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“The key to understanding the contrasts between the slave system of the United States and that of the Caribbean and Latin America…
probably lies in variants in the emphasis upon enforced acculturation of the slaves to their inferior status in the social system for the sake of long-range social stability.
The higher frequency of open rebellions and the higher degree of retention of obvious Africanisms in the Caribbean and in Latin America were not the result of the liberal racial attitudes of the Latin colonizers,
but of the lack of concern about socializing a population which was looked upon as an expendable commodity to be quickly used up and then replaced.
In colonies where there was a high rate of absentee ownership, less attention was paid to socializing the slaves because there was less concern from absentee owners about the long-range stability of the colony.
In St. Domingue, it was the colonial authorities who looked out after the long-range interests of the colony and clashed with the planters who had a get-rich-quick mentality.
In nineteenth-century Cuba, the opposite was true. The stable creole planter class of Cuba favored an end to the African slave trade for the sake of internal stability,
while government officials, allied with Spanish commercial interests, preferred to get rich quick by protecting the
illegal African slave trade, regardless of the long-range interests of the colony.”
illegal African slave trade, regardless of the long-range interests of the colony.”
“In contrast, there was great concern in the English mainland colonies to promote social stability and minimize the danger of slave uprisings.
African-born slaves were often seasoned or trained to function in the slave system in the British West Indies before being brought to the mainland.
The planter class thought of itself as American and, especially after the American Revolution, of the United States as its permanent home. By the early nineteenth century, the African slave trade played a relatively minor role in replenishing the slave population.
Slave-breeding, especially in the border states, was encouraged if not forced. The slave system enjoyed very favorable conditions for the procreation of an American-born slave population during the nineteenth century.
Cotton, the major crop, was conducive to child labor. There was abundant land for the cultivation of food crops and the expansion of the slave system.
Most of the slaves were American-born, forcibly acculturated from birth, and lived on small estates with their owners, allowing for more frequent contact between master and slave than was common on Caribbean slave plantations.”
“Any social system relies, in varying degrees, upon the carrot or the stick, upon manipulation or naked force.
If the exploited can be convinced that they deserve to be exploited and that they are powerless to end their exploitation, the social order can be maintained with a minimum of strife.
Because the slaves were looked upon as a necessary, permanent part of the population of the United States, racism was…designed to keep the slaves passive enough to insure the survival of the system, regardless of what the real relationship of forces might be at any given moment”
Just a comment. The white lady who wrote this (and many others after her) have misinterpreted this to mean anti-Blackness is somehow worse or deeper in the u.s.a. than elsewhere. That's not true…it's just different.
For one, the context in which this distinction is being made is one in which slaves in the Caribbean were being both imported *and* slaughtered at faster rates. It's not right to call that a better collective condition than "investing" in more prolonged psychological control.
They are two sides of the same system. It's not the carrot *or* the stick—it's the carrot *and* the stick. Obviously, outright physical violence still underlies the u.s. slave system, & psychological violence still does the same elsewhere. The differences are in emphasis…
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