american-holocaust

272 APPENDIX IIanimality and a peculiarly potent sexuality." 8 In short, virtually all theelements that would go into the full blown eighteenth- and nineteenthcenturyideology of anti-black racism were present in European thoughtlong before the arrival of the first blacks in Virginia in 1619.But although racial antipathy preceded enslavement, Jordan cautionedagainst too simplistic a cause-and-effect model. A predisposition to invidiousracial distinctions was not in itself sufficient to explain the wholesaleenslavement and the horrendously systematic degradation of Africans thatemerged in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North America. Rather,Jordan suggested that "both slavery and prejudice [were] species of a generaldebasement of the Negro," each of them-once they were joined­" constantly reacting upon each other" in a dynamic "cycle of degradation"that created a unique "engine of oppression." 9 (It will be recalledthat I quoted these phrases in my text and adopted the same ideologicalinstitutionaldynamic in pursuit of an explanation for genocide against theAmericas' native peoples.)In this conclusion Jordan actually was delivering heavily documentedsupport to an insight first expressed by Alexis de T ocqueville more than acentury earlier. Since the age of the ancients, Tocqueville had said, a scornfulattitude toward the enslaved had followed upon their enforced servitude,a scornful attitude that remained for a time after the abolition ofslavery, but one that eventually dissipated. However, in America, he wrote,"the insubstantial and ephemeral fact of servitude is most fatally combinedwith the physical and permanent fact of difference in race. Memories ofslavery disgrace the race, and race perpetuates memories of slavery." Addedto this, Tocqueville noted, was the fact that for whites in general, includinghimself:This man born in degradation, this stranger brought by slavery into ourmidst, is hardly recognized as sharing the common features of humanity. Hisface appears to us hideous, his intelligence limited, and his tastes low; wealmost take him for some being intermediate between beast and man. . . .To induce the whites to abandon the opinion they have conceived of theintellectual and moral inferiority of their former slaves, the Negroes mustchange, but they cannot change so long as this opinion persists. 10In sum, as Jordan later picked up the argument, while the roots of aracist antipathy among whites toward blacks ~ did indeed clearly precede. the rise of the institution of slavery in America, this is a less importantindependent phenomenon than some may have thought, since once theattitude and the institution became fused-and they did so at a very earlydate-they reinforced one another, strengthening and deepening the whitecommitment to both of them. The idea of racism as deeply imbedded inWestern consciousness was still a very troubling notion to many, however,