domingo, 15 de octubre de 2017

How American Oligarchs Created the Concept of Race to Divide and Conquer the Poor

How American Oligarchs Created the Concept of Race to Divide and Conquer the Poor

 By Courtland Milloy
/ washingtonpost.com


Oct 11, 2017

While teaching U.S. history at a public charter high school in
the District, Julian Hipkins III noticed that students tended to assume
that “race” was as old as mankind. “Almost like it was natural, a
given,” as he put it.



So, using some specialized lessons, Hipkins helped the students
explore the invention of race and the reasons for it, as laid out in
colonial law. Especially the Virginia slave codes enacted between 1640
and 1705.



Question: How did wealthy landowners thwart the efforts of enslaved
Africans and European indentured servants to join forces in a common
struggle for economic justice?



Answer: Divide and conquer through the invention of race. Make the
white servants feel superior to black slaves by virtue of skin color;
manipulate poor whites into believing that any perceived gains by blacks
had come at their expense.



“I started by having students get together in groups and think up
laws that could be used to separate one group of people from another and
laws that would make one group of people feel superior to another,”
said Hipkins, who taught 11th-graders at the Capital City Public Charter
School in Northwest Washington.



The students, reluctantly, brainstormed. And when Hipkins showed them
how similar their concocted laws were to actual slave codes, some of
the students recoiled in disbelief. “They said, ‘You made that up!’ ”
Hipkins recalled. “I said, ‘No, those are actual laws.’ They said,
‘That’s crazy. Somebody actually sat down and wrote those?’ ”



Students eventually homed in on the essential question: Who stood to
benefit from such diabolically inspired disunity among people whose
economic interests were so intertwined?

 How American Oligarchs Created the Concept of Race to Divide and Conquer the Poor