The Institutional Legacy of American Slavery: Theological and Economic Entanglement
By Darvin A. Adams
Blacks have been in this country since 1619. For more than 200 years they provided free labor for the building of the economy of this nation. Blacks have helped to build railroads and fought in all the wars. In fact, in every way possible blacks have earned their place as full and authentic citizens of the United States. We are now more than a century and a quarter beyond chattel slavery and yet blacks are still struggling to win rights that are routinely given to citizens recently arrived from other parts of the globe. Racism is for black Americans an intergenerational problem that will not go away.
The goal of this particular essay is to provide a scholarly treatment within the economic backdrop of the history of slavery and racism in the United States. In particular, I envision helping readers to see systemic poverty as the abiding legacy of this dark history, which then, provides a helpful lens to understand the current disenfranchisement of Black Americans and the need for reparations. This essay also brings Black Liberation Theological discourse into Christian Ethics Today's attempt to unpack the painful and complex history of slavery in the United States through The Angela Project. This is not an easy task.
Given the current landscape of American racism and its economic ties to the practice of institutional slavery, I feel that a theological response is needed in regards to the growing conversations of privilege and reparations. By way of disentangling the theological and economic legacies of institutional slavery, I will begin unpacking the economic implications associated with the dehumanization of African slaves. As evidenced in the slavemaster's immoral treatment of the slave, there was a well thought out, economic plan in place. The strategic plan was designed to prosper the white slavemaster in such a one-sided way that Black people would always be economically-deprived. Because the white slavemaster believed that African slaves were not worthy of educational development and economic self-sufficiency, they strategically set in motion a plan to keep Black people oppressed. Hence, this essay attempts to describe what this dehumanizing and oppressive treatment looked like in the human spheres of theology, economics and physical torture. In presenting an accurate account of the history of slavery in the United States, I believe that a conversational turn to the development of the American economy is necessary. Here, there is an unspoken contradiction within the narrative of how the cheap labor of African slaves modernized the American economy; and the growing economic poverty of Black people who have been born, raised and identified as African Americans.
Historical Overview of African Enslavement
Edward E. Baptist's text, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, is the primary source for the argument that the African slave trade made a most significant contribution to the development of the U. S. economy. Baptist's text is factual in its estimation of how the American economy was developed and modernized through the efforts of African slave labor. Against their wills, African slaves were kidnapped from their native land and forced to work the slaveowner's fields so that the white master might profit. The moment in which African slaves were forced to come to the United States for labor purposes, white privilege was birthed in the religious lathers of white supremacy and Black dehumanization.
Baptist's account of institutional slavery in the United States describes how the slave was motivated and inspired to be productive in their work. Beaten to an inch of their lives within the cruelty of physical torture, African slaves either died as the result of punishment or they were frightened into working at a fast pace. Economically, Baptist's argument that the business of slavery represented an early version of capitalism is compelling because he explains how the slaveowner used his access to money to further his business and revive it. Hence, the purchasing and selling of slaves represented an economic transaction on behalf of the slaveowner. While I do not consider Baptist's account of slavery as his way of taking sides with Black Americans, I recognize Baptist's historical accuracy in telling the story of slavery in a way that it has never been told. It can be argued American slavery was more so a white economic doctrine than it was a white racist evil. Meanwhile at home, racism and poverty continue to be greatest problems of the twenty-first century in the United States. Due to the fact that institutional slavery carried harsh economic consequences for the African slave, Black Americans have suffered greatly over the last 400 years. As the faces at the bottom of the American economic well and victims of systemic racism, Black people have lived and died at the hands of economic poverty.
Theologian, J. Deotis Roberts, states that, “Slavery has an economic history.” “Slavery also speaks volumes about human history.” For Roberts, “The mix of ideologies among the colonists in the United States was to lead an uneasy conscience. On the one hand, there were Puritans who saw God's hand in the brutal institution. Their mission was to “civilize” and “Christianize” slaves, once they were assured that they had souls. But with a platonic dualism in mind they were able to separate the destiny of the body from that of the soul. With a strong Calvinist theology to support them, they could see God's judgment and power manifest in this evil system”. The mixing of religion, economics and politics paved the way for the white slave owner to exploit the African slave for the purpose of prosperity. The ideological intertwining of the slave owners' God-talk and the dehumanizing treatment of the slave's body provided enough substance to keep the majority of slaves in line.
Roberts writes that, “With the false notions of religious piety, economic charity and communal civilization firmly in place, the evil intentions of the “Jesus-loving” white interpreters were masked in the sacredness of their Bibles. Consequently, the white slave owners and slave masters saw every African as a heathen, and their task was to stamp out all African cultural survivals, religious or otherwise. Their mission was to prepare the Africans for heavenly rewards, with no regard for fulfillment in this life.” One of the major strategies of the slave owner “was the creation of “slave missions”: white preachers funded and regulated by white denominations, would be sent to black congregations. The proslavery sermons that slave missions delivered were the South's interior version of the arguments that were to be, beginning in the 1830s, increasingly projected at the region's exterior critics. Ministers developed a theological argument that claimed that Christianity justified slavery. They leaned on the apostle Paul, with his admonitions to servants to obey their masters. Increasingly, they also argued that a holistic view of the Bible showed that slavery was not sinful. In fact, they said, God had ordained that the Israelites, and white people in general, could enslave allegedly inferior “Hamatic” peoples (supposedly descended from Ham, one of Noah's sons), such as Africans, so long as they treated the latter with paternalistic goodness.” In his book, 12 Million Black Voices, Richard Wright summarizes how privilege influenced the mission of the white slaveowner:
And the Lords of the Land created and administered laws in the belief that their God ruled in Heaven, that He sanctioned this new day. After they had amassed mountains of wealth, the white master compared of our lives with the calm gentility of theirs and felt that they were truly the favored of God. The lyrical mantle of prayer and hymn, accordingly, justified and abetted our slavery; whenever we murmured against the degradation of the plantation, the Lords of the Land acted against us with whips and hate to protect their God-sanctioned civilization. For the white slave owner, their teaching the slave that slavery was ordained by God carried both religious and political implications. In addition to the fact that they believed in the oppressive power of their white God, the slave owner also wanted the Black slave to understand the politics of what it meant to be the property of white people. Inclusive to state laws, economic power, social favor and financial ownership, the political hegemony of the white slave owner juxtaposed their religious rite. The white slave owner believed that the material circumstances of their human dominance would influence what the Black slave believed about them and God.
According to Roberts, “The people who established the first colonies, in what is now the United States of America, were mainly British. They came for “errand in the wilderness” and with “a Manifest Destiny.” Like the Spanish, who led the conquest in the heart of South America, they had mixed motives, both religious and political.” These mixed motives have negatively affected the life of Black people living in the United States. The theological and economic entanglement of institutional slavery foreshadowed a legacy of racial (human) privilege and economic hegemony on behalf of the white slaveowner. Privilege, defined as the ideological mixture of motives within the practice of structural evil, not only affected the way slaves viewed their white slaveowner, but it also went a long way in defining how the slaves viewed themselves. Privilege for white folk meant that it would never be possible for Black folk to have cultural and human identities—only a physical identity. White privilege guaranteed the humanity of white folk in such a way that it unequivocally denied the possibility and purpose of Black humanity. Privilege was created as a means to the goal of racial dominance and cheap/free labor that financially prospered generations of white folk.
White Privilege and Black Poverty
Theologically, if “the moral burden of history requires a more direct and far more candid acknowledgment” of slavery's legacy, then it is imperative that we acknowledge the role of white privilege in guaranteeing the poverty of Black people in the United States. Without these historical acknowledgments, our theological reflections are misguided. It must be stated that the religious dimension of institutional slavery carried theological and economic implications. Even in their suffering, people of African descent have always believed in a Transcendent God as their source of spiritual strength. Put another way, religious belief has always been a part of the African worldview. As part of their religious worldview, many blacks believed that the end of slavery was God's liberating on behalf of oppressed people. Sadly, what Black folk came to realize was that the end of slavery was not the end of Black poverty. For many Blacks, the experiences of slavery and poverty followed them into the Reconstruction era and the twentieth century.
In his critically-acclaimed text, The Roots of Black Poverty: The Southern Plantation Economy after the Civil War, Jay R. Mandle argues that because the slave plantation was the main institution of civilized life in the southern parts of the United States, plantation agriculture was a hegemonic force in southern development up until the early to mid 1930s. According to Mandle, the poverty which plantation agriculture kept Black folk in gave way to many blacks migrating North for greater employment opportunities in the industries. Mandle's systemic understanding of how white economic control gave way to Black poverty in the South is nuanced in the dehumanizing oppression of slavery and the expansion of American capitalism. With the understanding that Black folk did not benefit from the practice of capitalism on slave plantation, Mandle is convinced that economic poverty represented white America's plan for Black people. According to Mandle, the residual roots of Black poverty were found in the African slave's experience on the master's plantation. Pointing back to Mandle's Post-slavery argument, Baptist proclaims that,
Because productivity was now declining instead of rising, and because of the political-economic situation that the South's white rulers inflicted upon their region in order to protect white power, the South sank into subordinate, colonial status within the national economy. Although many southerners wanted to develop a more diverse modern economy that went beyond cotton, for nearly a century after emancipation they failed to do so. Despite constant attempts to industrialize, the South could only offer natural resources and poverty-stricken laborers. It did not have enough local capital, whether of the financial or the well-educated human kind, and it could not develop it.
Although a textile industry sprang up in the piedmont of the Carolinas and Virginia, and an iron and coal industry in Alabama, they offered mostly low-wage jobs. Non-textile industries suffered in the competition with more heavily capitalized northern industries, which literally rigged the rules—such as the price structures that corporations used to ensure that Pittsburgh's steel would cost less than Birmingham's.
Extractive industries, including coal mining and timber, devastated the landscape and depended on workforces oppressed with shocking violence. The continued small size and poverty of the nonagricultural working class also limited urban and middle-class development. Thus, in the 1930s, a lifetime after the Civil War, the majority of both black and white southerners were poor and worked on farms—often farms that they did not own.
These economic realities give credence to Black poverty being a theological problem. The outgrowth of a system of idolatry that forced slaves to work for low wages prospered the white slaveowner. This outgrowth of a system of idolatry has also kept Black people in poverty. Following slavery, Black people remained in deep poverty as their employment options were limited to farmwork and other forms of cheap labor. Here, the implication is that Black people have an economic history in the United States of America.
The history of poverty in the Black community is a history of social and economic deprivation for Black people. Black Americans have been intentionally deprived of economic resources. It is also a history that is ensconced in institutional slavery as the labor of African slaves developed the American economy, prospered the white slaveowner and put into motion an American capitalist practice that has ensured the poverty of Black people. When one thinks about the poverty of Black Americans, one must consider how the economic implications of institutional slavery formulate our perspectives on slave labor. The economic implications of institutional slavery formulate our perspectives on slave labor in four distinct ways:
1. They shed light on how African slavery in the United States dehumanized and tortured millions of Black people for economic and racial reasons.
2. They affirm that the totality of African slave labor developed and modernized the local, regional, national and world economies.
3. Within the exploitation of slave labor, they reference the practice of capitalism as the gateway to financial expansion and white economic hegemony.
4. They elucidate the fact that Black people's modernizing of the economy of the United States merits a particular type of economic treatment.
Repairing Systemic Black Poverty
Disappointingly, the economic treatment of modern-day, Black people does not line up with the work done by their ancestors in creating a profitable and valuable economy in the United States. Not only does the United States owe reparations to Black families for years of hard labor and infrastructural development, but there should also be financial relief in the form of economic resources and employment opportunities available for those inner-city Black families that suffer from economic poverty and post traumatic slave syndrome. Because of slavery's exploitation of Black people, there is an economic debt to be paid to the ancestors and families of the African slaves. While economic equality is not the focus of Black Liberation Theology's treatment of institutional slavery within the conversation of Black poverty, the argument can be made that Black people in the United States are owed an economic debt of gratitude and financial support in the form of monetary services needed to live a decent life. In other words, America needs to repair what was done to African Americans. The call for monetary support presupposes the fact that white privilege has materialized itself in the form of white nationalism and economic hegemony. This makes it difficult for many white Americans to imagine how to do this.
Theologian Stephen G. Ray Jr., shows readers an approach to the issue of reparations that can result in material improvements in the lives of African Americans.
Shaping the reparations conversation proleptically makes its goals more realizable. Given the massive transfer of wealth capped by the 2017 Tax Bill, there is simply not enough "public money" to give Black people what we are owed. There is, however, the possibility to restructure the way that the national economy functions. Specifically, we can affect the ways that it shapes local economies which give Black people some modicum of what the whole idea of reparations is about: namely, justice.
For Ray, “A significant problem for Black communities has been that the wealth accumulated in them, in spite of political and cultural barriers has been prey to economic forces whose sole purpose is the extraction of that wealth. Usually, these organizations parasitically attach themselves to those parts of Black economic life shaped by the forces of racism.” This parasitic attaching of white racist organizations to the economic life of Black folk was birthed in institutional slavery. This is where white privilege has its roots.
The outgrowth of a system of idolatry that forced slaves to work for low wages prospered the white slave owner and kept Black Americans in poverty. Following slavery, Black people remained in deep poverty as their employment options were limited to farm work and other forms of cheap labor. Here, the implication is that Black people have an economic history in the United States of America. Due to the theological and economic entanglement of institutional slavery, religious scholars should have a greater understanding of how poverty in the Black community dehumanizes Black people and deprives them of economic resources. The theological and economic entanglement of slavery represents a form of structural evil in that both entities (Christian theological discourse and the systemic idolatry of economic gain) played a major role in destroying the livelihood of the slaves and their respective families.
This collaborative entanglement guaranteed the poverty of Black folk in the United States. When theology and economics are entangled for the institutional purpose of human oppression, more often than not, Black folk are the victims. Similar to the religious and political motives of the slaveowner, the conversation of theology and economics in the Black communities of the United States juxtaposes a particular type of Black economic condition. Poverty is the name of this Black economic condition. The history of Black people's residential presence on American soil confirms that a sizable amount of Black folk have lived and died in poverty.
Baptist and Roberts' statement on the labor of Black folk in terms of how it has helped to build the economic and physical infrastructure of the United States is compelling and true. The notion that Black people are still struggling racially, socially, politically and economically in the very place they were sent to build and develop is contradictory to the fact that just like all other races of people, Black Americans are human beings made in the image of God. But yet in many regions of the United States Black folk are still considered as less than human and unworthy of educational advancement and economic self-sufficiency. Where there is idolatry, heresy and racism, there is also Black poverty. Very similar to material and structural poverty, the idolatry of white nationalism is a theological issue for humanity and the Christian church. What this means is that white privilege has materialized itself in the form of white racism and economic hegemony.
So what does this particular treatment of institutional slavery mean for readers and the aims of The Angela Project? I will offer two perspectives. It is my understanding that The Angela Project aims to assist Black institutions and promote prosperity amongst Black and brown people, and in 2019 will commemorate the 400th anniversary of Black enslavement in the United States. In The Angela Project's promotion of modern-day Black advancement and its commemoration of Black enslavement in the United States, therein lies the need for theological transparency when it comes to discussing privilege and reparations. In other words, the deep-seeded, generational damage that is associated with Post Dramatic Slave Syndrome and other forms of human oppression needs to be unpacked in a systemic fashion. As Black Americans who are often time identified as sub-human and foreign immigrants, we must have a basic understanding of what institutional slavery in the United States did to us and our families. This essay is designed to demonstrate how torturous pain and the threat of death forced Black people to develop and modernize the American economy through cheap labor. And as a result of this infrastructural and economic modernization while enduring the irreversible harm of living and dying in poverty, Black Americans are owed reparations and other forms of financial support for their hard work and free labor.
Secondly, because there is opportunity for corrective action toward justice and reconciliation in the areas of race and economics in the United States, academic scholars and religious leaders alike must lift up their voices for the sake of social awareness and moral agency. Put simply, we must take advantage of these sacred moments. The conversation of slavery in the United States is painful and liberating. It is a conversation that must be undertaken in the emerging spheres of theological holism, historical studies and the Christian church. Because white privilege still provokes and undergirds the rampant mistreatment of Black folk in the United States, we must consistently look to the hills of institutional slavery for a better understanding of how God-talk and money, historically speaking, were entangled for the evil purposes of using, abusing and destroying Black people. In this essay we see the ethical importance of advancing Black America and commemorating the human experiences that have made us who we are.
— Dr. Darvin A. Adams I is the pastor of Bells Chapel CME Church in Fulton, Kentucky and a Christian theologian who writes on Black Theology, Black Poverty, Black Culture, Pneumatology and the Black Religious Experience.
Bibliography
Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, New York, NY: Basic Books, 2014.
Mandle, Jay R. The Roots of Black Poverty: The Southern Plantation Economy after the Civil War, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1978.
Mohler Jr., Albert. “Report on Slavery and Racism in the History of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary”, December 12, 2018.
Ray, Stephen G. Facebook, March 9, 2019.
Roberts, J. Deotis. “Slavery in the Americas: Economic, Cultural, and Religious Consequences”, The Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center, Volume XIX, Fall 1991/Spring 1992.
______________. The Prophethood of Black Believers: An African American Political Theology for Ministry, Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994.
Wright, Richard. 12 Million Black Voices, New York, NY: Basic Books, 2008.
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