““One of the things I think we can begin to do is to look at how it was that before we have a European colonial enterprise in the proper sense in the 15th century – or rather, the 16th century – we have already the formation of a race-based system of slave trading throughout the Atlantic basin, or the Mediterranean basin. We’re talking 1440s, 1450s, 1460s – we’re talking a half-century or more before there in even an idea of Columbus going west from the Iberian peninsula, we already have, in the formation of this new idea called Europe a counter-point, right, an antithesis which is called what we now think of as sub-Saharan Africa, that point beyond all intelligibility, for which North Africans have to serve as interpreters and mediators. This is all happening prior to the instantiation of what we talk about as “modern colonialism.” So that by time you have the first excursions, right, and the Spanish and Portugese empires, you already have what Marx would later call “the commercial hunting of black skins,” already, and it enables the colonial enterprise in fundamental ways. More importantly, it drives the enterprise. There’s a relationship between colonialism and slavery which says, “well it’s the land that makes this possible.” But it doesn’t. Land only makes productive labor possible. But if you understand that slavery is not reducible to labor relations, that slavery is already a property relation – a lucrative one – before any work happens or whether any work happens, then you understand that land is not necessary for slavery. First and foremost because of the Middle Passage. Not a square foot of land in sight, but slavery happening on the high seas. So if we start from that understanding we can see, not that they’re unrelated, or that we can think one exclusively, but that we better situate their actual relations.””
- Jared Sexton,“People of Color Blindness,” (via educationforliberation)
- Jared Sexton,“People of Color Blindness,” (via educationforliberation)