Discussion of Racism

[Jnyusa]

Yes, I agree with Imp on this one.

I do think that it is necessary to distinguish between racism as it manifests in individuals and racism as it manifests in institutions. As a matter of public policy it is institutional racism that should be the focus of our concern because that is what we control as a society and for which we are accountable as a society.

[vison]

On the Obama Phenomenon thread, Jnyusa posted: "Our textbooks cover slavery - impossible to pretend that didn't happen, but even at the college level we don't teach the fact that Africans were shipped here in pieces too. One of the most significant trade items during the 17th and 18th centuries was human fat, rendered from Africans who were captured and murdered and boiled down before being 'exported.' The barrels were shipped along with the whole people. A friend of mine has been doing research on this for a book ... and he went through the shipping manifests from the 16th-18th centuries where the imported items are listed quite plainly. He tells me that the number of live slaves we shipped can't hold a candle to the number of dead Africans, if you do a thumbnail calculation of how many people it would take to fill a barrel. What were they used for? Cosmetics.

I think about this every time I hear stories of cannibalism. Undoubtedly the people observed being put into pots were not being cooked for food but rendered for their body fat."

Jnyusa, that shocked me so much I went looking for information to support the assertion and I have found none anywhere. One historian said it is a myth, he had come across it before in very old essays and articles about the slave trade.

eta: Snopes debunked it, too.

[Jnyusa]

adeps humanis

My friend tells me that you can find this entry is nearly every shipping manifest from those centuries.

I have to tell you that this quite makes sense to me, as well, because rendered fat was indeed used as a cosmetic for centuries - it was specifically used to cover smallpox scars. I know this from other sources (that did not source the fat), and if you think about the improvidence of smearing lard on your face every day it seems quite likely to me that something other than animal lard would be sought. Glycerin might have worked as well, but I have never heard of glycerin being used in this context. Secondly, given the number of accounts we hear that present themselves as 'proof' of cannibalism, I am inclined to look for a better explanation, since cannibalism is highly ritualized in those cultures where anthropologists are aware of its practice.

[vison]

adeps humanis

My friend tells me that you can find this entry is nearly every shipping manifest from those centuries.

I have to tell you that this quite makes sense to me, as well, because rendered fat was indeed used as a cosmetic for centuries - it was specifically used to cover smallpox scars. I know this from other sources (that did not source the fat), and if you think about the improvidence of smearing lard on your face every day it seems quite likely to me that something other than animal lard would be sought. Glycerin might have worked as well, but I have never heard of glycerin being used in this context. Secondly, given the number of accounts we hear that present themselves as 'proof' of cannibalism, I am inclined to look for a better explanation, since cannibalism is highly ritualized in those cultures where anthropologists are aware of its practice.

Well, it makes no sense to me at all. There was no shortage of animal fat and besides, if it was really such a big item, appearing on ship manifests, etc., I think we'd have seen that along with the existing documents from slave auctions, etc.

It seems like a variation of a common urban legend.

* An extreme claim
* spoken of authoritatively, but in very general terms
* along the same lines, authoritative specifics that don't make sense when examined. "He tells me that the number of live slaves we shipped can't hold a candle to the number of dead Africans, if you do a thumbnail calculation of how many people it would take to fill a barrel." What? I would think you'd have trouble stuffing even two people into a wine-cask, a pretty standard barrel size. Furthermore, it doesn't say whether the number of dead is when the cargo is loaded or unloaded, and given the horrors of the Middle Passage there's probably a pretty drastic difference. Note that while the writer implies that there are specific numbers, we don't get any of them. (I think the idea was that the bodies had been cooked and then the fat rendered out, but I still think that if it was such an important trade item, there would be many documents easily found. And verified stories of humans being cooked for ANY reason are few and far between, anyway.)
* the language: if it were really one of the MOST significant trade items, you'd have heard of it long before now. The international cosmetics trade was probably tiny compared to, oh, actual slaves, not to mention tobacco, rum, cloth, etc."

I am not often reluctant to dismiss tales of human depravity, but I think this is not true.

[Faramond]

Is there some reason why human fat would be preferable to pig fat or cow fat? Could you really tell the difference once it's taken from the body? Unless there is some reason why human fat works better in cosmetics, then why wouldn't the Europeans just use the great big domesticated animals they had all around them? Why go to all the expense of importing something they could just as easily get locally?

[solicitr]

It makes no sense at all. Fat (human or animal) would go rancid long before it reached these shores.

But it's of a piece with other 'victimisation myths' that never die- like Dr Charles drew dying because he was refused admission to a white hospital (untrue), or the similar story about Bessie Smith, or the myth about Big Mama Thornton and 'Hound Dog' which showed up not only in Dreamgirls, but even on PBS, for shame.

[Jnyusa]

eta ... I should add that when my friend first told me about this, I tried to research it online and found nothing.

But there is quite an impediment to this kind of research in that passenger manifests were largely preserved, and many of these are available in museums around the country and can be accessed online. But companies routinely destroyed cargo manifests because the goods were already delivered and old inventory records are expensive to maintain. Cargo manifests are mainly of interest to salvage operators (treasure hunters) and it was for this context that my friend originally began reading these records for himself ... (he has an historical interest in certain theories about certain 17th ce expeditions) ... the cargo manifests, by the way, can be hundreds of pages long, and have to be accessed usually by appointment with the museums where they are archived. This is what I hear, anyway. What I have seen myself up until now, and what probably most people see, are samples of passenger lists, because most of us are interested in this topic for geneology purposes.

I'll wait and see how much he has to say about all of this when he finally publishes ... something I expect to happen within the next year or so. It might be that he will be debunked! ... but I rather doubt it. He has been right about too many other things.

[Impenitent]

I don't know, vison, I'm not so quick to dismiss though my stomach and mind revolt at it. The Nazis did terrible things just 60 years ago - there are still extant examples of lampshades made from human skin, wigs from hair of their victims etc.

I neither dismiss nor believe the human fat rendering story. Fence sitting on this.

[Jnyusa]

Oh sorry, I cross-posted with Faramond and sol ...

First, of course I was not suggesting that people were chopped up whole and stuffed into barrels. Of course you could not fit two whole people into a barrel that way, much less many!

Secondly, I have no idea whether human fat would actually be better than animal fat for covering smallpox scars ... I've never used either product and would not put animal fat on my skin for any purpose. But I can imagine this making sense to people three centuries ago in a certain context.

Third, there are people who do use lard for cooking, even today, and we once rendered fat into soap, and it did not go rancid over the time period in question. I'm sorry that I cannot be more illuminating about the technologies in question as this is totally outside my scope.

I certainly do not want to perpetuate an urban myth, and particularly not one so depraved as this! God knows humans do enough horrible things that we don't have to make them up. I am relating to you what has been conveyed to me by someone who, so far in my experience, is careful in his research. He may be proven wrong. If so, I will be the first to come here and tell you about it.

[Faramond]

I can certainly believe that people might have done this, sad as that is to contemplate. But to me it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense from an economic perspective, unless --- well, people will pay for water to be shipped from Fiji, even though it is awfully inefficient --- so who knows?

[Jnyusa]

But it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense from an economic perspective ...

I agree. Slavery didn't make sense from an economic perspective either. That was the argument made by Adam Smith, and which contributed to Jefferson's conviction that we should ban slavery in our constitution. Running the world on fossil fuel doesn't make sense from an economic perspective, but it is difficult to undo trade patterns once they get started.

Just by the way, the reason I know about this aspect of research being done by this one particular friend is because I had asked him to review for me some material I had written about the real source of inefficiency in mercantilism. That is an economic system whose causes and effects are deeply misunderstood, in my opinion.

[vison]

I'll be interested to know, for sure. I tend to side with Snopes on these things, simply because there are so many eyes out looking for the information.

I don't dismiss it on the grounds that no one could be so awful, but I also don't accept it for the reason that there seem to be no limits to human depravity. The story about human fat, or about humans being rendered into fat, has been told in other times about other places.

Fat would go rancid in barrels, absolutely. Without refrigeration, in the holds of ships? Within days, I would think. I've made lard from our own pigs, many, many times, and if there is the LEAST bit of meat or bone left in it, it goes "off" very quickly. It goes rancid even under refrigeration. (Anyone who ever keeps unsalted butter too long can attest to that.) (When my Mum was a kid they had barrels of salt pork in the cellar, and she said it inevitably ended up going rancid. And that was salted.) Once it's made into soap, it's not "fat" any more, but soap. I've made soap myself; it is a very simple process, although "good" soap isn't always a given.

Smearing any kind of fat on the face would NOT cover smallpox scars. Body heat would melt it and that would accomplish nothing. People once did cover smallpox scars with a variety of awful cosmetics, including makeup made with lead and arsenic. There are extant many, many journals and newspapers from the slavery era in Great Britain, and I would think if such a product as the fat from black Africans was common, there would be advertisements for it.

[ToshoftheWuffingas]

And the abolitionists would have seized on it.

[Jnyusa]

I tend to side with Snopes on these things, simply because there are so many eyes out looking for the information.

Actually, there are only four eyes looking for the information on Snopes, as far as I know. Do they have an entire staff? I have the impression that it is just the one couple because those are the only signatures that I've seen, and I've read pretty much everything on their site. (My guilty pleasure, too!)

I rather think, though, that it would take more than a quick browse through the internet to confirm or deny this one. As I said, I tried it myself and couldn't find anything. And I will hasten to add that my friend could be completely wrong about the meaning of what he read, but I really hesitate to suppose that he made it up. If I wanted to check this out myself it would put me to some expense in travel time and labor hours, given the archival nature of the sources he was looking at.

I can't argue against anyone's better experience with rendered fat ... this is totally out of my scope. But if cargo was labeled adeps humanis I have to believe that this is what it is. That a good deal of it may have gone bad before arrival is quite possible. A great many live humans died on those journeys and it is hard to imagine how that cost was covered, but the trade was lucrative enough that what we would call today 'quality control' was not an issue for them. (There are other reasons, as well, why this might be so, which I won't get into because it was take us far away from the original topic.)

There are extant many, many journals and newspapers from the slavery era in Great Britain, and I would think if such a product as the fat from black Africans was common, there would be advertisements for it.

This I find much more convincing, vison. One of the things, you see, that makes me doubt that people of the era would have cared that this was human fat is the fact that they did not consider it to have come from humans. It is labeled in Latin as if it were ... wildlife, or something. But that argues with equal force that there was no reason not to have advertised it as such. I've simply never looked to see what sorts of things appeared as advertisements in those days.

[Jnyusa]

Well, here's something that has already been published ...

Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness, by John. L. Jackson, Jr.

Jackson is at U.P and I heard him on radio interview today and wanted to paste here every word that came out of his mouth. Here's the website for the book.

http://www.racialparanoia.com/

Here's a review:

Daily Free Press

I'll try to summarize tomorrow a couple of his major premises. It will take some thought because the discussion was pretty far-ranging.

[vison]

There are extant many, many journals and newspapers from the slavery era in Great Britain, and I would think if such a product as the fat from black Africans was common, there would be advertisements for it.

This I find much more convincing, vison. One of the things, you see, that makes me doubt that people of the era would have cared that this was human fat is the fact that they did not consider it to have come from humans. It is labeled in Latin as if it were ... wildlife, or something. But that argues with equal force that there was no reason not to have advertised it as such. I've simply never looked to see what sorts of things appeared as advertisements in those days.

My readings in British/English history have not made me think that most English people would have regarded black Africans as "animals" in the sense of a cow or sheep. They might not have regarded them as being as good as an Englishman, but that's how they felt about most of the human race anyway.

The slave trade was operated largely by Englishmen, but owning African slaves was not common in England and there was always a strong anti-slavery movement, long before it reached America.

As for the Latin label, I can't explain it, either. Maybe it only meant "fat for people". If the traders didn't regard the Africans as Human, why would they label the fat as "human fat"?

[vison]

dp

[Faramond]

Here's a review:

Daily Free Press

Okay, first of all, Dave Chappelle's last name has two P's, not just one. That review kept getting it wrong.

Second of all, I found the review frustrating because it doesn't tell me much about Jackson's conclusions. I have no idea if I would agree or disagree with Jackson.

edit: This post appears to be more cranky that I really intended. In any case, I'm interested in seeing your summary, Jn.

[vison]

I asked a friend of mine who is a Latin scholar about "adeps humanis" and her response was: adeps soft or fat but
humanum for "of human beings", not "humanis".

A quibble, perhaps. But perhaps significant.

[Jnyusa]

Faramond, I posted the review without reading it, actually -- it was the first review appearing on google and I wanted not to post my remark about the interview without giving people someplace to go to at least get an idea about the book, but I did not have time to read or post further about the topic at that moment. The review, iirc, was from a college press? -- so ... written by students. I'm sorry that it was so unhelpful.

Hopefully I can summarize Jackson's thesis without distorting it. This is what I took from the interview:

that when the civil rights movement made overt discrimination illegal, this caused (obviously) a change in the way we talk about our race consciousness. It also forced racial feelings underground, so that they get expressed in non-verbal ways, or in 'coded' speech, and our language has not developed sufficient nuance to explain the feelings of a minority when confronted with such expressions. We only have this one word, "racism," and it is not overt racism that people are experiencing. It is something much more difficult to describe.

(This resonated with me because it is very much my feeling about anti-Semitism. It frustrates me that I have only this one word to describe some of the things I experience, because if I counted on my fingers all the people I've met in my lifetime whom I would call "anti-Semitic" I could not use all ten fingers. Nevertheless there are 'coded' ways of referring to Jews and Judaism that I would like to address as making me feel ... dismissed, discounted, viewed as misguided and primitive, not a full member of society and I don't know what words to use for this.)

Jackson said one sentence that really just bopped me in the head as being so thoroughly true -- that the acts of prejudice which those who experience them would really like to talk about are at once both preposterous and completely reasonable.

He gave two examples, one from his own experience, and one from a book by an African American woman. He was working out in a gym, and the gym attendant went from treadmill to treadmill and handed out fresh towels to every white person but not to him. Then this woman to whose book he referred was riding the bus, and a white woman sat next to her and sort of flipped her long blond hair in her face after sitting down, and she had the feeling that the white woman was rubbing her nose in the fact that long blond hair is the thing to have and she could never have it ... you know, and how do you describe feelings]/i] like that. They are at once both preposterous and reasonable.

(Btw, when I heard the hair story, my interpretation was slightly different, because hair flipping or head tossing is an expression of dismissal among women ... that the gesture might have been meant to indicate to everyone else that she did not mind sitting next to a black woman ... but this evokes the same feeling in the black woman because it is like saying that it would be 'normal' to mind and somehow virtuous to not mind, or one must make a demonstration of not minding, or something like this.)

You can't call this racism, and no one thinks that these people are motivated by racism as such ... but it is simultaneously impossible to know what these people are really thinking or feeling, because if they were motivated by racism the expression of this would never be overt, it would be coded. And when one tried to talk about it, there is a strenuous defensive reaction -- Are you calling me racist?? I'm not racist!! How dare you think it! What a preposterous example! -- and so on, all of which is a reasonable reaction in our current political climate but also makes discussion of race consciousness in all its current manifestations impossible to talk about.

I was listening to another talk show this afternoon about racism on the internet, and one African American caller related his experience that when he and his white neighbor are both out working on their yard, someone invariably comes up to him and asks how much he charges for yard work! These querries are not racist in the way for which this term was developed to describe, but one wants to be able to talk about this phenomenon without being accused of over-reaction or preposterousness.

One of the main themes that I gathered from Jackson is that what political correctness has done is to load a problem of language on top of a continuing problem of perception. There is still a great deal of race-consciousness in America, but PC has deprived us of words for talking about this by taking racial issues as a category off the table.

He also went on to express his opinion that race is not the only thing to be treated this way by modern culture (meaning late 20th ce and now 21st ce). He sees the popularity of "therapy," for example, as a replacement of discussions that used to be held within the family, around the dinner table. We have in general boxed ourselves into a corner where there are many deeply personal feelings that we just don't talk about except under sanitized conditions, such as therapy. But if you looked back 50 years those kinds of problems were not handled that way.

I'm very anxious to read his whole book.