Bad Labeling
I have never been formally educated in “Critical Race Theory”. I have of course, spent some time trying to understand it, and to see through all the “noise” made by those who decry it.
The “debate” seems to me to be a lot like “Defunding the Police”. That’s a lousy label for taking a close look at how we spend public funds to protect our society. Do we really want Police officers to be our “front line” for mental health and addiction? Do those police officers want to be on that front line? I think all of us would agree that those cases put good officers in positions that others are better equipped to handle. Re-evaluating why we use heavily armed and protected officers for that, and to direct traffic, or enforce evictions isn’t a slam on those who protect us from dangerous criminals. But the word “defunding” is a challenge – bad labeling.
Academic Lens
Critical Race Theory isn’t a political label. No one is holding up “CRITICAL RACE THEORY” banners at the Black Lives Matter rally, or anywhere else for that matter. It is an academic lens for focusing study, a way at looking at our history to determine what happened. There are forces that drive us: our behavior, our legislation, and our economics, that are beyond individual efforts and biases. Critical Race Theory is a way at looking at how that happens.
Here’s an example. Most of the American Founding Fathers were slave owners, or benefitted from slavery. Madison, Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, Hancock, Jay all had economic connections to slavery. But the “philosophers”, particularly Madison, Jefferson and Hamilton, truly believed that slavery would disappear in the next fifty years. They did “kick slavery down the road” for the next generation to solve (they banned the slave trade, but not for twenty years). But they believed it was a solvable problem by that next generation. Madison saw the “Three-Fifths Compromise” as a step towards that – “three-fifths” is better than “zero”. Then something changed.
Cotton Picking
Cotton was grown in the South. It was an important cash crop to the Southern Planters, not so much for the Virginians, but in the deeper South of Georgia and South Carolina. And while we all know about the “Triangle Slave Trade”, the trading ships of the North also took cotton to Europe, where it was sold for other goods and brought back to the America. So right after the American Revolution, the South and the North were vested in cotton.
But cotton has two characteristics that make it difficult to grow. First, the cotton plant takes nutrition from the soil. Unlike other plants, such as soybeans and peanuts, it does not return nutrition. After a few years of use, the cotton yield of a field drops. It takes years of other crops for that field to regain its nutrients after cotton. But all of that didn’t matter before the 1790’s, because cotton was so hard to clean.
Growing and picking cotton is labor intensive. But even after the cotton is picked, each individual piece of cotton must be cleaned of cotton seeds. Someone could pick cotton all day, but it would take that same person all-night to clean what they picked. So the plant itself was self-limiting, a planter could only grow so much, because only so much could be cleaned.
The slave owning Founding Fathers didn’t see cotton growing as the ultimate reason for slavery. In fact, Thomas Jefferson found himself unable to free his slaves, not just because of his “need” for their labor, but because they were the collateral for the money he borrowed. The enslaved people were guarantors of his repayment, and Jefferson was deeply indebted. Regardless of his personal beliefs, he was unable to act upon them. (I’m not offering that as some absolution of Jefferson – just the fact of his situation).
Remove the Cork
What changed? An invention by Connecticut gunsmith, Eli Whitney. He visited a friend’s plantation, and saw the enslaved people working late into the night, pulling the seeds from the cotton. So he designed a hand-cranked machine, a series of combs, that removed the seeds. Now instead of hand cleaning a pound of cotton a night, the machine could clean fifty pounds. (By the way, Whitney wasn’t trying to make “life better” for the enslaved. He saw that he could make a lot of money by building his “engine”).
The “cork” was out of the bottle. Planters could grow as much cotton as they could plant. But now they needed more workers – enslaved people – to plant, tend, and pick the cotton. With the seeds no longer the hold up, profit was based on the number of workers available. And the money was rolling in.
Except that the land would wear out, and so the Planters continually needed new land. The territories of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana and Arkansas had great land for cotton. The planters went, and they took their “cotton engines” or “gins”, and of course, their enslaved people to work the land.
They moved into the coastal areas of the Mexican province of Tejas as well. And when the Mexican Government outlawed slavery – they rebelled and set up their own nation of Texas. (That’s not necessarily what your Eighth Grade American History book said – protecting slavery makes the Alamo a lot less “romantic”).
No Clean Hands
But the North had their stake in cotton as well. Much of the early manufacturing in the Northern states consisted of textile mills – weaving the Southern cotton into cloth. The industrial revolution opened the manufacturing flood gates, and the demand for Southern cotton increased astronomically. The Northern industrialists wanted to buy the cotton, the Southern planters wanted to grow cotton, the new railroad magnates in both North and South were making money by moving that cotton.
The only group that didn’t benefit from cotton were the enslaved Black people. That “next generation” of American leaders weren’t interested in emancipation. Their future was vested in cotton profits, and cotton profits depended on enslavement. And while a growing minority of Americans were in favor of ending slavery, the “money” was definitely on cotton, and thus the continuation of enslaved labor. It was critical to the cotton industry, and cotton was “King”.
A Civil War
So when the new Republican Party, voiced by Abraham Lincoln, demanded that slavery should be restricted to the current slave states, it meant that the current cotton model would fail. And that’s why the Southern leaders saw the Republicans and Lincoln as the ultimate threat – to enslavement, and as importantly, to cotton. This was more than the individual racist views of American leaders. This was a founding industry built on the backs of enslaved peoples. Those people were Black – and that’s an issue that Critical Race Theory examines.
After the Civil War, the cotton industry still needed the laborers. So, instead of enslavement, share-cropping developed which trapped the worker to the land. The state governments backed that up in law, first with the Black Codes and then Jim Crow, keeping the now-freed laborers in the fields. If they couldn’t have slavery, then share-cropping was the next best thing.
So the legal and economic reasons to treat Black people different than others continued after emancipation. How those restrictions have continued into our present is another area that Critical Race Theory examines.
Of course racism was a part of our history. Whenever one race holds another as subordinate, that racist. But that racism also crept into our institutions and laws, and became part of our economic foundation. As it took hundreds of years to take root, it will take time to uproot. To say that isn’t to call “everyone” racist, but it does say we are all obliged to dig in our own gardens.
So that’s your history lesson for the day. I hope you don’t feel “violated” – somehow contaminated by this analysis. It’s just a way to examine our history, and how that history still impacts us today.
