Introduction
For Conceptual clarity, in this presentation, the key notions that will be developed in reference to racism, slavery and coloniality are connected to the root “dom.”
Let us think about all the words connected to this root:
Dominance, dominations, dominion, domain, kingdom, domesticate, more positively, freedom, wisdom etc.….
For our presentation I will single out the following:
1. Internalized dominance
2. A Matrix of dominations
3. Ecosystems of dominions
Time will not allow me to talk about “dominionism.” It is a religious supremacist ideology, germane to world domination by Christians as what was attempted in Geneva by Jean Calvin.
For this presentation, I will focus on clarifying the concepts of racism, slavery and coloniality and highlight their intersections.
Racism
Racism is a multilayered and multifaceted phenomenon.
There are personal, interpersonal, societal, structural, institutional. There are also systemic dimensions to this evil that one must take into consideration.
1. Internalized dominance
A. At personal level it takes the form of “internalized dominance,” a disease of the pride of alleged superiority based on a construct of the notion of race, and in-built biases according to which black people are inferior to other races.
B. At interpersonal level the pride of internalized dominance is conjugated into prejudices, manifested in how the racist relates to those deemed inferiors.
2. Matrix of Dominations
A. At societal, structural, institutional levels, racism manifests itself as a Matrix or matrixes of dominations, favoring privileges based on one’s ethnicity or color of one’s skin.
B. At an ecological level, environmental racism is expressed through the dumping of toxic waste in regions of the world with predominant BIPOC populations, bringing diseases, and premature deaths of millions of people.
3. Ecosystems of Dominions
A. At global, geopolitical, economic, and cultural levels, Racism is a force that shapes the whole ecosystem of human relations, the making of meaning, education, leadership, governance, academic curricula, media representations, worldview, values, fashions, and taboos.
B. Even the realm of Artificial intelligence is not immune from racial biases.
Slavery
Slavery is
1. A cancellation of human identity
2. A reduction of human beings to a status of subhuman
3. A domination, and subjugation of people into domains to domesticate.
4. It is about multiple separation of families, gut-ranching suffering of mothers whose children were sold in slave markets on January 1st, or on any other day convenient for the oppressors.
But January 1st was the worst day of the year for those whose lives were punctuated by losses:
Loss of dignity
Loss of autonomy, freedom, and self-determination
Loss of personhood, reduced to chattel
The various kinds of slaveries
When referring to slavery, it is not just about the trans-Atlantic slavery.
There were other human trafficking practices before the 15th century transatlantic slave trade. Some of them have been designated as veiled genocides. The Trans-Saharan Slavery, the Oriental Slavery, the Intra-African slavery, and the transpacific Slavery. They were all crimes against humanity.
Slavery is not only a reality of a bygone era. Modern day slavery, human trafficking, organ trafficking, abductions, and reduction of human beings to the status of sex slaves is a despicable current reality.
Focusing only on the Translating slave trade and giving in to the conspiracy of silence regarding the other crimes against humanity will make the healing of the wounds of slavery only partial and incomplete.
In the United States, racism has paradoxically coexisted with the ideals of freedom and equality. These ideals were believed to apply to the White majority. Framers of the US constitution and the declaration of independence did not find it contradictory to own slaves.
The horror stories of what African Americans went through are heart wrenching.
250 years of slavery.
Almost 100 years of Jim Crow law centered on legalized segregation.
Racial terrorism through unspeakable violence, lynching and killing of black people had the devastating effects of transgenerational traumas.
During the era of slavery, African Americans were considered second-class citizens. Historically, also both in life and in death, African Americans were considered property of their co-called masters. To add contempt to injury, dissections of bodies of dead African Americans for so-called scientific research were a lucrative business. This was all part of the legacies of colonialism with one undergirding postulate: the inferiority of black people and chattel slavery were economically and religiously justified.
Socio-politically, it took three amendments to the constitution to try to reverse the evil of racism. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, known collectively as Civil War Amendments, were designed to ensure equality for emancipated slaves. They were about the abolition of slavery, the recognition of their full humanity and their right to vote. In other words, their rights were expressions of the full participation of black people in the democratic processes.
But racism is a die-hard disease and evil and sinful. Coloniality carried its perpetuation.
Coloniality
To understand coloniality, one must recognize that the seed of coloniality were planted at various infamous conferences aimed at legitimizing colonialism, the appropriation of BIPOC bodies, lands, and resources.
The Berlin conference in 1884 for the partition of African was a notorious crime against the continent of Africa, its peoples, and its resources.
Colonialism: The process of establishment and presence of colonial administrative structures. Colonialism could only become a reality because of the legitimization of unspeakable violence against black people deprived of their dignity, land, and resources.
Coloniality: The Colonial forms of domination after the end of colonial administrations produced by colonial cultures and structures in modern /colonial capitalist world-system.
Walter D. Mignolo, who made significant contribution regarding the concept and reality of coloniality wrote the following:
“Modernity doesn't' t stand by itself. Without coloniality, its darker side, there is no modernity. The modern/colonial world as I conceive it here goes together with the mercantile, industrial, and technological capitalism centered in the North Atlantic.
Coloniality of power, in a nutshell, worked as an epistemic mechanism that classified people around the world (see chapter 5), by color and territories, and managed (and still manages) the distribution of labor and the organization of society.”
Christianity has been used to expend the web of coloniality in various ways, not only through the so-called “civilizing mission” but also through art e.g., the portrayal of Jesus as a “white” person with northern European features.
The insidious subliminal messaging practices have contributed to supremacist assumptions. But religious people, misinterpreting sacred texts have perpetrated the myth of the curse of Ham. A curse that never was. In the narrative of Genesis 9 it was Canaan who was cursed.
Intersections
What racism, slavery and coloniality have in common are the systems that deprive human beings of their identities, their stories in fact their very humanity, their full humanity.
Racism, slavery and coloniality reduce BIPOC to supporting roles. They are presumed unqualified, unfit, or unworthy of leading roles.
Their alleged inferior status in the supposed and constructed racial hierarchy has become a doctrine, an ingrained ideology regarding how things are supposed to be.
After all, claims the racist, black people have not contributed anything to history, to civilization, and to human flourishing.
The belief in the inferiority of BIPOC is therefore perniciously ingrained in practices of marginalization, segregation, apartheid, and other crimes against the human.
Racism, slavery and coloniality suppress the conscience of those considered inferior as inexistant. Because their conscience does not matter, they are exchangeable and disposable for the sake of profit. That is the economic side of racism, slavery and coloniality.
Way Forward
Today, there is an urgent need for alternatives to personal internalized dominance, alternatives to interpersonal reduction of people into domains to be owned, controlled, and disposed of.
And alternatives to corporate matrixes or webs of dominations spread to subjugate people.
It goes with the urgency to plan and adopt a new model of being human.
My overarching question as to how to move forward is the following:
How can we envision human relations not in terms of dominance, domination, dominion and exploitation, but solidarity based on a benevolent disposition towards the whole human family?
This would be a new Renaissance that would function as an antidote to racism, coloniality and slavery.
The anti-value of lording it over people has been elevated to the status of a supreme good associated with power, domination, and dominion, domesticating humans reduced to being domains.
Subjugated human beings are thus deprived of their stories, instrumentalized to supporting roles, forced to perpetuate the narratives framed by racial, ethnic, tribal supremacists who structure society into superiors and inferiors, creating a matrix of dominations.
Depriving people of their stories is to strip them of their identity. It is simply criminal and belong to the nomenclature of crimes against humanity.
The human family can do better, in applying humane principles into policies and practices.
At the center of the whole endeavor would be the affirmation of every person’s dignity, rights, and responsibilities towards one another in human solidarity.
The solution ultimately is also expressed through the root “dom.” But this time “Freedom” and freedom for all.
