For these rich men, freedom was not the power to make choices; freedom was the power to create choices. England created the choices, the policies American elites had to abide by, just as planters created choices and policies that laborers had to follow. Only power gave Jefferson and other wealthy White colonists freedom from England. For Jefferson, power came before freedom. Indeed, power creates freedom, not the other way around—as the powerless are taught.
Enslavers and slave traders were creating similar ethnic hierarchies within the African kingdom. Enslaved Africans in North America were coming mainly from seven cultural-geopolitical regions: Angola (26 percent), Senegambia (20 percent), Nigeria (17 percent), Sierra Leone (11 percent), Ghana (11 percent), Ivory Coast (6 percent), and Benin (3 percent). Since the hierarchies were usually based on which ancestral groups were thought to make the best slaves, or whose ways most resembled those of Europeans, different enslavers with different needs and different cultures had different hierarchies.
Polygenesists were questioning or rejecting the reproductive capability of biracial people in order to substantiate their arguments for racial groups being separate species. If Blacks and Whites were separate species, then their offspring would be infertile. And so the word mulatto, which came from “mule,” came into being, because mules were the infertile offspring of horses and donkeys.
In Ibn Khaldun’s day, most of the captives sold in Western Europe were Eastern Europeans who had been seized by Turkish raiders from areas around the Black Sea. So many of the seized captives were “Slavs” that the ethnic term became the root word for “slave” in most Western European languages.
Already, the American mind was accomplishing that indispensable intellectual activity of someone consumed with racist ideas: individualizing White negativity and generalizing Black negativity. Negative behavior by any Black person became proof of what was wrong with Black people, while negative behavior by any White person only proved what was wrong with that person.
To substantiate American slavery and win converts, Cotton Mather preached racial inequality in body while insisting that the dark souls of enslaved Africans would become White when they became Christians.
Fooled by racist ideas, I did not fully realize that the only thing wrong with Black people is that we think something is wrong with Black people. I did not fully realize that the only thing extraordinary about White people is that they think something is extraordinary about White people.
“I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man on the farm,” Jefferson once explained to a friend. A year after the Slave Trade Act, a South Carolina court ruled that enslaved women had no legal claims on their children. They stood “on the same footings as other animals.”
My definition of a racist idea is a simple one: it is any concept that regards one racial group as inferior or superior to another racial group in any way.
Historically, there have been three sides to this heated argument. A group we can call segregationists has blamed Black people themselves for the racial disparities. A group we can call antiracists has pointed to racial discrimination. A group we can call assimilationists has tried to argue for both, saying that Black people and racial discrimination were to blame for racial disparities.
no matter how much the producers of the show may want the contestant with the heartbreakingly tragic personal story (and amazing chesticles) to survive until next week, the worst cook that particular week goes home.
Of course, the FN “business model,” for which Ms. Johnson was apparently the vanguard, turned out to be a spectacularly successful one. With each incremental dumbing down of their programming, ratings climbed proportionately. A purge of the chefs who’d built the network followed. Mario and Emeril and nearly anybody else who’d committed the sin of professionalism were either banished or exiled, like Old Bolsheviks—seen as entirely unnecessary to the real business of “Food”—which was, they now recognized, actually about likable personalities, nonthreatening images, and making people feel better about themselves.
Given the current woeful state of backyard grilling, a priority should be assigned to instructing people on the correct way to grill and rest a steak. We have, as a nation, suffered the tyranny of inept steak cookery for far too long. There’s no reason that generation after generation of families should continue to pass along a tradition of massacring perfectly good meat in their kitchens and backyards.
But I do think the idea that basic cooking skills are a virtue, that the ability to feed yourself and a few others with proficiency should be taught to every young man and woman as a fundamental skill, should become as vital to growing up as learning to wipe one’s own ass, cross the street by oneself, or be trusted with money.
I believe that the human animal evolved as it did—with eyes in the front of its head, long legs, fingernails, eyeteeth—so that it could better chase down slower, stupider creatures, kill them, and eat them; that we are designed to find and eat meat—and only became better as a species when we learned to cook it.
I like a blue cheese burger as much as the next guy—when I’m in the mood for blue cheese. But if it’s a burger I want, I stick to the classics: meat—and bun. I believe this to be the best way to eat a hamburger.
