Search

Over the past 40 years a tradition of Marx interpretation has built up around a single passage concerning Black slavery in an 1853 letter from Marx to Engels, in order to demonstrate that Marx's support for emancipation was conditional on the level of 'civilisation' attained by Black slaves. I will argue that this interpretation, which attempts to prove Marx's racist defence of slavery, is overdetermined by an inattention to historical context and a hypersensitivity to Marx's nineteenth-century epithets. This is important because the alleged anti-Black racism of Marx and the place Black workers occupy in his historical-materialist vision of class struggle are of the utmost significance for properly conceptualising the relationship between Marxism and Black liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Blackest Thing in Slavery Was Not the Black Man" by Eric Williams, edited by Brinsley Samaroo, is a book that expands on Williams's thesis from his previous work, "Capitalism and Slavery." Williams argues that racism was a consequence of slavery, rather than its cause, and explores this idea from the period of slavery to the late twentieth century. The book examines the development of racism in Europe and the New World, the experiences of Indigenous people and African slaves, the contributions of the Church to the slave trade, the challenges faced by people of African descent after emancipation, the emergence of Asian immigration as a new form of slavery, and the origins of the Black Power Movement. The book provides a hemispheric perspective and serves as a primary source of Williams's intellectual thought in his later years. [Extracted from the article]

Scholars tend to regard enslavement as a form of disability inflicted upon the enslaved. This paper confronts the irony that not all black Atlantic peoples and religions conceive of slavery as an equally deficient condition or as the opposite of freedom and other rights that are due to respected human beings. Indeed, the religions of enslaved Afro-Latin Americans and their descendants—including Brazilian Candomblé, Cuban and Cuban-diaspora Ocha (or Santería) and Haitian Vodou—are far more ambivalent about slavery than most scholars and most Black North Americans might expect. In these religions, the slave is often understood to be the most effective spiritual actor, either as the most empowering servant of the supplicant's goals or as the most effective model for supplicants' own action upon the world. These ironies are employed to illuminate the unofficial realities of both the Abrahamic faiths and the North American practices of 'freedom'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]