he believed that Negroes were inferior to white people. On the contrary he bought them precisely because, as working cattle, they were superior to whites.

[33]

Being of alien blood, these black people were outside of the social and political system to which they were introduced and, quite naturally, beyond the range of such sympathies as helped to soften the hard brutalities of the system. They were, from the beginning, more ruthlessly exploited than the white workers. Thus they had their place made for them—at the bottom.

Now it is a social law—not yet proclaimed by our college sociologists—that whenever a certain social arrangement is beneficial to any class in a society, that class soon develops the psychology of its own advantage and creates insensibly the ethics which will justify that social arrangement. Men to whom the vicarious labor of slaves meant culture and refinement, wealth, leisure and education, naturally came—without any self-deception, to see that slavery was right. As Professor Loria points out, there is an economic basis to moral transformations in any society which is built on vicarious [34] production.

psychology

[34]

We turn now to the resulting conditions of the slaves. They were at the bottom, the most brutally exploited and, therefore, the most despised section of the laboring class. For it is a consequent of the law stated above that those who are exploited must needs be despised by those who exploit them. This mental attitude of the superior class (which makes the laws of that society in which it is dominant) will naturally find its expression in those actions by which they establish their relations to the inferior class. And whenever anyone is to be kicked it is usually the man farthest down who gets it, because he is most contiguous to the foot. So the Negro having been given a place at the bottom in the economic life of the nation, came to occupy naturally the place at the bottom in the nation’s thinking. I say, the nation’s advisedly; because the dominant ideas of any society which is already divided into classes are as a rule the ideas preservative of the existing arrangements. But since those arrangements include a class on top, the dominant ideas will generally coincide with the interest of that class. The ethics of its own advantage, then, will be diffused by that class throughout that society—will be, if need arise imposed upon the other classes, since every ruling class has always controlled the public instruments for the diffusion of ideas.

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