In the beginning

Valerie Fitzgerald

(Disclaimer: This information is accurate to the best of my knowledge, but I am not a historian, archaeologist, or any other kind of expert.)
As I considered how humans developed a racial hierarchy, I found myself going all the way back to the beginning: the Big Bang. In his book, "Astrophysics for People in a Hurry," Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote: “Every one of our body’s atoms is traceable to the Big Bang and to the thermonuclear furnaces within high-mass stars that exploded more than five billion years ago. We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out – and we have only just begun.”
About 4.5 billion years ago, Earth was formed. Life on Earth evolved over millennia. The first humans are thought to have existed in the area we now know as Africa about 315,000 years ago. Climate change and drought drove humans to near extinction some 60,000-90,000 years ago. This led them to migrate to different locations.
As human beings migrated out of Africa to colder parts of the world with less sunlight, their skin pigmentation mutated in order to maintain vitamin D3 production in the skin. This evolution is thought to have begun over 20,000 years ago.
In "The History of White People," Dr. Nell Irvin Painter describes how, since antiquity, the peoples of Eurasia warred with, conquered, enslaved and tortured each other. She devotes a chapter to White slavery and gives a nod to the Romans. However, Dr. Painter observed that my Norwegian ancestors, the Vikings, were “preeminent slavers” in Europe from the fifth to the 11th century. My Irish ancestors may have become acquainted with them a thousand years ago: “It is said that Dublin was Europe’s largest slave market during the 11th century.”
Dr. Painter describes how Africans came to be enslaved in the Americas. “We still recognize Prince Henry the Navigator (1390-1460)… he sent Portuguese sailors into the Atlantic and down the cost of West Africa… Fairly soon the Americas, especially the Caribbean islands, proved so productive that sugar making became synonymous with America – and with African slaves.”
Meanwhile, Britain and the Virginia Company trafficked Europeans to the Americas. Homeless children, poor women, indentured servants, convicts or political prisoners, all were essentially sold or traded into labor or servitude in the colonies during the 1600s. Slavery and oppression were business as usual.
In "My Grandmother’s Hands" Resmaa Menakem wrote: “Back then, no one used the term 'white people'… Instead, there were English, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonists, and members of Indian tribes, such as the Pequot, Narragansett, Wampanoag, and Mohawk. It was only in the late 17th century that white Americans began in earnest to formalize a culture of white-body supremacy.”
Bacon’s Rebellion was a critical event that took place in the 17th century, 100 before the Declaration of Independence was signed. In "How the South Won the Civil War," Heather Cox Richardson wrote: “Nathaniel Bacon, a new arrival from England who was well connected and wealthy but frustrated at his lack of authority in the colony,” pulled together lower income colonists, including free Black people. They marched on Jamestown, the colonial capital of Virginia, and burned it down.
In response to this insurrection, “the Tidewater elite set out to preserve their control over the colony’s government, and thus over its economy and society. To do that, they began to split the lower classes apart along racial lines. They pushed Indians off their land and enslaved those who fought back. From 1670 to 1715, colonists enslaved between 30,000 and 50,000 Indians. Entire tribes disappeared, and white farmers moved onto their lands.”
Bacon’s Rebellion led to a set of laws called the Slave Codes of 1705. These laws benefited people of European descent, and removed rights previously held by Black colonists and Indigenous people. As Heather points out, “Poor white men did not achieve actual economic and social equality with society’s leaders, but those leaders did not have to worry about challenges to their privilege. Their lower-class white neighbors got the benefit of believing they were on the same level as rich men, because they shared the same racial identity. They would not revolt, because preserving the distinction between themselves and slaves was more important than seeking political power.”
In 1776, the Declaration of Independence stated that all men were created equal. It was signed by men who owned enslaved human beings, and described Indigenous people as “merciless Indian Savages.” The revolution continued for five more years. In 1781, Britain surrendered.
The Constitution was signed in 1787 and ratified in 1788. Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution is known as the “slave trade clause.” It allows for the “Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit” until 1808. The Fifth Amendment forbid the government from taking “private property… without just compensation.” Thus, while the international slave trade was prohibited after 1808, private property in the form of enslaved humans was protected by the constitution.
The emerging American concept of freedom depended on excluding certain groups of people – enslaved people of African descent, Indigenous people, and women, for example. Heather wrote, “Since most white men could not conceive of a world in which men of color had rights equal to theirs – and they certainly didn’t think women did – they believed that the fact white men had equal rights meant that the nation was dedicated to the ideal of human equality.”
The 1800s would see a huge influx of European immigrants. Eastern Indigenous tribes were pushed westward. Dakota and Anishinaabe people in Minnesota ceded much of their land to the growing U.S. It was this America that my great-grandparents came to, hoping to build a better life for generations to come.
Valerie Fitzgerald is a clinical counselor who has worked in mental health care since 2011. She resides in Howe. This is the second in a four-part series. Read the others online at www.LongfellowNokomisMessenger.com.