An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

enslavement), wrote, “[The European] makes them subservient to his use;
and when he cannot subdue, he destroys them.” 24
Throughout chapter 18, Tocqueville refers to two tropes: the inherit state
of servitude of Africans and the untamed savagery of Indigenous peoples.
For Africans, he wrote, “The Negro of the United States has lost all
remembrance of his country; the language which his forefathers spoke is
never heard around him; he abjured their religion and forgot their customs
when he ceased to belong to Africa.” 25 Here, Tocqueville engaged in the
dual process of erasing the African past, a part of capitalism’s justification
for further exploiting African peoples, as well as subtly describing the
purpose of enslavement: the attempted complete eradication of anything
related to Africa. However, that did not happen. While Africans, perhaps,
lost their connection to land, even elements of their language, it was not a
complete loss. Africans forced to come into contact created a new oral
communication, what we would today call African American Vernacular
English, or simply, Black English. As sociolinguist Geneva Smitherman,
who you’ll see again in a later chapter, argues, Black English is “Euro-
American speech with an Afro-American tone, nuance, and gesture.” 26 This
language, in addition to other cultural and spiritual elements, began to
emerge during the Middle Passage and once those enslaved had to put aside
their cultural differences in order to “make a way outta no way” on the
plantation. They produced a new way of talking to not only communicate
with one another, but create a counter-language that could at times be
wholly unintelligible to white people. The creation and sustained use of
Black English is, in spite of the traumatizing nature of enslavement and its
ongoing aftermath, one of the most brilliant things to happen in the modern
world; just ask the corporations who have been exploiting this Black
cultural element for decades. Africans who were enslaved maintained their
cultures and produced new elements of it.
Indigenous people, according to Tocqueville, had a sense of unbridled
freedom. He wrote, “The savage is his own master as soon as he is able to
act; parental authority is scarcely known to him; he has never bent his will
to that of any of his kind, nor learned the difference between voluntary
obedience and a shameful subjection; and the very name of law is unknown
to him.” 27 Though Tocqueville also understood the greed of European
Americans to exterminate and exploit, he also continued to engage in the
trope of Native people being unable to operate in modern, European society.