The Third Deadly Sin: Greed

Copyright Daniel Litwack

Daniel Litwack                                           October 3, 2016

            We have all been taught that race is a social creation, however the truth is that race was created by an elite group of incredibly wealthy property owners focused and driven by greed to achieve higher status’ and more wealth. These European Christian land-owning men committed acts that, by their own religious standards, were acts of sin. They used whatever means necessary to create an economic system that would benefit and empower only a handful of plantation owners but would give the illusion of power to poorer whites across the new world.

            In 1675 “Nathaniel Bacon was a white property owner in Jamestown, Virginia, who managed to unite slaves, indentured servants, and poor whites in a revolutionary effort to over throw the planter elite” (Alexander, 2012, pg. 24). If this simple white property owner could see through the Planter Elite’s tactics of oppression and bring together so many people from all parts of the oppressed society, then it meant that the planter elite had to act to maintain both their power and dominance. This was the perfect time for the Planter Elite to exploit the differences in skin color and to create the idea of a Bi-racial society (Soderlund, UTS, Chapt. 2), where there could only be two sides: The Blacks and the Whites.

This was an essential turning point in the creation of race because not only could the Planter Elite control the enslaved Africans, they could use poor, Indentured, and middle class whites as their pawns to enforce a racial hierarchy where white dominated black. This profound use of hierarchy, ensured that Whites would become complacent in their powerless roles, and Blacks would be forced to comply with lifelong enslavement by those very same powerless Whites.

As far as we have come as a society since 1865, the concept of race has still managed to wedge itself into every nook and cranny in American society. Each layer that we peel back brings forth new meanings and new understandings of the racialized society that exists all around us. This created idea of race – something that is based on creating divisions – still benefits the same individuals now as it did when it began, and still middle class and poor whites in America continue to maintain their status as pawns for the greedy.

Racialized behavior and ideologies are woven so tightly into our society that the only way to escape it is to wipe the memories from all those who reside on earth. Du Bois’ idea of double consciousness, in regards to blacks, is a result of hundreds of years of psychological trauma as well as racialized thinking. He says “this [is the Peculiar] sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (Du Bois, 1903, pg.11). Du Bois is not wrong but I would expand his theory to encompass whites as well because we too are just as psychologically caught as anyone else.

In the end we committed one of the worst sins of all, a deadly sin, and blindly sent this world sailing towards its doom.

References

Alexander, M. (2012). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In The Age of Colorblindness. New York, NY: The New Press.

Du Bois, W. E. B. (1999). The Souls of Black Folk:Authorative Text, Contexts, Criticism (Norton Critical Edition) (H. L. Gates & T. H. Oliver, Eds.). New York, NY: Norton.

Scott, W. R., & Shade, W. G. (Eds.). (2000). Upon These Shores: Themes In The African-American Experience 1600 To The Present (pg.63-82). New York, NY: Routledge.