-determination and social principles, the Revolution is falsely remembered as a war to establish our independence from over-reaching (read: evil) tyrants of the English aristocracy. And, while this is true to an extent (just as the Civil War was somewhat about socioeconomic independence for the South if you look at it through a race-critical framework) it must be remembered that the cornerstones of these calls for “independence” were predicated on the continuance of the vilest institution of degradation and torture that is chattel slavery.
It is upon these racial disparities and injustices that our national identity has been based on until very recently – and even then, too many still believe that whiteness is core to the US national identity. That whiteness and “American” are synonymous in our collective mind indicates just how damning those “revolutionaries” and their so-called principles were.
Class
The second half of the discussion relates to economic class, a nigh insurmountable topic that has been intentionally obfuscated over time to protect ruling class elites and their privileged lifestyles at the expense of all laborers regardless of inherent factors such as skin color, religion/ethnicity, philosophical creed, or any other sort of social orientation. In fact, it is clear throughout humanity’s history that these factors are inherently secondary themselves when placed next to the issues of class and the continual, cyclical development of capital-centric caste systems around the world.
For the United States, there are no shortage of examples of class interests superseding all else in the highest levels of governance and legislation. In fact, our two most well-known domestic conflicts both revolved around the class interests of a ruling class horrifically dependent upon the use of inhumane chattel slavery for their continued economic survival. The “Revolutionary” War was led by fledgling aristocrats whose economic wellbeing was unerringly dependent upon labor abuses of a lower socioeconomic caste of Peoples they deemed unhuman. In fact, the view of people/communities of color as something other than human was the fundamental principle that linked the ideas of race and low economic prospects for the entirety of this country’s history, the earliest Slave Codes ordaining that people of African descent were not to be viewed in the same light as those who labored under indentured servitude laws and could – as such – enslaved in perpetuity for the economic wellbeing of their enslavers.
Similarly, the Slavers’ Rebellion was likewise founded upon the economic sustainability of a region dependent upon enslavement of peoples who were demeaned as subhuman based upon the economic demands of their enslavers. Both the Black Codes that preceded the conflict and the Jim Crow regime which followed were explicit in their exclusion of Black people from the larger economic system of “white” people – a fluid and ethereal designation that was quick to change for Italians, Germans, and Irish immigrants as Blackness became the predominant socioeconomic designator in the country. It is clear in hindsight (as well as in contemporary accounts) that the primary cause of the “Civil” War was the economic pressures that would follow the humanization and empowerment of those they kept and viewed in the same lens as livestock. In their minds, a system built upon the free labor of enslaved people was a fundamental economic right upon which empires of capital had been founded for 150 years at that point; to take that away would mean the (justified) collapse of large sections of the agricultural markets of the South.
Following their demise and the less-than-thorough cleansing of the land of racist capital owners, the southern states were quick to reinforce their economic stranglehold over Black populations through restricted access to fundamental aspects of their newfound citizenship. Namely, the inability of these communities to access economic and legal recourse that would stretch until this very day and which prohibited the accumulation of wealth in Black communities.
Identity
So where do we go when looking for our national identity? We cannot (and MUST not) look to those who “founded” this country and put in place the very systems which continue to oppress to this day as their interests were, and are, not those that we value today. It must be admitted that the entire concept of “race” – something which did not exist in any meaningful sense prior to the subjugation of millions to chattel slavery – is a simple mechanism designed solely to further the economic interests of elite families and institutions for near 200 years prior to our “founding.”
Yet, we must admit that, like it or not, race has become and inherent part of our social identity in the United States; it is impossible to view any issue as unrelated to race and try as we might, we similarly cannot erase the biases the concept has embedded in our social systems. We continue to see the waves created by our enslaving forefathers in laws which solely exist to limit the growth and stability of communities of color such as redlining, drug laws, employment bias, disenfranchisement (both legal and implicit), and restricted access to the most basic and fundamental systems that other communities need not even ask to access.
Despite these facts, the beautiful irony is that there is only one culture which is solely a product of the United States: that of Black Americans. No matter where one looks, the effects of planting these peoples on foreign lands, stripping them of any sort of original identity – names, religions, languages, or community – has reverberated across time to create the only identity which can be seen as of the United States.
Founded in isolation and in spite of concerted efforts of European efforts at “civilization,” Black American identity is one based completely upon experiences relative to those who sought to keep them economically impotent from the moment the first Black foot stepped foot on the red soil of the South. It is the only identity which is truly founded upon the principles of the Declaration and the Constitution, these communities those who truly believed in the words and derived hope from the promises held therein. Whereas White colonizers knew what they were doing in their drafting of these documents to exclude Black people, Black communities saw them for what they should mean and saw the lies which underlined the ink before it even dried. When it was proclaimed that “All men are created equal,” the enslaved knew the truth even as their enslavers denied it: they are human and are owed the promises of our fundamental legal documents.
Who We Are
Today, Black culture is omnipresent and flourishing despite the best efforts of regressive institutions to brand it as degenerate. No matter where one looks, the identity of the United States is completely inundated with the influences of Black communities from fashion to media to our contemporary beliefs in fundamental rights and principles; all is informed by the experiences of those who have never stopped fighting to collect on the promises of their nation.
Yet, many of these influences are, like so much else, things taken, extracted from Black souls and Black bodies; things created by them which are now “mainstream” with little to no input from Black creators and communities on how their individualities are manipulated in pursuit of goals beyond their reach and which are not concerned with their lives.
Similarly, and perplexingly in opposition to this identity, is that of class. Leftist and progressive politicians and scholars have found themselves largely lost in a quagmire of race-/class-reductionism that ignores the intersectional realities of communities which have been subjected to abuses on both accounts. It is impossible to extricate race and class in this country without first examining how the former was created in direct interest of the latter. Race is a social identity developed explicitly for the purpose of denying economic opportunity to a class of individual for no reason beyond the enrichment of another. Without a recognition of this, we are doomed to continue the same negative spiral that splits the greater movement toward social and economic protection for all into a self-cannibalizing discussion of interrelated grievances.
When seen through the eyes of the elite, there is no difference between Greenwood, OK and Blair Mountain, WV. The United States is Black and poor, that is our identity, and until we realize that there is no extricating the two in a system such as ours, Leftist and Black Liberation will continue to be seen in false-contradiction.
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