Europe’s chronic warfare, not weapon superiority, made its racial violence more brutal

Evidence

As we have commented, though rebellion might appear warranted to the Europeans who witnessed the uprisings of African peoples, the forms that Black resistance assumed were incomprehensible. Ultimately many such witnesses fell easily into whatever language was on hand to evoke mystery: the participants in Black resistance were seen as having reverted to savagery; were under the influence of satanic madmen; had passed beyond the threshold of sanity. To the Europeans charged with the responsibilities of preserving the sources of Black labor or control over that labor, the only effective response to Black rebellion was massive, indiscriminate violence and afterward the routine of brutality. More frequently than not, the logic of racial domination that had already endured for centuries invoked no alternatives. On this score it had always to be an unequal contest, not because of the superiority of weapons or the preponderance of numbers but because such violence did not come naturally to African peoples. The civilizations of Europe and Africa in those terms had also been very different. For far longer than a millennium, the history of Europe had amounted to an almost uninterrupted chronology of fratricidal warfare and its celebration. The museums of the civilization are the current testament to that preoccupation, its histories chilling accounts. In Africa, where the incident of state and imperial formations and total warfare were rarer, conflict could and was more frequently resolved by migration and resettlement. Eventually the penetration of Islam into Africa and the organization of the Red Sea and Mediterranean slave systems had made some real difference but it was the scale of the Atlantic slave trade and the racial cacophony of European colonialism that would dictate the more profound adjustment to violence. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1430

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s reading on how civilizations diverge in violence—echoes themes in the Frankfurt School material on civilization’s self-destructive character accumulation.