August 6 2019
Dear Editor,
Indranie Deolall is a name I recall from her days at the Guyana Chronicle in the 90’s when she wrote the report on the turtle that had washed up on the foreshore. I was so impressed by the word pictures she had drawn and the clarity of her language that I asked a friend who was working at the Guyana Chronicle who she was. So I began to read her columns in SN from time to time.
Her latest column on Thursday reminded me to share at this Emancipation season what to me seems like a major contribution to the history of the world. In fact, it would make our understanding of history in need of major overhaul. It is the smoking gun that puts Caucasian self-worship otherwise known as white supremacy in overdue perspective.
The findings are those of Dr. Jacqueline Battalora, a white American sociologist. She went into the records of colonial US and found that:
a) Before 1681 it was the culture for black African slaves that became free in Virginia to own slaves and servants themselves.
b) There was a huge surplus of poor white Englishmen exported from England to the American colonies who arrived there as indentured labourers
c) Up to that point, black Africans, white men and women, and apparently everyone else, worked, ate, and slept together.
d) There was a huge disproportion of white women to white men – about 10 men to 1 woman.
e) In those very circumstances white women were marrying black African men including slaves.
f) So they passed a law in 1664 stipulating that all white women who married a slave would become a slave herself and her children become slaves up to age 20.
g) That increased the incidence of the phenomenon; the white property owners in the colony saw it as increasing their property. So, as far as the white gender imbalance was concerned the law backfired.
h) Then something happened that changed everything – a rebellion by a white man named Bacon (not against slavery, but for other reasons).
i) That frightened the British property owners and something had to be done. It was done at the expense of those who had little power and whose skin colour could not change.
j) In 1681 a law was passed that 1) forbade white women from marrying blacks, American Indians, and others 2) took away weapons from black people, 3) made it illegal for a black to give witness against a white person, and gave poor whites privileges over everyone else in the newly created “below”.
k) So, suddenly, there was a buffer class between the 1% of rich white men and the blacks, consisting of a class of poor whites who up to then were in the same class as freed blacks.
l) The poor whites loved it so much that it was easy to maintain- there was now a group of people who they could look down upon.
Since there were Portuguese, Spanish, French, and others who worked in the American colonies, this successful formula was imitated all over.
The implications of this are truly stupendous. It means that:
1. The view that all mixed black people are more or less descended from unconsensual sexual relations is invalid.
2. The claim for reparations is valid; while slavery was up to that point a universal phenomenon (white slavery continued up to the 18th century when the American government decided to stop paying ransom and use the same money to build a navy to stop their people from being kidnaped on the high seas) it became more or less a black thing by one stroke of the pen.
3. To achieve that, the term “white” had to be recognized in law for the first time. Before 1681 nowhere in the world was there any such delineation in law (according to Dr Battalora)
It is truly amazing to be able to trace the industry of white belief in its superiority and its concomitant inducement of a belief of so many black people in their own inferiority to its origins. Just imagine, the British hailed Toussaint L’Ouverture as a great warrior and military genius– the clear implication being that he and the black people were different. The result was unexpected not because of the conditions of oppression, but more because by then they had become regarded as a different species.
This is the Caucasian self-glorification (CSG) that presumes to deny that Egypt is African, (the ones left who hold this view should be a laughing stock by now. Every find of a new burial site in Egypt that contains images shows images of body types who could be Arab, African, Indian, anything but white) that anything built in Africa that is of any significance must have been built by white people. This is the self-glorification that causes some who have been fooled into the same mindset to rhapsodize over the “great” philosophers and scientists who made a career of analyzing why blacks are inferior. This is the same investment in self-glorification that grew to create names such as “kaffir” for blacks and to create all manner of names for people in Latin America such as “pardo” “mulatto”, and by how much black blood they had. It still exists in Latin America, especially Brazil to this day.
It is the same CSG that causes a monument to be erected to an unknown soldier and not to the unknown Indian who taught these people to count. You would never believe that these superior people were counting without zero and without place value until a Hindu showed the world how. All their physics and nuclear achievements would have been impossible without that. This is the origin of the attitude to people of colour that is reported in Oxford and Cambridge University even today , 100 years after Ramanujan. (See his story in the Netflix move “The man who saw infinity”)
That is the mindset in which a reporter comes from supposedly one of the most prominent newspapers in the world (Bloomberg) and makes disparaging remarks about an Indo-Guyanese man he sees in the countryside and the number of paved roads in Guyana which he counts as only 3. Let us forget for one moment that he did not manage to learn to count. What the ignoramus does not know is that even with 3 paved roads after 50 years of independence Guyana would have had three more than the USA 50 years after theirs! The first asphalted road in the US is dated 1870 – 94 years after their independence.
Unfortunately, this myth will continue to be fed because our venal and accommodating politicians have entered into backroom arrangements that will take Guyana back 100 years to the time when Linden was a company town and those of one colour of skin lived upwind while the others took the bauxite dust as we build a new enclave society.
Unfortunately , ID in her column treats as gospel a theory that is being debunked over and over again but one in which CSG has made a great investment. Notice the famous monkey in the upward evolutionary chain appears just before the next stage of “evolution” – the African. Somehow the authors of this cockeyed theory forgot that macaques come in all colours, not only black.
As the world beholds the spectacle of a macaque of Caucasian origin erupting volcanically from one of the most powerful positions in the world in effusions of filth, we would do well to investigate Dr. Battalora’s findings and what they mean for all people, including the lighter skinned macaques who are being surprised to discover that they have genes of the darker variety.
Yours faithfully,
F. Collins
