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Books by Clarence J. Munford
Production relations, class and Black liberation: A
Marxist perspective in Afro-American studies
(1978)
The Black Ordeal of Slavery and Slave Trading in the
French West Indies 1625-1715
(1991)
Race
and Reparations: A Black Perspective for the 21st
Century (1996)
Race
and Civilization: The Rebirth of Black Centrality
(2003)
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The
Benefits of Whiteness
in America's Hierarchical Society
By Clarence J. Munford
Race as a concept has two aspects. There is
a gene-based physical aspect to its status as a historical
artifact. In fact, the latter stands on the former. The physical
aspect has to do with somatotype, that is, body type or corporal
traits. The chief indicator of race in Western social formations
is physical appearance resulting from the interaction between
inherited genes and the physical and social environment. The
term for these observable traits is phenotype, with attention
usually concentrating
on the morphology of skin, hair, and facial features.
From New England to the southern plantation
colonies, a crucible formed in which emigrant Europeans of
different nationalities were naturalized as American whites.
Brewed in this historical vat was the USA's white nation. A
dynamic process of whitening crystallized. A fiery mold arose on
America's soil, in which a white racial identity took shape as
distinct from the previous European national identities---fiery
in the sense that it entailed the flames of slavery and
humiliation for Africans, and immolation of the entire race of
Native Americans.
In America, pre-bellum Southern “poor
white trash” and other pre-proletarian white toilers, the
white middle class and white workers all moved on a convergent
course with slaveholder and post-bellum capitalist interests
from the genocide of Native Americans to the enslavement,
segregation, super-exploitation and national oppression of
African Americans. Of course, the white ruling elite benefited
much more than ordinary white folks, but the disparity in the
benefits from racial discrimination is not the issue here.
Whether a Western Hemisphere society is
bi-racial or multi-racial, the norm is the privileged status,
and in the United States the norm is white. Everyone white is
privileged to some extent, and the white working poor are white.
The benefits are real for both sides, for white workers as well
as for the white business class.
The 12 to 15 percent of white Americans who
are anti-racist are not the issue, nor do they bear the blame
for racism, nor, unfortunately, have white anti-racists had the
clout at any time in the twentieth century to nullify white
supremacy. International race-class has subsumed traditional
class divisions.
White America constantly reinvents itself
in a socio-historical process in which many different Caucasian
ethnic groups, most of them directly from Europe, fuse, and
transform into something "white." These neophytes put
on a specifically American socio-cultural and political coating,
distancing them from their European allegiances: for example,
Italian immigrants become Italian-Americans, the hyphenated
phenomenon, and finally indistinctly white Americans with
Italian-sounding surnames and Catholic denominational
affiliation.
Whiteness in the United States has always
operated according to a hierarchical selection in which
Anglo-Saxon and Aryan Nordic nationalities were the preferred
raw material, favored over "lesser" Caucasian breeds,
such as Southern Europeans, Slavs, Hispanics, Jews, and such like.
Source: Dr. Munford's series -- TO CHANGE
OUR WORLD FIRST UNDERSTAND OUR WORLD
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DR. Clarence J. Munford is
Professor Emeritus of Black Studies and History at the
University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, near Toronto. He was born
in Massillon, Ohio on November 18, 1935. C.J. Munford, an
African American with dual Canadian-U.S. citizenship, has taught
in universities in Nigeria, Europe and U.S., in a college
teaching career that began in 1959.
He introduced the first courses in Black
history in an Ontario university in 1969. He is the recipient of
the 1997 African Heritage Studies Association Book Award for
Race
and Reparations: A Black Perspective for the 21st
Century. Munford is active in the N’COBRA campaign for
reparations for African Americans. |
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He is a scholar and activist who has authored
numerous articles, addresses and essays, and a three-volume
autopsy of early Black enslavement in the West Indies, entitled Black Ordeal (1991). He has focused on the theory and practice of
revolutionary nationalism from a Pan-Africanist slant.
Munford is the lead discoverer of civilizational
historicism, the theory of human history from a Black
vantage point. His newest work, a volume entitled
Race
and Civilization: The Rebirth of Black Centrality,
elaborates and substantiates empirical discoveries presented in
earlier works.
Race and Civilization
was awarded the 2002 AHSA Edward Blyden Book Award. This
treatise offers civilizational historicism as the theory and
practice of World Black struggle against global white supremacy
in the 21st century.
Builds on the
author's previous work,
Race and Reparations(1996) and in a
three-volume study of the Atlantic slave trade,
Black Ordeal
(1991). |
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Debt: The First 5,000 Years
By David Graeber
Before there was money, there was debt. Every economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems—to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market. The problem with this version of history? There’s not a shred of evidence to support it. Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that for more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors. Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it. Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history—as well as how it has defined human history, and what it means for the credit crisis of the present day and the future of our economy. Economist Glenn Loury /Criminalizing a Race
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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updated 11 June 2008
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