Jeffrey is describing an ideology (in one important sense of the term) rather than a doctrine. Doctrines or propaganda can be refuted; ideology can only be countered with a powerful counter-practice. -- Carrol
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>From "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America," by
Barbara Jeanne Fields. New Left Review, May/June 1990.
This is perhaps a good moment to say a few words abut what ideology is and what it is not; because without an understanding of what ideology is and does, how it arises and how it is sustained, there can be no genuinely historical understanding of race. Ideology is best understood as the descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existence through which people make rough sense of the social reality that they live and create from day to day. It is the language of consciousness that suits the particular way in which people deal with their fellows. It is the interpretation in thought of the social relations through which they constantly create and re-create their collective being, in all the varied forms their collective being may assume: family, clan, tribe, nation, class, party, business enterprise, church, army, club, and so on. As such, ideologies are not delusions but real, as real as the social relations for which they stand.
Ideologies are real, but it does not follow that they are scientifically accurate, or that they provide an analysis of social relations that would make sense to anyone who does not take ritual part in those social relations. Some societies (including colonial New England) have explained troublesome relations between people as witchcraft and possession by the devil. The explanation makes sense to those whose daily lives produce and reproduce witchcraft, nor can any amount of rational "evidence" disprove it. Witchcraft in such a society is as self-evident a natural fact as race is to Richard Cohen of the _Washington Post_. To someone looking in from outside, however, explaining a miscarriage, a crop failure, a sudden illness, or a death by invoking witchcraft would seem absurd, just as explaining slavery by invoking race must seem absurd to anyone who does not ritually produce race day in and day out as Americans do. Ideologies do not need to be plausible, let alone persuasive, to outsiders. They do their job when they help insiders make sense of the things they do and see--ritually, repetitively--on a daily basis.
So much ideology is. Here is what it is not. It is not a material entity, a thing of any sort, that you can hand down like an old garment, pass on like a germ, spread like a rumour, or impose like a code of dress or etiquette. Nor is it a collection of dissociated beliefs--"attitudes" is the favoured jargon among American social scientists and historians they have mesmerized--that you can extract from their context and measure by current or retrospective survey research. (Someday the reification of conduct and demeanour in "attitudes" will seem as quaint and archaic as their reification in bodily "humours"--phlegmatic, choleric, melancholic, sanguine--does now.) Nor is it a Frankenstein's monster that takes on a life of its own.
Ideology is not the same as _propaganda_. Someone who said, "Anti-slavery _ideology_ infiltrated the slave quarters through illicit abolitionist newspapers," would be talking rather about propaganda than about ideology. The slaves' anti-slavery ideology could not be smuggled to them in alien newsprint. People deduce and verify their ideology in daily life. The slaves' anti-slavery ideology had to arise from their lives in slavery and from their daily relations with slaveholders and other members of slave society. Frederick Douglass was not propounding a paradox but speaking the simple truth when he said that the first anti-slavery lecture he ever heard was delivered by his master in the course of explaining to his mistress why slaves must not be taught to read. By the same token, slaves who decided at the first shot of the Civil War--or even earlier, with Lincoln's election--that emancipation was finally on the nation's agenda were not responding to prevailing Northern propaganda (which, indeed, promised nothing of the kind at that time). It was their experience with slaveowners, not least the slaveowners' hysterical equation of the Republican Party with abolition, that made slaves see Lincoln as the emancipator before he saw himself that way. And, I might add, it was the slaves' acting on that foreknowledge that forced Lincoln to become the emancipator.
_Ideology, Propaganda and Dogma_
To insist that ideology and propaganda are not the same is not to suppose that they are unrelated. The most successful propagandist is one who thoroughly understands the ideology of those to be propagandized. When propagandists for secession before the American Civil War emphasized the danger that the Northerners might encroach upon Southerners' right of self-determination, they emphasized a theme that resonated as well with the world of non-slaveholders as with that of planters, even though the two worlds differed as night from day. "We will never be slaves" was good secessionist propaganda. "We must never let them take our slaves" would have been poor propaganda and the secessionists knew it; just as today "Strategic Defense Initiative" makes a good advertisement for a weapons programme, whereas "Strategic Offensive Initiative" or "First- Strike Initiative" would not.
Neither is ideology the same as _doctrine_ or _dogma_. Pro-slavery _doctrine_ might well hold, for example, that any white person's word must take precedence over any black person's. But the push-and-shove reality of any planter's business would tell him or her that some situations call for accepting a slave's word over an overseer's. [36] After all, overseers came and went, but slaves remained; and the object was to produce cotton or sugar or rice or tobacco, not to produce white supremacy. The perfect subordination of the slaves to the overseer, if coupled with poor production, would spell disaster for the planter. Thus, the ideology of a planter--that is, the vocabulary of day-to-day action and experience--must make room for contest and struggle (perhaps couched in paternalistic or racist language), even if doctrine specified an eternal hierarchy. Doctrine or dogma may be imposed, and they often are: dissenters can be excommunicated from a church or expelled from a party. But ideology is a distillate of experience. Where the experience is lacking, so is the ideology that only the missing experience could call into being. Planters in the Old South could have imposed their understanding of the world upon the non-slaveholders or the slaves only if they could have transformed the lives of the non-slaveholders and slaves into a replica of their own.
====== {36. Genovese, _Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made_, New York 1974, p. 16.} ======
An ideology must be constantly created and verified in social life; if it is not, it dies, even though it may seem to be safely embodied in a form that can be handed down. [37] Many Christians still think of kneeling with folded hands as the appropriate posture for prayer, but few now know why; and the few who do know cannot, even if they choose, mean the same thing by it as was meant by those to whom the posture was part of an ideology still real in everyday social life. The social relations that once gave explicit reality to that ritual gesture of the vassal's subordination to his lord are now as dead as a mackerel, and so, therefore, is the ideological vocabulary--including the posture of prayer--in which those social relations once lived.
====== {37. Some people imagine that ideology can indeed be handed down in the form of law. If that were so, then the law could do without courts, lawyers, judges and juries.} ======
The foregoing line of argument raises the question of how one group's understanding of reality, its ideology, appears to prevail over others when it comes to real and effective political power. Depending on who poses the question, it is the problem of social order, of converting power into authority, or of political hegemony. The most obvious answer --force-- is not an answer. There is never ultimately enough force to go around, particularly since submission is hardly ever an end in itself. If the slaveowners had produced white supremacy without producing cotton, their class would have perished in short order. A colonial ruler does not just want the natives to bow down and render their obeisance to their new sovereign. The natives must also grow food, pay taxes, go to work in mines and estates, provide conscripts for the army, and help to hold the line against rival powers. For these activities to proceed, the natives must not just submit, they must cooperate. Even in those few cases in which submission _is_ an end in itself, force is never enough in itself. Slaveholders, colonial rulers, prison guards and the Shah's police have all had occasion to discover that when nothing remains except force, nothing remains--period. The rule of any group, the power of any state, rests on force in the final analysis. Anyone who gives the least thought to the matter reaches that conclusion, and thinkers as different in other respects as Weber, Marx, Machiavelli and Madison would have no trouble agreeing on that. Rule always rests on force in the last analysis. But a ruling group or state that must rely on force in the first analysis as well is one living in a state of siege, rebellion, war or revolution.
[CLIP]
Racial ideology supplied the means of explaining slavery to people whose terrain was a republic founded on radical doctrines of liberty and natural rights; and, more important, a republic in which those doctrines seemed to represent accurately the world in which all but a minority lived. Only when the denial of liberty became an anomaly apparent even to the least observant and reflective members of Euro-American society did ideology systematically explain the anomaly. But slavery got along for a hundred years after its establishment without race as its ideological rationale. The reason is simple. Race explained why some people could rightly be denied what others took for granted: namely, liberty, supposedly a self-evident gift of nature's God. But there was nothing to explain until most people could, in fact, take liberty for granted -- as the indentured servants and disfranchised freedmen of colonial America could not. Nor was there anything calling for a radical explanation where everyone in society stood in relation of inherited subordination to someone else: servant to master, serf to nobleman, vassal to overlord, overlord to king, king to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
It was not Afro-Americans, furthermore, who needed a racial explanation; it was not they who invented themselves as a race. Euro-Americans resolved the contradiction between slavery and liberty by defining Afro-Americans as a race; Afro-Americans resolved the contradiction more straightforwardly by calling for the abolition of slavery. From the era of the American, French and Haitian revolutions on, they claimed liberty as theirs by natural right. They did not originate the large nineteenth-century literature purporting to prove their biological inferiority, nor, by and large, did they accept it. Vocabulary can be very deceptive. Both Afro- and Euro-Americans used the words that today denote race, but they did not understand those words the same way. Afro- Americans understood the reason for their enslavement to be, as Frederick Douglass put it, "not _color_, but _crime_." Afro-Americans invented themselves, not as a race, but as a nation. They were not troubled, as modern scholars often are, by the use of racial vocabulary to express their sense of nationality. Afro-American soldiers who petitioned on behalf of "These poor nation of colour" and "we Poore Nation of a Colered rast [race]" saw nothing incongruous about the language. Racial ideology in its radical American form is the ideology to be expected in a society in which enslavement stands as an exception to a radically defined liberty so commonplace that no great effort of imagination is required to take it for granted. It is the ideology proper to a "free" society in which enslaved descendants of Africans are an anomalous exception. There is no paradox; it makes good, common sense. Indeed,