History teaches that hate is learned — and can be unlearned

In one of the more remarkable reactions to the white supremacist marches in Charlottesville and the murder of civil activist Heather Heyer, former President Barrack Obama's tweet of a quote from Nelson Mandela seems to have become the most liked tweet of all time. As Obama noted, Mandela wrote in his autobiographical "Long Walk to Freedom" that racial hatred is not innate but learned. And what has been learned, Mandela suggested, can be unlearned.

There is a profound lesson here for American history. Racial hatred has a beginning point; it was invented in the New World, and in a very real sense, perfected in the United States. It was a direct product of Caribbean and then American southern slavery.

Apologists for slavery in the United States before the Civil War justified slavery by its presence in the ancient world, and in the Christian Bible. Slavery, they argued, was a natural phenomenon that had always been present in society. In fact, they insisted, Southern U.S. slavery was an improvement, because plantation owners took care of and provided structure for an inferior race incapable of caring for itself.

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But in making these arguments, slavery advocates left out crucial realities. The most common source of enslavement in the ancient world was not race, but capture in war. Debt was another source. Consequently, slaves came in all ethnicities and from all classes, and whoever was a conqueror today might be a captive tomorrow.

Moreover, the historical record contains numerous instances of black Africans holding whites as slaves. Equally important, slavery was not hereditary. The freeing of slaves was common, either as an act of generosity, state or political mandate, or some other change in the circumstances of the owner. It also meant, moreover, that many slaves were educated, and might at one time have been wealthier than their current owners. Epictetus, one of the great Greek philosophers of the first century CE, was born a slave, owned by the emperor Nero's secretary. This prevented Epictetus neither from writing nor teaching.

As historians of the Atlantic world have explained, what changed slavery was the discovery and commodification of several new agricultural crops in the New World, foremost among them sugar, but also including tobacco, coffee and chocolate. All of these were new to the European diet in the 17th century, and they transformed it, becoming exceedingly popular. But they could only be produced with slave labor.

As it happened, just at that time Africa presented a new, plentiful and accessible source of slaves. In the Caribbean and in Brazil, virtual factories produced the new commodities with heavily exploited slave labor. So plentiful was the supply of African slaves that owners paid little attention to their slaves' well-being, instead working them to death since they could be easily and cheaply replaced. Thus the Africans themselves were commodified. People so fully exploited could not be considered equal by the owner class, and thus blackness became equated with slavery, and at the same time, with inferiority.

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In the 1620s, tobacco in the southern British colonies was worked by indentured servants. But it did not take long for growers to discover the cheaper source of labor, Africans. By mid-century slave contracts, initially limited to a specific number of years like indentured servant contracts, became lifelong and hereditary: The children of slaves were themselves slaves. When the invention of the cotton gin made that crop highly profitable, northern investors funded the acquisition of more and more land by southern plantation owners, and the system of slave labor segued to cotton production.

As Edmund S. Morgan explicated in his 1975 masterwork "American Slavery, American Freedom," landless white southerners learned to hate blacks when land owners seduced them away from cooperating with escaped and free Africans in resistance to the owners' exploitation of both groups.  The owners gave the poor whites someone to look down on. This was the birth of white supremacy in the U.S.

Mandela wrote that love comes more naturally to the human heart than hatred.  This is the foundation on which white supremacy can be defeated, can be unlearned. The history of that hatred is long, and so will be its unlearning. But individually and collectively, we must continue.

Steve Haycox is professor emeritus of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

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