E Pluribus Unum

Issue: E PLURIBUS UNUM AND THE END OF RACIAL IDEOLOGY

Your Role: Please Consider JUDGING OTHERS BY THE CONTENT OF THEIR CHARACTER NOT THE COLOR OF THEIR SKIN

Following Louis G. Gregory's example, begin to consider the human race as one. Consider Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s advice to judge others based on the content of their character not the color of their skin. Try to describe the friends, siblings, parents without reference to their Race, but by the content of their character. Try to get in the habit of early America and describe others without reference to Race as we all "unlearn" this unscientific ideology.

LOUIS G. GREGORY'S EXAMPLE: SPOKE OUT AND LIVED HIS LIFE TO TEACH THAT WE ARE ONE HUMAN RACE

In 1937, Louis Gregory wrote "The divisions of mankind upon the basis of physical features are due to fancy rather than reality …  All the so-called races of mankind are mixed races, the mixing being a process which continues more rapidly today than in past cycles and ages … However much opinions and emotions and customs may dominate human thoughts, the scientific world of today which reaches conclusions upon the basis of facts, is entirely agreed that there is no proof to establish the superiority of one racial group over another."

BACKGROUND: 350 years may mark the end of "white" and "black" in America

In America prior to Bacon's Rebellion we lived without "Black" and "White". We have planters of African Descent and planters of European Descent, indentured servants and enslaved from Africa, we had Europeans who were indentured servants and living in un-freedom.

In that kind of world, distinctions between by continental origing are of course made. But very few people talk about Africans as being stupid or dull or ignorant or dirty or lazy. When they speak of Anthony Johnson [a planter of African Descent] there may be disdain in their voice, but generally it is that perhaps he is too clever, he is manipulative. He is untrustworthy. He is a little bit too smooth for them. But somebody like Anthony Johnson has been so successful that it would be foolish to denounce him as stupid or lazy or unproductive.

Many historians point to an event known as Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 as a turning point.

Bacon organized his own militia, consisting of Europeand and African indentured servants and enslaved Africans, who joined in exchange for freedom. A power struggle ensued with Bacon and his militia on one side and Berkeley, the Virginia House of Burgesses, and the rest of the colony’s elite on the other. Months of conflict followed, including armed skirmishes between militias. In September 1676, Bacon’s militia captured Jamestown and burned it to the ground.

Virginia’s wealthy planters were shaken by the fact that a rebel militia that united European and African servants and slaves had destroyed the colonial capital. Legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes:

The events in Jamestown were alarming to the planter elite, who were deeply fearful of the multiracial alliance of [indentured servants] and slaves. Word of Bacon’s Rebellion spread far and wide, and several more uprisings of a similar type followed. In an effort to protect their superior status and economic position, the planters shifted their strategy for maintaining dominance. They abandoned their heavy reliance on indentured servants in favor of kidnapping more Africans.

After Bacon’s Rebellion, Virginia’s lawmakers began to make legal and ideological distinctions between “white” and “black” inhabitants. By permanently enslaving Virginians of African descent and giving poor European indentured servants and farmers some new rights and status, they hoped to separate the two groups and make it less likely that they would unite again in rebellion.

It is not simply enslavement that transforms notions of race. It is this plantation enslavement, the advent of the forced-labor plantation and disciplined, exploitative labor that begins to transform notions of race.

But once those legal distinctions disappeared and Americans in the northern states wanted to maintain the social distinctions, they created a whole other set of institutions which are eventually called segregation. Moreover, since the line between "black" and "white" was no longer hedged by the institution of slavery, they had to create other fences, other barriers to make sure they couldn't confuse a "white" and a "black". After all, "black" people were now citizens of this nation. They had all of the rights of citizens; Northerners had to find ways to either eliminate those rights or to make sure that they were not exercised.

And of course this unleashes an enormous amount of violence, violence that is in some ways implicit in the institution of slavery, but must be explicit in maintaining the distinctions between "whites" and "blacks" in the post-Emancipation world. And the more competitive that "blacks" become with "white" people, of course, the more dangerous they seem.

One of the interesting things is that many of the institutions that develop in the post-Reconstruction United States had their origins not so much in the slave South but in the free North. It is in the North where the first system of segregation first begins. It is there where race riots first appear.

"E Pluribus Unum" was the motto proposed for the first Great Seal of the United States by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson in 1776. A latin phrase meaning "One from many," the phrase offered a strong statement of the American determination to form a single nation from a collection of states. How do we now approach the racial ideology created following Bacon's rebellion?