The answer became the system of race, as we currently know it. From the earliest systems of race, this purpose of domination seems evident. One of the greatest scientists of the Western world was Carolus Linnaeus, who developed the basic way of categorizing all living things. He emphasized the diversity of life and yet the commonality of life, and we still use his system today. He was also one of the early developers of the system of race. In 1738, he indicated four racial groups of humanity, and it is revealing to briefly review those categories:
Homo Europaeus—light, lively, inventive; ruled by rites
Homo Americanus—tenacious, contented, free; ruled by custom
Homo Asiaticus—stern, haughty, stingy; ruled by opinion
Homo Afer—cunning, slow, negligent; ruled by caprice.1
Here we see the beginnings of the system of race as we know it today—it is not meant to classify people in different branches of the human family. It is rather meant to indicate who should dominate and who should be dominated. We need a classification system that chronicles and notes the branches and the diversity of the human family, but the system of race is not that system.2 This system works so that people classified as “white,” especially white men, will internalize its approach and believe that we are superior. It also works so that all others will tend to internalize inferiority and believe that white males control almost all the power because they were ordained by God or by biology to do so. There are no significant biological or genetic differences between human beings; the system of race was developed to signify that there are such vast differences between human beings that those classified as “white” should be in power.
Ida Wells lived in the tensions and demonic powers of this system, but she was soaked in a spark of divinity that allowed her to see herself as God’s child. She refused to abide by the attempts to strip her dignity in the post-Reconstruction days that reestablished slavery under the name of “neo-slavery,” or “Jim Crow.” She lived in the tension between equality and slavery in American history. No white person personifies this tension better than Thomas Jefferson. Fifty years after Linnaeus created his formula for the hierarchy of racial classifications, Jefferson gave his thoughts in 1785 in “Notes on Virginia.”3 In his earlier prose, Jefferson had helped to define the American identity: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all {men} are created equal.” This radical idea of equality has been the driving force behind many of the justice movements in our country’s history, including those who have insisted that women are included in this idea of self-evident equality. This powerful idea continues to motivate people of all classes and groups. Writing in 1785, however, Jefferson doesn’t express the certainty of that idea of equality that fired the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
Jefferson waffles on equality because he wants to hold people as slaves while still professing belief in the revolutionary idea of equality. In “Notes on Virginia,” he begins to see a hierarchy in this circle of equality, predating George Orwell’s satirical concept that while all humans are created equal, some humans are more equal than others.4 In his scientific analysis, Jefferson puts the “Homo sapiens Europaeus” on top of the racial ladder, with “the Indian” next and “blacks” on the bottom. While hoping to be objective and scientific, Jefferson admits that much more study is needed. Yet he must add this conclusion: “I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”5
Although Jefferson later expresses misgivings about his dismissal of the equality of black people, his ruminations reflect the difficulty of all those who are classified as white in our society, whether in 1785 or 1985 or 2019. While committed to the idea of equality, there are also distinct economic privileges to the inequality inherent in the system of race that places white folks on top of the ladder. For all of his misgivings about slavery, Jefferson benefitted immensely from it. At his death, his will freed only five of his slaves, all from the family conceived through his relationship with his slave Sally Hemmings.
While many who are classified as “white” would disavow the power of race and racism in our lives, the benefits cannot be denied. Jefferson shared this struggle, even as he quoted “scientific” evidence that seemed to verify that Africans were less equal than Europeans. If Africans were less than Europeans, then the “self-evident” clause of equality might not apply to them, and maybe, just maybe, holding them in bondage might be justified. In one form or another, throughout our history, “white” folk have gone through the same process as Jefferson did in order to justify the many privileges that come to those classified as “white” under the system of race. It was certainly true in the days of Ida Wells.
In 1875 in its last significant law for civil rights until 1957, the US Congress passed an act that forbade segregation on public accommodations. In 1883, the United States Supreme Court ruled the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional, and the floodgates of segregation and reenslavement were open fully. In the spring of 1884, Ida Wells followed her usual pattern of purchasing a seat in the ladies’ car on the train on a trip out of Memphis. After the train had pulled out, the conductor came to collect the tickets and then informed her that she would have to move to the car reserved for black people. Seventy-one years before Rosa Parks, she refused to give up her seat, and when he grabbed her and tried to pull her up from her seat, she bit his hand and braced herself not to move—no nonviolent resistance for her. He went to get male reinforcements, and it took three men to throw her off the train.
Undeterred, she took the railroad to court under Tennessee law, and the white judge who heard the case was a former Union soldier. He ruled in her favor and awarded her $500 in damages. She was thrilled with the victory, but it was short-lived. The railroad appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court, and in 1887, they overturned the verdict. Ida Wells was crestfallen and wrote in her diary on April 11: “I had hoped for such great things from my suit for my people generally. I have firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would, when we appealed to it, give us justice. I feel shorn of that belief and utterly discouraged, and just now if it were possible would gather my race in my arms and fly far away with them.”6
Wells was beginning to learn that the power of racism was deep and wide in those classified as “white,” and she would later lift up a phrase that Ronald Reagan would use as one of his hallmark phrases: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” Wells meant it in the sense that we know it today: racism is deeply embedded and intertwined in our American consciousness, and we must always be working to mitigate its loathsome power.
Though some marked the Obama presidency as the death knell of the power of racism, many in the South did not. We were astonished at this turn of events that led to his election, but as native Southerners, raised in the power of white supremacy, we knew that the hold of racism remained mighty in our hearts and in our structures and institutions. The racism that undergirded slavery and neo-slavery is both resistant and resilient, and much work needs to be done to dislodge its power from our individual and collective hearts. We wished that the election of Barack Obama as president could have changed that, but we also knew that it could not and did not.
In regards to race in America, there are at least three passages that we have all traveled. The first was the European landings and settlement, when cheap labor was needed to work the land and grow the economy. Indentured servants and slaves were brought to do this work. During this time, the idea of race and slavery were married, and the idea developed that people of African descent were meant, by God and by biological