From Rodney’s “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”
Making Sense
“The more confident you are of your ability to resist dehumanization, the more vulnerable you are likely to be to its uncanny power” — David Livingston Smith, On Inhumanity
Living in DC is a transforming experience, and I am grateful that it would happen that I could live here. It’s a small planet in many ways.
Being one who wants to understand themselves in the context of small planets, and as someone who sees this work as essential for living a good life, it was inevitable that I would end up reading Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
To be frank, this book is a masterclass in research and skillful writing such that he was able to pack so, so much information into every sentence. It is dense with context and history. This was a big read that I started in the fall of 2022 and just finished in February of 2023.
This book is worth the read for many reasons, but I want to put forward a candid moment where I had a moment of realization. Overall, I simply mean this to be a sample of what it can look like to do the work of seeing themselves within a racial, historical context.
The book gives great detail to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, specifically to demonstrate how the slave trade created an environment and infrastructure such that the colonization of Africa would be possible.
In the labor of setting up this context, he wrote:
“Occasionally, it is mistakenly held that Europeans enslaved Africans for racist reasons. European planters and miners enslaved Africans for economic reasons, so that their labor power could be exploited. Indeed, it would have been impossible to open the New World and use it as a constant generator of wealth, had it not been for African labor…having become utterly dependent on African labor, Europeans at home and aboard found it necessary to rationalize that exploitation in racist terms as well” (103).
I set the book down after reading this. It is a crucial level of clarity.
The insight here is around the difference between what is racism and when is racism. The mass-generational-atrocity of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade is undeniably evil, and for that understanding I had not questioned it any further. The answer is obvious, and I did not see the room to wonder how exactly it was evil.
Along with clarifying the wealth generated through the slave trade, this entry shows when racism takes place: it was the justification.
I mean to draw attention to the difference Rodney pointed out. Racism is not necessarily something so overt and obvious but something that occurs in the functionally-innocent-enough space for reasoning, unguarded from bias but protected by the mantra of “makes sense.”
It is the “makes sense” of a situation that ought to be questioned. What things are at work that are making that sense?
Common sense is a helpful tool for many things, but it does deserve pause from time to time. I think we are all ethically bound to make time for this essential work. The insight I gained from reading that passage helped clarify where I can improve and should stay vigilant, as much as anyone else.
Trevor
