Enlightenment, liberalism, democracy, slavery and racism

I have a tad bit of frustration when learning about the contradictions within American ideology: Enlightenment, classical liberalism, democracy, slavery and racism. I am interested in anyone with some thought about it and it would great to hear from people who are at least quasi-versed in the terms above. Regardless, I wanted to spark discussion.
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Emancipation in the United States is often romanticized as the political and social release of enslaved peoples of African descent. It’s a narrative that often depicts Blacks casting down their bags of cotton, tossing down their shovels and heading towards a somewhat ambiguous space called “freedom” somewhere in the northern half of the United States. However, often times this narrative is not transmitted onto the lives of displaced Africans in the West Indies. In addition, the idiosyncrasies of political and economic Black incorporation into majority white societies are often overlooked. Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies, argues that what is most neglected is a critique of how the European “Enlightened” bourgeois liberal emancipatory framework relied heavily upon maintaining a capitalist class structure supported by the oppressive system they were supposed to be opposing. By constructing homogeneous yet separated, national identities grounded in the ability to access resources and justified by phenotypic differences, the contradictory framework was doomed to fail. In Eric Foner’s chapter “The Politics of Freedom” in Nothing But Freedom, he writes that throughout the African Diaspora, freedom for enslaved Blacks did not constitute the same political, social, or economic state as the term engenders. What Blacks discovered was that the “liberal” rulers created boundaries that inhibited Blacks’ integration into their respective majority white societies. Those political, social, and economic boundaries included discriminatory notions of how emancipated Blacks would conduct themselves once released from their plantations. As a result, Blacks who were able see their dreams of a large-scale manumission come to fruition, woke up only to find their previous “masters” from the “big house” would remain so in a reformulated government.

Once embarking upon the task of emancipation, rulers of the US and the Caribbean found themselves in a conundrum: How can formerly enslaved peoples be elevated to social, political, and economic equals to their past enslavers in order to stay true to the newly adopted unbiased classical liberal ideology? Free labor and equal citizenship could not co-exist among European/European-Americans and African descendants in a capitalist context where the bourgeoisie were vying for resources and working to maintain social, political, and economic advantages. According to the capitalist system, every man in their respective society had “equal standing before the law, was capable of accumulating goods and resources in unlimited quantity, and was free therefore to maximize his gains so as to satisfy innate materialist appetites.” As a result of unregulated market exchanges of goods and services, social relations are vulnerable to manipulation by avaricious individuals’ whose goal was to hinder others from competing in the market place. In the spirit of increasing productivity via ascendancy, the elite class sought to replicate slavery under the guises of free labor, sharecropping , apprenticeships and colonization creating a class of mostly landless, low-income, disenfranchised Blacks. Integrating freed people failed because European and US global powers built their societies based on a capitalist system where a marginalized class with limited or no power is necessary to sustain said system. The liberal rhetoric sounded nice, just, and in alliance with a democratic society, but to fully embrace classical liberalism in all aspects of society –especially economic –those in power would have to relinquish a substantial portion of that power in order to allow the newly emancipation people to integrate into white-dominated political, economic, and social spheres. “[T]he unstated precondition for this democratic exchange was harmony in the basic purposes and assumptions for the participants, which, in turn, could arise only from the compatibility of each subject’s relation to the whole.” If freed Blacks were to be individuals with “unmediated relationship(s) to the state,” then white representatives of the generational wealth that was acquired by the utilization of exploited labor, would have to willingly excuse themselves from the US economic table of free trade and unmediated access to all things that entail their materialistic pursuit of happiness. If societies are constructed on the bases of an economic free-for-all with little to no mediation from the state and a relaxed set moral principles to guide their economic endeavors, then it seems feasible, if not necessary, for those who feel the need to remain a stakeholder in the society’s political and economic undertakings, to fill or remove the chairs from the table preventing others from accessing resources via de facto or de jure segregation –whichever system negates the most amount of people and gives the seated an advantage.

What appears ironic is that US freed people eagerly wanted to be a part of the very system that created their subjected status. The Lockean notion of a political actor carried with it an “anthropological minimum,” –such as age, gender, race, property ownership, or literacy –that was said to be requirements for citizenship. Locke, who formulated ideas about race during the Enlightenment period which occurred simultaneously with the creation of the liberal universal individual, helped set the stage for contradicting philosophies that could not find a ground upon which to coexist. Instead, the European capitalist construct implemented across the Atlantic and grown out of European nationalism prevailed to the detriment of displaced peoples who resided in the “New World.” In order to spread the wealth, the wealthy would have to sacrifice. Are there capitalists willing to do that? Arguably socialism is synonymous with liberalism. Therefore, if socialism holds a substantial distance from capitalism due to a socialist society implementing equal distribution of wealth amongst its members as opposed to the wealth being concentrated by a few, how could a society built on the concentration of wealth placed on a small portion of the population, implement a complete overhaul of resource distribution that includes the very people they treated as sub-human only days or months prior? In addition, how could the creators of classical liberalism simultaneously invent the concept of racism during the Enlightenment period and not see the inherent paradox?

Although, Blacks did, and still do, highlight the blatant contradictions in the United States’ laws of supposed equality and the limited implementation of those laws (e.g. throughout the Black Liberation struggle), was it the goal of freed Blacks to enter the political sphere in hopes of having a seat at the table or making the liberal rhetoric a reality thus obtaining a fighting chance at access to basic resources such as land and a political voice? In the Caribbean, there was “…mounting anxiety that Black political power in Jamaica might actually be used in Black people’s political and economic interests. From that point forward, colonial officials sought ways to blunt the impact of Black political participation.” Blunting political participation went hand-in-hand with restricting landownership. By inhibiting landownership opportunities for Blacks, that, in turn, limited Blacks ability to generate agricultural products to be place within a free trade system for profit, resulting in Blacks having limited abilities for economic improvement which worked in tandem with castrated political involvement.

What happened in the minds of the European/European-American ruling class that made them believe that Blacks would not want the ability to have entrepreneurial rights and exercise the same methods of freedom as they did? It is not as if many of the European bourgeoisies did not know the intelligence that streamed the continent. In addition, the “failed” emancipatory project and Blacks’ success during the short-lived Reconstruction should have proved that Blacks had the ability and desire to move beyond their forced servile state. What appears to not be explicitly articulated is white fear of losing their seat at the table. Could this be because Enlightenment thinking denounced the blatant expression of fear from the “rational” being who is not suppose fear but rather be feared? This idea of “rational” thought and the suppression of passions or emotions could explain why classical liberalism and capitalism in a discriminatory aristocracy cloaked in democracy could not work. Classical liberalism can only be affective if the contradictions are recognized, understood, and all that suffer from the ills of disenfranchisement are satiated. Maybe there is hope, but clearly the US was, and arguable still is going through a political identity crisis.