American Colonization Society”
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GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE: “COLONIALISM IN REVERSE” AS PRACTICED BY THE “AMERICAN COLONIZATION SOCIETY” From Thomas Jefferson’s NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA (an excerpt selected by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze in his RACE AND THE E NLIGHTENMENT): “This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.... Among the Romans, emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining, the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.” HDT WHAT? INDEX GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.” — George Bernard Shaw HDT WHAT? INDEX GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE 1770 The specialist in natural history under whom Samuel Taylor Coleridge would study at Götingen from 1798 to 1799, Herr Professor Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, laid the groundwork for Nazi racial thinking first by classifying the human races into 28 varieties and then by attributing the differences between these varieties to varying sorts of degeneration or deterioration, on account of influences of gender, of geography, or both gender and geography, from a uniform originary white male standard. However, while he coined the term “Caucasian,” at this point the term “Aryanism” had not come into being — and, this theorist at this point was presuming Semites to be a part of the white race.1 As [Martin] Bernal has argued in one of the most interesting parts of [BLACK ATHENA: THE AFROASIATIC ROOTS OF CLASSICAL CIVILIZATION. VOLUME I, THE FABRICATION OF ANCIENT GREECE 1785-1985 (London: Free Association Books, 1987, page 220)], the curious and disturbing fact is that the rise of professional scholarship and the transmutation of knowledge into the different forms of academic disciplines, decisively established at the University of Göttingen (founded in 1734) and then in the new University of Berlin and elsewhere, was intimately bound up with the development of racial theory and the ordering of knowledge on a racial basis. As [Edward W.] Said observes, “What gave writers like [Joseph Ernest] Renan and [Matthew] Arnold the right to generalities about race was the official character of their formed cultural literacy” [ORIENTALISM: WESTERN REPRESENTATIONS OF THE ORIENT (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978, page 227)]. The blunt fact that has even now not been faced is that modern racism was an academic creation. What we are dealing with here is the dominance of racial theory so widespread that it worked as an ideology, permeating both consciously and implicitly the fabric of almost all areas of thinking of its time. This racialization of knowledge demonstrates that the university’s claim to project knowledge in itself outside political control or judgement cannot be trusted and, in the past at least, has not been as objective as it has claimed; the university’s amnesia about its own relation to race is a sign of its fear of the loss of legitimation. But that was Germany. In America, already at this point, the Reverend Samuel Hopkins, who in April of this year become the pastor the 1st Congregational Church at Newport, Rhode Island, was suggesting a program to train black missionaries so as eventually to begin a mass repatriation of American blacks — back to Africa 1. Refer to THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL TREATISES OF JOHANN FRIEDRICH BLUMENBACH [1775-1795], edited and translated by T. Bendyshe and published by the Anthropological Society in London in 1865 and to Young, Robert J.C. COLONIAL DESIRE: HYBRIDITY IN THEORY, CULTURE AND RACE (London: Routledge, 1995, page 64). HDT WHAT? INDEX GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE where they belonged. This continent of course needed to belong to its white people. LIBERIA For some reason we keep forgetting that the original reason we didn’t like slavery was that we didn’t like black people. One wonders why we keep forgetting that. The contemporary scholar Lewis Perry has characterized this American Colonization Society, on page 9 of his RADICAL ABOLITIONISM: ANARCHY AND THE GOVERNMENT OF GOD IN ANTISLAVERY THOUGHT, as the antebellum political organization which most successfully arranged a political marriage of convenience between the American white racists and the American antislavery crusaders. He has used the example of Friend Benjamin Lundy to illustrate just how lacking in influence the antebellum antislavery crusaders actually were where they were unable to forge this political bond with their strange bedfellow, the white American who hated and feared black Americans whether they were enslaved or free. Samuel J. Mills of the American Colonization Society summed everything up when he wrote in his memoirs published at the point of his death in 1820 that “we must save the Negroes or the Negroes will ruin us.” “Historical amnesia has always been with us: we just keep forgetting we have it.” — Russell Shorto THE AGE OF REASON WAS A PIPE DREAM, OR AT BEST A PROJECT. ACTUALLY, HUMANS HAVE ALMOST NO CLUE WHAT THEY ARE DOING, WHILE CREDITING THEIR OWN LIES ABOUT WHY THEY ARE DOING IT. Someplace Else “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE 1815 Friend Paul Cuffe’s interest in Africa stemmed in part from his father’s having been born there. The success he achieved as a captain of color, with black crews, was evidence of the black expertise thought essential to the redemption of Africa. In this year, at a personal expenditure of $4,000, Cuffe took nine free black families in his ship Traveler to settle in Sierra Leone. This voyage, and his financial success, anticipated ideals later associated with black nationalists from Henry Highland Garnet to Marcus Garvey. And this complex man, like Bishop Henry M. Turner later in the century, was certain enough of his own vision to risk association with the American Colonization Society, whose motives regarding the return of blacks to Africa were, in black leadership circles, highly suspect. HDT WHAT? INDEX GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE 1816 The American Colonization Society was formed, out of illustrious dignified white patriots such as Francis Scott Key and Henry Clay, to “rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous, portion of its population.” HDT WHAT? INDEX GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE Christmas Season: During this holiday season at our nation’s puzzle palace in Washington DC, Virginia congressman Charles Fenton Mercer was founding what we now refer to as the American Colonization Society, the “American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color in the United States.” Africa for Africans, America for Americans — what an excellent Christmas present from the Christ child! As the Reverend Robert Finley of Princeton University put the matter, “Every thing connected with their condition, including their colour, is against them, nor is there much prospect that their state can ever be greatly ameliorated, while they continue among us.” The Brits had done this, in Sierra Leone, so why couldn’t we? The movers and shakers in this new benevolent association included: LIBERIA The American Colonization Society Speaker of the House of Representatives Henry Clay Representative from Virginia John Randolph Representative of New Hampshire Daniel Webster Secretary of the Treasury William Harris Crawford Attorney General Richard Rush Author of “The Star-Spangled Banner” Francis Scott Key General Andrew Jackson Justice of the Supreme Court Bushrod Washington The agenda of this association was the lightening of America. The plan had been urged by Thomas Jefferson, who knew the value of enlightenment, as early as 1777, and the legislature of Virginia had been advocating it since 1801. Supreme Court Justice Bushrod Washington would function as the 1st president of the society and his immediate successors would be signer Charles Carroll, signer James Madison, and Speaker of the House Henry Clay. Congress appropriated ten millions to the sinking fund. HDT WHAT? INDEX GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE needs his Freedom needs his Africa HDT WHAT? INDEX GO BE FREE, SOMEPLACE ELSE The city of Baltimore had begun, in this year, to illuminate (lighten?) some city streets with gas lights on light poles. By December some night streets in London were also being thus brightened, and the envoy John Quincy Adams, witnessing this, has recorded that the illumination seemed “almost too dazzling for my eyes.” The police in particular liked this lighting and began to explore the ever-popular project of relocating crime from well-to-do districts which could afford street lamps to poor districts which could not. As one authority of this period put the matter: Without presuming to play on words, I regard gas as essential to an enlightened police. The 1st theaters to be presumably mainly lit by coal-gas rather than oil or candles are said to have been the East London Theatre and a theater in Philadelphia. Gas of course offered a measure of dimming control, but it also generated heat, and toxic gases which caused headaches, eye discomfort, and sore throats. So now we have an enlightened planet: The talk of New-York and Boston during this month was an arson-for-profit scheme that had just been exposed in the course of a lawsuit against an insurance company that had been refusing to pay out on a policy. A New Jersey judge was suing in regard to the supposedly accidental loss of his home, and the insurance company was responding in court that it believed the home had been set on fire by a slave at the judge’s instigation. The legal outcome was hinging on the admissibility of the testimony of that black man.