Iansá Magazine

By Heb Braggs

Chapter 2: From 1492 to 1441 

The importance of a wider frame on pan-Indigenous solidarity that includes both New Afrikans and Natives can’t be overstated. The mutualistic relationship between liberation movements in the third and fourth worlds, most obvious in the New Left/Black Power/Red Power/National Liberation era, highlights this with one simple, complicated, and complex word: decolonization. 

Decolonization-as-theory in the Americas often takes 1492 as its starting point; from a certain point of view, this makes a lot of sense. That’s when Columbus brought his stanky ass to what became known as the Caribbean, and started plotting and enacting his subjection of Taíno folks. So, this frame has a lot of uses; it allows us to understand how important the decolonial struggle is in the Americas, especially in the ways that it might look different than (while still having similarities to) ‘Old World’ colonial enterprises, especially given the world-dominance of the “US,” manifesting most clearly in things like the Monroe Doctrine and its farcical modern reinterpretation. A persistent issue with/in this framing, though, is the flattening of the dynamic into a “settler-native” dyad, wherein all of that (potential) explanatory power is subtended by a dearth of engagement with the other participants in the tetraptych that we mentioned before: indentured servants and (especially, in my eyes) the enslaved. This “widening” or ”stretching” is important, as it helps us have more context for dynamics that have bearings on the present, especially why, in a world that should have “progressed,” Black and Native folks continue to struggle. 

I propose—following Wynter, Spillers, King, and others in and adjacent to Black Studies—a move from 1492 as a frame for the inauguration of modernity to 1441: that was when Portuguese people started kidnapping and enslaving Black folks on the account of them being Black, and positions me to trace the earliest days of the trade as a pan-European affair that was (and is) inseparable from colonialism, war, desire, patriarchy, self-definition, and exploitation, while not being “reducible” to any of those things.³⁷¹ This allows us to make sure we tie the threads of labor, life, land, and living together, rather than focusing on one thread at the expense of the others. Having an understanding of the role that Black folks play in this whole thing is critical, given the ways in which slavery 1) looms large over modernity, and, for some reason (������), is 2) analogous to Blackness, regardless of the “actual” racial composition of the populations-in-bondage (or the nature of that bondage), alongside the apparent persistence of social forms that could accurately be called slavery throughout history and into the present. Before we get to 1441, though, it’s worth it to go even further back. 

Colonizing-commercial-patriarchal-slavery was deploying, heightening, and innovating on the tools and tactics used in the Crusades,³⁸²the Reconquest,³⁹³ and the Inquisitions.⁴⁰⁴ Given this, the opening act of settler colonialism produced from this frame is the subjection of the Canary Islands.

The Canaries are due west of what’s now Morocco, a bit more than 60 miles off of the coast. Iberia started their “engagements” there in earnest in 1341 with Niccoloso da Ricco (yet another Genoan), bringing back material goods and a few Guanche (folks indigenous to the Canaries) slaves to Portugal. Other Europeans followed suit, including “Majorcans and Catalans[, followed by the] French, Spanish, Portuguese [and] Scots.” The conquering started in earnest when the French took one of the islands in 1402, though the decades of capturing indigenous folks would show that even the previous periods of “trade” weren’t as benign as that word makes it sound. It took until 1495 and multiple invasions for the Spanish to take the Canaries, and many of the processes of settler colonialism as we would come to know it⁴¹⁵ were first done there. Out of all the islands and chains in this area, the Canaries were the only ones with indigenous folks. Once they had fully subjected the islands, the Spanish used the Canaries alongside the other islands off of the coast of Africa in Macaronesia as a kind of staging ground for “expeditions” to the Caribbean; Columbus’s last stop before (what became) Hispaniola was these islands. Sugar, which became the calling card of the Caribbean, likely came from the Canaries.⁴²⁶ 

Madeira, about 250 miles north of the Canaries, was even more critical for sugar, though its prominence in the production of that product was similarly short-lived. Columbus got a hang of the capitalistic ropes there as he planned to make a name for himself by going west. Similarly to the process with the Canaries (and later in the New World), ecological change framed the whole colonial enterprise—starting in 1420—when the island was first colonized. These activities ranged from introducing grazing animals and cutting timber, to African and Canarian slaves to build irrigation for the sugar industry. The island went from producing 280 tons of sugar to topping out at 2.5k tons in 1506, only to fall down 90% by 1530, as the growth of the sugar industry led to deforestation, which ate up the fuel source for sugar processing. The wine that the island is currently known for became the primary commodity by the 1560s. This quick process of colonization, ecological change, and commodification showcases a supercharged version of the varied and uneven transition from precapitalistic to capitalistic modes elsewhere, where people went from leading the money to following it.⁴³⁷ Much of that “following” started involuntarily through the process of enslavement. 

All of these processes (theft, commodity-enslavement, colonization, and war) are intertwined. To see how Black Africans were brought into this equation, it’s worthwhile to trace that out a bit more. Columbus wrote in his December 21st, 1492 diary entry⁴⁴⁸ about having “been to Guinea” and comparing the harbors there unfavorably to the ones in the Caribbean, burying the lede on the fact that—by that time—Black Africans were being kidnapped and enslaved from the Gulf of Guinea area. This hints at the fact that, alongside the aforementioned “activities” off of the Atlantic coast of Africa, there was activity in the Old World that fed into the New World; ergo, the colonial enterprises were connected. At the very least, it can be seen that people like Columbus saw them as connected. 

Slavery was started, in its modern form (i.e. the antiBlack formulation of bondage that facilitates and subtends modernity), by the Iberians (specifically the Portuguese, but Spain and other Europeans were in the mix). This was enabled by historical convergences in Europe’s technology that allowed them to traverse the sea past Iberia and down Africa’s Atlantic coast. The Portuguese-made caravel was the crux of this change, as, in 1434, it enabled Gil Eannes to do just that, going past Cape Bojador in (what is now) Western Sahara. This allowed the Portuguese to bypass long-standing African trade control established by North African Muslims, who used trans-Saharan trade routes. Sailing along Africa’s Atlantic coast allowed the Portuguese to gain direct access to the slaves and resources that western Africa below the Sahara had to offer. They did this through establishing trade feitorias (aka hubs, run by the Portuguese) to commandeer existing networks, and colonizing islands along Africa’s Atlantic coast to use as staging grounds for people and goods.

This created an opportunity as the “fall” of Constantinople closed Europe’s access to Asian and Levantine goods (there used to be a relay from “the East” to the Byzantines to Italy to the rest of Europe); Portugal was able to find a new route around the Cape of Good Hope (which is at the bottom of Africa) and open Europe up to the Indian Ocean trade; they had to go all the way around Africa back then, as the Suez Canal wouldn’t be built in Egypt till the 1800s. Those first Black Africans were captured and taken to Europe soon after. This facilitated steady growth (and inflation), as gold and silver came from Africa and the New World. The trade also spurred sugar growth, moving it from its base in the Mediterranean to the Americas. The slaves themselves came from West and Central Africa, with a few from Southeastern Africa (what is nowMozambique and Madagascar, thereabouts).⁴⁵⁹ 

Iberia established the slave system in the Atlantic world, creating a racial hierarchy⁴⁶¹⁰ (at the greatest expense of specifically Black Africans) in the process. This slavery of the early modern period in Iberia was continuous, for the first few years, with the traditions of their wars with Muslims and the general Mediterranean societies they were situated within. Slavery, according to their justifications, was seen as a byproduct of war and was governed by 13th century legal codes called the Siete Partidas, which essentially saw slaves as temporary prisoners hit with a bout of misfortune. Nevermind the impossibility for ransom for these slaves; at least they weren’t (clearly) legally seen as property (yet).⁴⁷¹¹ 
This emerging (or reforming) system of slavery started earnestly in 1441, with “two Portuguese vessels land[ing] at the Rio de Oro and carr[ying] off several of the local Berber people, the Idzagen” and “one of the Idzagen’s black slave women,” wherein the captors used that “just war” rationale; they could be sources of information about their territory and communities alongside being ransomed or sold.⁴⁸¹² This strategy ended after a few years, as the Portuguese switched from “warlike raids on the coast of Mauritania” to “trad[ing] with African princes and merchants,” where “the number of slaves acquired each year steadily increased from the middle of the fifteenth century to the middle of the sixteenth.”⁴⁹¹³ Slavery was further justified through a combination of adapting crusades rhetoric (including the idea that it could “Christianize” the Black folks who were seen as “pagans”), looking back at ancient Greek and Roman usages and logics of slavery, the context of existing in the wider Mediterranean, where forms of slavery were a persistent part of the institutions, alongside the condition of slavery as a resultant of original sin, articulated in its most biblical extreme by the idea that Black folks were of the “sinful race of Ham.”⁵⁰¹⁴

Another slave raid occurred in 1441 and was described in The Crónica, known in English as the Chronicle of Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, written by Gomes Eanes de Zurara and commissioned by the then King Alfonso V. In it, Antam Gonçalvez, one of those infamous “explorer” types, wanted to make some more money, beyond the goods he got from the Western Sahara area. So, he captured a couple of Berbers. Nuno Tristão later joined him and they captured more. The Berber captives then made a deal to gain their freedom, in exchange for 10 Black slaves, which showcased the potential for more gains to be had. This led to Pope Nicolas V passing papal bulls that granted Portugal (i.e.King Alfonso) the right to enslave Black Africans, labeling them as a population to perpetually exist in bondage, unable to “hold,” “obtain,” or “maintain” what would come to be understood as sovereignty, autonomy, or territory. This also provided a legal grounds for using Christianity to renegotiate a “limit” to slavery (that is to say, who could and couldn’t be enslaved, and what could and couldn’t be done to those slaves, though this idea of a limit should be understood less like a restriction and more like a boundary).⁵¹¹⁵ Contrary to popular distortions that see African systems of slavery as a “reservoir” that Europeans “tapped,” or that the difference between the buyers and sellers was a matter of quantity, what was labeled as slavery in African societies was, in actuality, an institutionalization (based in bondage) of marginalized peoples. This qualitative difference brought those people “into the fold,” so to speak. Due to the variance of these societies, it is hard to say what shape this “institutionalization” took in any general strokes. The shift occurred as Europeans used economic domination to supplant the more powerful political order of Africans.⁵²¹⁶

With relation to money, “[f]oreign demand [drove] up prices within the whole system until massive new sources of slaves appeared in the 1560s and 1570s as a result of migrations of peoples in Africa and the Portuguese conquest of Angola. In Lisbon, the average price of slaves more than doubled between 1500 

and 1540, and the price of the best slaves reached American levels at mid-century. This price rise put slaves beyond the reach of most Portuguese, but the crown had never been concerned primarily with domestic demand. Indeed the policy of re-export favoured by the kings of Portugal showed concrete returns, for it encouraged an increase in the volume of the slave-trade, and this increase brought more revenue to the royal coffers: between 1511 and 1559 the revenue from the western African trades in which slaves were one of the principal commodities almost quintupled.”⁵³¹⁷

Relatedly (and critically), Spain would be the first people to use African enslavement in the Americas, as a myriad of factors made the enslavement of Natives “unsustainable,” in spite of the millions of Natives who were enslaved. These factors included a declining population, flimsy justifications for enslavement (as the brunt of the justification philosophy was tied to Black people) when compared to other options of bondage like indenture and the encomienda system (though the labor regimes of each of these systems are difficult to neatly and tidily separate), alongside multiple failed attempts at policy reform and legal remuneration. Settlers do not give up their spoils easily. This led Nicolas Ovando, who was the 3rd governor of the Spanish colonies, to advocate for the banning of slavery. There was fear around them spurring on revolt amongst themselves and Natives—the colonies had been dealing with issues of African resistance. A ban came in 1503, but Ovando reversed course in 1505 as there was work to be done in the mines.⁵⁴¹⁸ 

Up until 1518, slaves transported to the colonies had to come from Iberia rather than directly from Africa—there was a concern of non-Christians coming into contact with Natives and inciting rebellious tendencies within them. Emperor Charles V changed this on Aug 8, 1518. He declared that Lorenzo de Gorrevod had permission to transport 4,000 slaves directly to the colonies from Africa if they were “converted” during the trip. This set the tone for the asientos (which are the contracts which gave private entities to supply slaves to the colonies) that allowed people to follow suit in the name of the Spanish Crown, from migrants bringing one or more slaves with them to big merchant houses and other nations fulfilling those needs at scale. A non-Iberian illicit slave economy developed, which led to pirates and the like providing early English colonists with their first slaves. Stated plainly, much of Europe (i.e.the West), was in all of this; the slave trade’s social promise, most tangibly represented by money, got lots of people involved. Iberia provided the rest of Europe with the template to enslave Africans and get in on the trans-Atlantic slave trade.⁵⁵¹⁹ 

It is worthwhile at this point to state directly how (what would become known as) Blackness was thought about in the context modern slavery’s establishment. There was a clear dislike of Africa and their people below Cape Bojador, from superstitions about boiling African seas and the sun darkening skin, to the literal dislike of Black skin and darkness-as-evil concepts. In contrast, there was a sense of moral “ambiguity” for Natives (of the Americas), revolving around a “simple” idea of nobility and a connection to/example of the past that didn’t exist for Africans. This is worth highlighting as Blackness and Native-ness are even played against each other conceptually. As the French West Indian proverb put it: “To look askance at an Indian is to beat him; to beat him is to kill him; to beat a Negro is to nourish him.” Material conditions and worldviews were stacked against Black folks. Even the deadly conditions of settlement and enslavement were papered over due to the early drive to import people. In all, at least 9.4mn people were transported from Africa to the Americas.⁵⁶²⁰ 

This didn’t start from a purely racial perspective (or, said otherwise, race alone—as it is currently thought of—wasn’t enough to start slavery, even if it was concretized over time and made more central to maintaining it); there were various forces of the religious and political variety (which can be difficult to separate from race) that prevented the widespread and “straightforward” enslavement of certain kinds of people, as part of a general thrust of Christianization. This is part of why the “just war” answers to Black slavery by Europeans fell apart after a short while, alongside previous edicts of enslaving “infidels.” An important thing to keep in mind is the “ecology” of “reasons” that slavery happened. While money (i.e.profit) seemed to be a big part of it, the motivation was also racial and religious and social and political and libidinal, alongside being about domination and coercion. 

For the purposes of this piece, I posit that it’s critical to think of the US historically in ways that acknowledge its context as part of a pan-European project for the Americas; this project isn’t unitary, as much as it’s a lot of folks driven by the same or similar forces for their own, widely varying (though ultimately copacetic at the level of—and for the sake of—the [capitalist] system’s) ends. All of the conversations we’ve had so far, tracing histories of enslavement, help contextualize how African folks ended up in Jamestown in 1619. That illicit strategy was what was being tapped when English-sanctioned pirates stole them from Portuguese ships.⁵⁷²¹ 

As for the US, it is best understood as a settler empire that started from settler colonies.⁵⁸²² It is often assumed that the original settlers were poor, but the supermajority of them were middle class, and the rest had at least an avenue to becoming middle class. The “unclaimed” land of America was a vehicle to establish this class character, stomping out any chance at establishing a white proletarian subjectivity (and, as time went on, allowing America to act as a larger and more encompassing pressure valve for Europe, enveloping more and more folks into whiteness and settlerism). This land was, obviously, not unclaimed, but cleared, through the killing of millions of indigenous people and the enslavement of millions more (both Natives and Africans). Selling this land kickstarted the profits of certain colonies like the Carolinas. Far from being something that only the evil planter and merchant capitalists perpetuated, this benefited all of the settlers.⁵⁹²³ 

Given the lack of capital generation of the colonies (resulting from their newness), there needed to be a way to make the capital investment worth it. It didn’t (originally) come from production; it was from the slave trade. Slaves, both as a means of production and as labor, were the foundation of the economy. The “branding”/idea of America was built up as a democracy of small farm owners (a concept most saliently represented in the ideas and ideals of Thomas Jefferson, antiBlack and antiIndigenous proclivities included), so those left outside of that vision had to do the work of the proletariat (i.e.producing the stuff that society uses to function). For the scant few whites (20% of workers, though 3/4s of them had the chance to move into that small farmer ideal through being granted land after “paying their due” from indenture or other settler scheming) that did labor for a wage and weren’t able to escape such a condition, they had some of the highest wages in the capitalist world. Everything being shaped around settlers lead to the erosion of even minor class consciousness, a situation exacerbated by the racial stratification at play.⁶⁰²⁴ 

This understanding of the role that settlers play in the US context is critical given the ways in which, both historically and contemporarily, oppressed people are (unevenly) recuperated into the American “democratic project” through their participation in its (revolutionary) struggles. This idea often came from situations like Bacon’s Rebellion, where settlers allied with each other to get a bigger piece of the money pie. The goings of this mo(ve)ment led Bacon to call on the slaves of his opposition; he offered them freedom for their alliance. There is a view that might see this, especially in imagining the indentured, enslaved, and landed (with Natives suspiciously absent) working together as an early example of anti-oppressive solidarity. In reality, as it is often so, the oppressed had a much clearer assessment of the situation. While understanding their interests to be opposed to these colonial entities (there were much less allusions to and illusions of any benefit coming from the settler colonial entity that occupied them or that that sent the settlers here), they found themselves tactically allied with them (especially during internecine conflicts) to try and gain freedom. Democracy and oppression were welded together, as white “freedom” and “ownership” was fueled by exploitation of oppressed peoples.⁶¹²⁵ 

As time went on, and the colonies solidified their social structures (usually though war), there was a constant negotiation between settler control and the activity of non-settler populations. As a slave society, this was a big problem; the quantity of enslaved, and various insurrections (along with a world-ordering revolution in Haiti) led planters to be very fearful in a haunted kind of way, leading to different plans for how to address the potential for similar such acts in the US. Some places, even in the core of the society, wanted to deport or remove Black folks, and others wanted to import more whites. This tension around what to do to maintain settler society and continue to grow its wealth and power exploded into the unrest of the Civil War era.⁶²²⁶ 

All of this should be framed, as it relates to Black folks, in a context that points to an appropriation/thingification of what we often call “humanity,” rather than a true (i.e. total) rejection, exclusion, or suppression. Those are all pieces of the puzzle, but they are not the full picture. Otherwise, there would not be a need to constantly weaponize and create falsehoods around the people who were chosen to be targets of enslavement; our “unhumanity” would prove itself, in ways that are more robust than the kind of shoddy claims of “hindsight” that can be found at present. Another way to approach this is seeing the zone of non-being as metaphorical and metaphysical, but no less material. My thinking here is pretty basic: the undeniable factuality of our personhood as Black folks is something that we are compelled to “prove,” as that seems to be the obvious response to our shitty treatment, given the rhetorical weight that is often put into an antagonistic unmooring from humanity as a “neutral” or “general” or “average” category/idea/concept. However, if we weren’t understood to be people, our positioning and positionality in relation to the idea of the Human would be less weaponizable. For example, being “only” considered subhuman would point towards inferiority, which doesn’t explain the (admittedly double-edged and Orientalist) interest in Black cultural creations, from Ebonics to the banjo, to the agricultural and artisanal skills that various enslaved folks brought with them (and were often specifically targeted for). 

A thread to continue tracing is the ways that oppressed people, namely Black and Native folks, have negotiated and navigated these historical dynamics, especially as it relates to the “humanity” concept. Many conversations I’ve been privy to about Black-Native relations in the US focus on discontinuities. Cherokee enslavement of Africans and the Buffalo Soldiers killing Natives are the primary ones that I see deployed. These discontinuities are exemplified by the narrative that black folks are looking for belonging (through things like civil rights) and native folks are looking for (tribal) sovereignty. The implication therein is that these are mutually exclusive strategies, and the implication in that is that Black-Native solidarity can at best be tactical in nature. In reality, Native-Black relations are shaped by fights, foibles, and joining forces. We contend with a settler state built upon racialized, antiblack, and spatialized expropriation and enslavement. Black and Native resistance has happened through political violence, volatility, movement, and many other modes of engagement, so trying to boil it down to any of those tactics in particular would, at the very least, require a lot of evidence alongside a narrow framing question. 

This is critical as tensions around the invisibilization of Native folks alongside the predominance of “Playing Indian” can make it hard to acknowledge the Indigeneity of Africans in America.⁶³²⁷ This is important to do as Blackness wasn’t initially a positive self-concept. That unity started to form with shared experiences of unique peoples from unique tribes on slave ships⁶⁴²⁸(and honestly, before that, for folks who had to traverse the brutal slave routes from/across the interior of Africa to whatever coast they were being shipped from⁶⁵²⁹). This is explored by many different people, like Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, and Lucy Terry, all operating in the 1700s before the American War for Independence as some of the earliest Black writers to get published here. Tensions with other Indigenous people do show up, as, for example, Lucy Terry made poetry that fed into settler narratives about Natives; her contemporaries, being embedded in the settler society, likely had similar proclivities in certain regards.⁶⁶³⁰ Even if they perpetuated settler colonial ideas, we have to remember that isn’t the same as being a settler or having settler power.⁶⁷³¹ A critical point is to remember that anyone can believe pretty much anything; this is part of why people within a community can be against that community (or otherwise act in ways that are against that community’s interest). This is pretty clear if you’re a person in any of these non-dominant spaces and you interact with… the people around you, but that embodied awareness seems to be one of those inconvenient truths that gets lost in the shuffle. That doesn’t make those bigoted ideas excusable; bigotry is not acceptable, in any time or place! However, we do have to contend with it, and a part of that is knowing where it can show up and what might cause it to do so. Fighting against normalization and being critical of historical instances of it is paramount. 

These differences are more advantageous to settlers than us, as Natives and Africans were left out of many of the early imaginings of the US liberal democratic project. The propertied, homogenous “freedom” of white folks was not only diametrically opposed to the freedoms (even if they meant the same thing, i.e.that freedom on the tongues of whites was self-aware of its incredulity) of Africans and Natives but was built off of the denial of our own many concepts of “freedom”. While Africans and Natives were understood to be fundamentally different from each other (and each at least decently different from whites), they shared the experience of oppression under whites in the form of appropriation and tyranny.⁶⁸³² The shape those experiences take is both similar and dissimilar. Inclusion in the liberal democratic project does (and has) le(a)d to a massive subtending of resistance, allowing the bounds of the imagination to be left within the system of oppression, rather than going outside, against, and beyond it. 

The tension between Black belonging (i.e.being speciously positioned as subjects of the American citizen-state, relegated to violence of questionable legibility) and Native removal and dispossession (i.e. being understood as enemy nations related to through legible violence) defined how relations were understood in the later parts of the 19th century. From the Five Civilized Tribes enslaving folks to the legalistic abjection of Black humanity to the rhetorical erasure of Natives by folks like Frederick Douglass, Black and Native interests have been historically pitted against each other. This culminated in Black folks gaining citizenship amid continued native dispossession and a shift in relations with the US towards Native Folks. I’d say this is a big source of the specious idea of there being two (at best twin) struggles, as mentioned earlier: 1) the Black struggle for recognition and 2) the Native struggle for sovereignty. I think that both of these struggles end up getting averaged out into a more amenable amalgam, which can obfuscate the coercion and violence that leads to the situation where “recognition” and “sovereignty,” as conceived within a liberal paradigm, are the narrative forerunners for struggle.⁶⁹³³ For me, the focus shouldn’t be on how folks “just wanted to be allowed to exist”, but the active and militant resistance to domination, even in acts that seemed to be “purely” “self-serving,” like flight or personal work stoppage. Various insurgent activities should be highlighted. 

After the Civil War and the inability for Reconstruction to deal with the rotten roots of slavery, there was a heightened period of reaction or backlash. This Nadir of race relations in the US, from 1890 to the 1920s, occurred for both Natives and Black folks. It might have been the ”Progressive Era” for other folks, but that “progress” came at the expense of internal and external colonies. The Dawes Act, which both gave Native land to settlers and put the rest into private allotments, led to continued/renewed indigenous land dispossession. The establishment of Jim Crow ensured that Black folks suffered through the convict leasing system and debt bondage among a myriad of apartheid policies. The Society of American Indians (SAI) and Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) were established for their respective communities to advocate for self-determination, which I understand to be the more militant and radical form of what “sovereignty” tries to get at. DuBois and Charles Eastman, on the other hand, advocated for a seat at the table, trying to use education at the 1911 Universal Races Congress to prove the capacity of their “races.”⁷⁰³⁴ 

Overall, Modern slavery (as in the kinds of enslavement that accompanied and inaugurated the “age of discovery,” continually transforming into the present) can be seen as an accumulative assemblage of previous practices of slavery (reframed by modern cultural paradigms), with some new elements that come from its place in shaping and being shaped by capitalism. Said otherwise, modern slavery added new dimensions to previous forms, at once being something new and contiguous with the past (while overdetermining the imaginary of what slavery is, both premodern and modern, making it difficult to think about premodern slavery or other kinds of bondage, especially since it is so heavily racialized and welded to Blackness specifically). This happened through a kind of structural primacy (rather than cultural primacy) (not to say that cultural aspects didn’t matter, it’s moreso about what the “engine” is) given to the power that the enslaved generated, reshaping all other concerns along political and economic (i.e. rational-humanist) lines, turning them into motivations to feed the engines of early globalization. Ironically, capitalist modes of production derive more economic benefit from slavery than so-called slave societies did, since the slave under capitalism is both a means of production, modernist ideological coagulant, and a laborer, rather than “just” a kind of “reservoir,” “marginal,” or “expedient” social container, in the context of things like labor for “great works” such as massive buildings for worship or veneration. Modern slavery is very decentralized as well, led by “entrepreneurs” in the market acting in their own “private interests,” while collaborating to uphold those interests in the ecosystem-economy of slavery, rather than being tightly wound to the mechanisms of the state. As this arrangement was built around Black people specifically, we were at least partly seen about as “Other” from the slavers as a people could get, far and beyond other nonwhite or even nonBlack indigenous peoples. 

Through this frame, it is insufficient (though necessary) to say “we’re all fighting against white supremacy”; racialism became as “coherent” as it is (which is not saying much) by making Blackness it’s limit, container, and outside. Obviously, Natives were an important ideological and social group for this idea, especially in the context of the Americas, where they are a demonstrably separate people from Africans (which is different than, say, South Africa) but it was a different side of the same coin (a principally material affair of dispossession vs an ideological affair of justifying that affair along with slavery)… that doesn’t mean we should ignore the qualitative and quantitative differences, though! Attending to those differences, while reframing our liberatory movements, theory, and practice so as to be able to imagine an abundance of energy to address all radical concerns specifically and generally is paramount. 

Moving towards the present, it can be seen that African American ghettos and Native American reservations are often analogized. Even given analogy’s violence, this is an accurate analysis, insofar as it’s framed around the concept of social exclusion, which illuminates that both of these spaces lack political, social, and economic integration (i.e. equal participation) into the wider American fabric. This exclusion is often blamed on the inhabitants of these spaces, as it supposedly represents their failure to take advantage of the meritocratic ideals that the system constantly reminds them of. Further resonances between the experiences can be found in the fact that both groups were/are specifically segregated from other segments of the population, rather than “choosing” to build ethnic enclaves from an assortment of possible choices.⁷¹³⁵ 

Beyond these, there are differences between the racism (as policy and opinion) against Natives and other racisms along these spatial lines. The features of tribal sovereignty and federally owned lands specific for Natives are primary amongst the unique dynamics. Through assimilation attempts through Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Indian Appropriations Act of 1851, and The Dawes Act (Indian Allotment Act) of 1887, to 1934’s Indian Reorganization Act, there was an extended period of the government taking land and Natives reasserting sovereignty, which was responded to with another round of formalizing displacement with the Indian Relocation Program. The Bureau of Indian Affairs’s (BIA) initiative was attempting to urbanize the Native population on the heels of WW2’s industrial boom, with mixed results. Many Natives have struggled to find success after relocation due to the lack of support systems.⁷²³⁶ Current tribal efforts to improve conditions has led to casino gaming, which benefits from the special status of tribal lands. However, these benefits have been minimal; the gap between Natives in the rest of the US population remains. 

Existing within a settler context can lead to a myriad of approaches, from assimilation/integration, to separatism, to trying to find a “middle ground.” The inability to delink, exacerbated by the inability engage in the market in a “fair way” (not that there ever is such a thing, but it is especially apparent for internal colonies, as the first [historical] targets of while being the constantly revisited launchpad for the nation’s imperialism), means that there is bound to be some unequal relations therein, and affirms the need to figure out what it would mean to truly not only delink, but create spaces of freely associated, generalized, autonomy. The answer to being cut out of the economy isn’t to be dealt a hand, it’s to flip over the table and burn down the house of cards. Gaming (both in the sense of this analogy and the concrete industry of casinos) shows itself not to be a source of freedom. Its lack of ability to improve the lot of Native reservations (in the face of being presented as a chance to do just that) is seen as an issue of not being a part of the main space of urbanity and economy, rather than, again, taking issue with that economy as such. 

A similar story exists with Black capitalist efforts. Entertainment is rampant with examples of this, but an example that comes to mind is the Roc Nation School scheme. In these situations, the best-case scenario is for people to take a tenuous deal with the status quo at the expense of other marginalized communities. It is critical to understand the present-ness of the past; ancestral issues are our issues. 

Tracing the historical specificity of racialization, with the intent of finding out what makes a certain experience “unique” is important, but embarking down that path with seeing “uniqueness” or trying to understand what makes something “un-analogizable” can lead to a zero-sum (i.e. for one experience of racialization to be unique, others have to be less so, or assuming that the way to avoid this is assuming parity) understanding that exaggerates the separation between different experiences. In the context of this conversation, this zero-sum frame would mean seeing settler colonialism and slavery as, at best, “twins”, rather than “multiple heads of the same beast.” Following the latter analogy, a more accurate way to describe them would be interpenetrated, rather than simply being tag-teamers. That is a better foundation than the kind of “analogizing” work that the usage of the word “twin” grasps at. In thinking about (settler) colonization or enslavement as systems, trying to isolate one from the other serves to be more obfuscating than illuminating. 

This is another reason why I find it useful to acknowledge the indigeneity of New Afrikans; it makes clearer the entanglement of us and Natives here. Further entangling can be found in Orientalism, given the ways in which the Othering and assumed validity of imparting violence on said Other, as discussed within that context, is true for Black and Native folks as well. 

Hopefully, peeking back into some of the historical foundations and present conditions of the bullshit we’ve been talking about shows that these threads of orientalism (and its association with war), (settler) colonialism (and its association with dispossession), and capitalism (and its association with exploitation, especially when slavery is understood to be its extreme, specious as that understanding may be) are functionally inseparable, if we want to talk about Big Things like trying to understand why certain historical processes happen. After all, how can we separate the “dominant” ideas of each part of the triptych from each other? The war/violence associated with orientalism can be found in the other two; the same can be said for the dispossession found in settler colonialism and exploitation found in capitalism. 

To draw the connections between orientalism and Blackness a bit more, especially as it relates to or otherwise points towards the “War on Terror,” it is important to acknowledge its history in the American geographical context. Islam has always been a part of the “American” story; it is likely that the very first words that the Taino heard during first Contact were Arabic from Columbus’s interpreter. Islam had an outsized influence in the Americas due to the intersecting historical flows of Islamic influence on Spain after 700+ years of Muslim rule in Iberia and the critical contingent of enslaved West African Muslims. Spain took on Islamic practices as part of their colonial algorithm, and Africans were used for and used their skills to make a life in the Americas.⁷³ The Americas can be understood, especially in the early years post-Contact, to be “the great collision” of peoples from Africa, Europe, and the Western Hemisphere, and of core importance here is the substantive portion of the enslaved population that was Muslim, including the Christmas 1522 rebels in San Domingo. 

In saying that, though, it’s worth reiterating: my intent is to not say that “we’re all the same.” It is to say that “we” can’t even approach the ways that we are or are not “the same” without reckoning with the varying and variegated nature of social positions. 

So, it’s a both/and situation; “we” are both “the same” and “different,” and (I believe that) resolving the contradictions that exist—whether it happens in the traditional sense of zero-sum conflict, and/or it is a more syncretic mode that learns to embrace the friction—means leaning into both directions, figuring out how to attend to situational specifics and structural generalities. Given this, I want to return to that first black slave that was taken from those Berber captives. In the current conversation, is critical that they were a marginalized gender (maGe) person; specifically a woman. To start, her being marked as a black woman (referred to as a “mooress”), alongside that information being the basis of deciding who could be enslaved,⁷⁴indicates that “the color line” has gendered strands, and that this has been true from the start. This understanding requires that those doing analysis “center” those that have been marginalized. One of the issues that comes from the act of marginalization is that it becomes a way to lose sight of the roles of various people within domineering’ social structures. Gender is critical to think through in these systems, as it is, once it is made visible, a critical site of struggle. Patriarchy and the concrete ways that it shows up in the world—given that it’s all about enforcing regimes of embodiment (most clearly around gender—which can’t be clearly thought of outside of other forms of domination)—brings together the triptych of war, dispossession, and property, potentially turning it into a tetraptych. So, alongside the tetraptych of indenture, wage labor, slave, and capitalist, there is a tetraptych that is fused to wider systems of domination through social reproduction, creating meta-industrial labor. 

1. By this, I am getting at the fact that being aware of any of these facets will not necessarily build awareness of the other facets, nor will it engender an understanding of the accompanying social dynamics in a robust way. This is not to say that 1441 as the pivot point solves it, but… it’s a start. ↩︎
2. The Crusades could be seen, in the main (for our current conversation), as an example of tying together the early prototypes of modern slavery (justified through just war theory, which was, very quickly, not as applicable to how black Africans were engaged, as the ransoming aspect was made absent… the obtaining process looked more like the trade of materials), the primacy of commerce, and colonialism, using with religion to make it as coherent as it needed to be for action. Some of these connections are explored in Palestine 1492 w/ Linda Quiquivix.. ↩︎
3. The Iberian peninsula was ruled, with varying degrees of cohesion and concentration, by Muslims from 711 to 1492 CE. The Reconquest (often referred to in the literature as the Reconquista) was the movement to bring things back under Christian and European control. The main things that came from this—for the purposes of the current conversation—were the Islamic-associated practices that the Spanish adopted (including the requerimiento, descriptions of Native religious sites as “Mosques,” and describing Native dress as “Moorish”), alongside the Spanish being able to think of themselves as… Spanish.  ↩︎
4. There have been many inquisitions, both during medieval and early modern (1400s+) periods, from the Iberian entities. Of relevance to this particular conversation, the Spanish Inquisitions connected these periods, as they spilled from and fed into the Reconquista. (Re)claimed territories were treated with suspicion and the mandate to convert to Catholicism or face sanctions and (eventually) expulsion. 
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5. These processes included the “what it says on the tin” things like settling, the slavery as mentioned before, and the ruinous shifting of the island’s ecology towards cash crop production. ↩︎
6. An Ecohistory of the Canary Islands: A Precursor of European Colonialization in the New World and Australasia on JSTOR ↩︎
7. Madeira, Sugar, and the Conquest of Nature in the “First” Sixteenth Century: Part I: From “Island of Timber” to Sugar Revolution, 1420—1506 on JSTOR ↩︎
8. I sourced these diary entries from page 122 of The journal of Christopher Columbus (during his first voyage, 1492-93) and documents relating the voyages of John Cabot and Gaspar Corte Real and page 6 of Documents of West Indian History 1492 – 1655 From the Spanish Discovery to the British Conquest of Jamaica. 
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9. Slavery in Iberia before the Trans-Atlantic Trade ↩︎
10.  Chapter 1 of The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History ↩︎
11. Slavery in Iberia before the Trans-Atlantic Trade · African Laborers for a New Empire: Iberia, Slavery, and the Atlantic World. ↩︎
12. A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441—1555, p. ↩︎
13. ibid. ↩︎
14. ibid, chapter 2. ↩︎
15. Pope Nicolas V and the Portuguese Slave Trade · African Laborers for a New Empire: Iberia, Slavery, and the Atlantic World ↩︎
16. From Chapter 1 The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History. This is a bit of a difficult conversation to navigate given the ways that colonial slavery overdetermines what slavery is understood to be. That is to say, there are ways in which the constancy of “slavery” across time and place naturalizes the particular, European-spurred and (proto-)capitalistic slavery of the 1400s on, obfuscating the differences between what came before and what came during/after. Bondage, trafficking, and peonage are never “just” or “good,” even in cases like this, where it was used as a way to have certain folks assimilated into a society. However, it’s important to know that what was happening in the slave trading period between African polities and the Portuguese (especially as the balance of forces shifted towards the favor of the market) was not quite the same as what was happening between African polities. This at least creates space to not place outsized blame on Africans for our lot. 
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17.  A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441—1555. ↩︎
18. The Spanish and New World Slavery · African Laborers for a New Empire: Iberia, Slavery, and the Atlantic World ↩︎
19. The Early Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: Emperor Charles V · African Laborers for a New Empire: Iberia, Slavery, and the Atlantic World. ↩︎
20.  From Chapter 1 of The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History. It’s also worth pointing out (again, as a similar thing came up earlier) that there were/are ideologies of abuse exercised against non-Black Natives that were similar to what’s been described with Black folks. A good way to think of this is what dominant narratives exist, and how they shape “truth,” regardless of whether or not they turn out to be so. To make a long story short: these tendencies overbearing on the concerns that shaped the historical moment in which they exist is not mutually exclusive with instances of the kinds of concerns that seemed to be there for the “other” subjected population. ↩︎
21.  Slavery in America Didn’t Start in Jamestown in 1619 | Time ↩︎
22.  This is not to say that the two are mutually exclusive, or that one must lead into the other… like, I wouldn’t call the short-lived British attempt in Zimbabwe anything that had a chance at becoming an empire, but it was definitely a colony. ↩︎
23.  Chapter 1 of Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern. ↩︎
24. Chapter 1 of Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern ↩︎
25. Chapter 2 of Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern ↩︎
26. Chapter 3 of Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern. ↩︎
27. The main tension here is that this acknowledgement could be weaponized in a zero-sum way, feeding into “replacement” rhetoric. For me, replacing is both not something that’s taken seriously, nor should it be a rhetorical framing that is used like a cautionary tale. I wholeheartedly reject those narratives and am extremely critical of their deployment. ↩︎
28.  Chapter 1 of An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States. ↩︎
29. “The Other Middle Passage: The African Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean” in Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World ↩︎
30. Chapter 1 of An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States ↩︎
31. It should be understood here that being a settler is at its root a material relationship. I have no interest in letting people off the hook, but I do find importance in being accurate in critiques when the stakes demand it (rather than being “pedantic” for its own sake… just because it’s not that deep to some, doesn’t mean it’s not that deep in general). Things get messy when attention is not paid to the conflation that often happens between moral and analyticial concepts (i.e., in this case, how “settler” = “bad”, so asking 
    to not use that language specifically can be understood as absolving the genuinely harmful behaviors that are being referred to). As I’ve talked about elsewhere, I believe that morals should be dispensed with, and the manual, non-scalable labor of deep, radical, and critical thinking—in communal contexts if not settings—should take its place. Concretely, for this, it means holding all of the relational truths together without a need (or an acquiesce to an impulse/drive/desire) to “resolve” the contradiction between Indigeneity as a concept, the critical importance of respecting the Native peoples of these lands, the Indigeneity of the African Diaspora (with this case being a large focus on New Afrikans), and the harm that can happen between communities, indigenous or otherwise, alongside how none of those things are themselves invalidating of positionality or identity. ↩︎
32. Chapter 2 of An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States ↩︎
33. Chapter 3 of An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States ↩︎
34. Chapter 4 of An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States ↩︎
35.  Learning from the American Ghetto. ↩︎
36. Chapter 1 of Indigenous Memory, Urban Reality. ↩︎