Slavery was not invented in the USA. It has been a scourge of humanity and developed when agriculture emerged after the ice age in the Magdalenian around 12,000 years BCE. Anglo-Saxons in America were plain fools. They made it a real industry by systematically strengthening what the Spaniards and Portuguese were already doing, turning what was a crime into something like a holocaust. We have to consider tens of millions of people were imported as slaves to the English colonies in North America and probably fifty percent of the Africans captured or bought in Africa never reached America, and were thrown overboard during the voyage, mostly dead or plainly sick. and yet it was one of the most profitable commercial enterprises in the whole history of humanity. But the Anglo-Saxons based their reasoning on a fully racist opinion that became so deeply engraved in the American consciousness that it is the core of the US constitution and all possible corrections introduced since 1789 cannot erase the racism so deeply imprinted in the minds of the whites in these USA. White supremacy is the very starting point of America, and there is probably no cure for this sin, some will say, crime, I do say.

2. NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES
– THE NEW YORK TIMES
MAGAZINE – THE 1619
PROJECT – 2021
Anyone who wants to know how the United States was born, as I did in the 2010s
for some publications, comes to John Smith and his first successful colony, Jamestown, in
1607 in what was to become Virginia. The name of the colony was in honor of King James
1st who had granted the colonists a ten-year license running till 1617. The colonists had a
tough time, and they managed to survive thanks to their systematic looting of the Indians
for food – and women – and the apparent lack of real deadly hostility on the Indian side.
They managed to survive by kidnapping the daughter of the local chief, Pocahontas,
the Indian name under which she is known and honored in the US Congress rotunda.
Pocahontas was an educated priestess that knew the ritualized procedure to grow and
process tobacco which was a sacred plant among Indians. The colonists used Pocahontas
in a way that is vastly discussed among historians and Indians. For some, she was a
hostage, of course, but also what some Indians today proclaim a seemingly self-appointed
(or maybe tribal) diplomat to avoid war with the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants in
Jamestown. She was forced – or maybe she decided – to be christened under a Christian
name (note the deculturation at work here), though the US mythology (because what they
call history is nothing but mythology, and that is already a great honor to call it that) of this
period keeps her under the name of Pocahontas, but kneeling and being Christened all
dressed in white, the basic symbolical color of the colonists.
John Smith
She married John Rolfe, provided him with her know-how about tobacco, and gave
her a son, Thomas. John Rolfe started the first tobacco plantation in Virginia with seeds

3. that a legend has were stolen from the Spaniards in Barbados or some other West Indian
island, but this is a long story. The first decent production of tobacco was completed in
1616 when the colony had to ask the King of England for the renewal of the license. For
this, he went to England with his wife and son. They were received with great honors,
including a “masque” (the precursor of the English opera that will be developed by
Marlowe and Handel, after the former). The king was satisfied with the tobacco and
granted John Rolfe the necessary license to produce and export to England and Europe
his Virginian tobacco, thus becoming a direct competitor of the Spaniards who had up to
then the total monopoly in Europe.
Unluckily, Pocahontas died and was buried at Gravesend. John Rolfe entrusted his
son who was also sick to a trustworthy man till his uncle, John Rolfe’s brother, could take
the guardianship. Thomas Rolfe stayed in England till he was of age to go back to Virginia
and start working on his father’s plantation. In 1619, to develop the plantation John Rolfe
bought the first-ever Black slaves from a Dutch dealer. And those were the first African
slaves in an English colony which was extremely clearly white, Anglo-Saxon, and
Protestant, (the famous WASPs) and that is the origin of the African American “problem”
that is the subject of this book. But that was not the beginning of slavery in the Americas.
John Rolfe and Pocahontas
When I was working with my assistant Paula Osorio on an article for the book by
Geetha Ganapathy-Doré, Michel Olinga, Cornelius Crowley, Michel Naumann, Yannick Le
Boulicaut, et al. IMAGES OF DECOLONIZATION / IMAGES DE LA DÉCOLONISATION,
2013, in which we (me and Paula) published Chapter 2 Jacques COULARDEAU, and
Paula OSORIO, Colonization and Decolonization in the US and Mexico, pp. 55-80. We
compared the oldest slavery system in the Americas developed by the Spaniards and the
Portuguese under the authority of the King of Spain, the Spanish Catholic church, and the
Spanish Inquisition, on one hand, and the same slavery developed by the Anglo-Saxons in
Northern America. Note the French in Louisiana (an enormous expanse of land from
today’s Louisiana and Mississippi to Quebec (included though mostly referred to as New
France) had a very close practice to the Spanish practice under the authority of the French
King, the French Catholic church, and the nascent royal justice in France. I regret this
book does not consider this alternative that has produced what some sociologists consider

4. a three-tiered society on the model of Brazil, but also Mexico. That would have shown how
much crueler the Anglo-Saxons were.
On the French and Spanish-Portuguese sides the slaves were supposed to be all
christened, married, have all the normal religious, Catholic actually, rights and duties.
Among these duties, they had the right to have one day a week to attend and perform their
marital duties, even if the wife and the husband did not work and live on the same
plantation. They could have a normal religious practice, be buried in normal holy
cemeteries, and could take part in various entertaining events as singers and musicians,
even for a price, which explains why many could actually benefit from manumission on
their own earnings. Very few slave masters in the Anglo-Saxon colonies provided their
slaves with such rights that included the major Catholic, hence Christian and Protestant,
celebrations. They were encouraged to learn the local language and to read and write if
they so wanted.
Then in this book, the Anglo-Saxon, soon to become American, practice would have
appeared for what it was: at least ten times worse than any other comparable slavery for
Africans deported and imported (in)to the Americas. The slaves were mixed, so that, they
could not easily communicate since they did not have a common language. They were
banned from English, except for obedient and humble, hence submissive and subservient,
acquiescing responses to the orders they were given. They had to understand but never to
learn. Of course, reading and writing were kept away from them as much as possible.
They were never really married except in some kind of sham ritual that had no Christian
value (Check Toni Morrison’s Beloved). Women were the submissive vessels to all sorts of
intrusions and penetrations from the white masters and their friends or clients in order to
produce as many children as possible, however by law declared slaves like their mothers.
No patrilinear filiation. The children could be sold as soon as six or seven. Among the
whites, all males as soon as hormonally able could enter this productive and profitable
commerce with all female Black slaves at their disposal, not on demand but on command.
And Thomas Jefferson was the model of this treatment with his Black slave at his
command including at the White House, and one of her sons, Thomas, served dinner at
the table of his mother’s master who was actually his father too.

5. We should not generalize and say that it was always the same thing. Actually, some
slave masters could have some dignity and decency and provide their slaves with a
softened system that could get closer to the French and Spanish-Portuguese systems.
You can find such examples in Solomon Northup’s 12 years a Slave. But let me be clear,
even when softened, even in the French or Spanish-Portuguese ways, it was slavery and
the basic fundamental element known as freedom was negated, absolutely all freedoms:
freedom of expression, freedom of mind and conscience, freedom of circulation and
movement in space, freedom of education, freedom of religion, etc. And we should also
consider a tremendous number of human rights were negated. The book is clear, and its
main idea is that it was so deeply ingrained in the consciousness of the Anglo-Saxon
colonists who were such male-chauvinistic white supremacists that the very constitution
had a bill of rights that only concerned the free male citizens of the United States. The
famous Bill of Rights of this US Constitution never declared in writ, and certainly not in any
unwritten intentions that Black slaves were human beings and that they were US citizens
by the right of birth (on the US territory). Three amendments were necessary after the Civil
War to grant them some of these fundamental civic and civil rights, and yet after five years
or so, these three amendments were just nullified in practice by Jim Crowe's policies, the
Ku Klux Klan, lynchings, and all sort s of segregation declared constitutional by the
Supreme Court. We will have to wait till 1954, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, for
the very first step away from this white supremacist system to be written down on paper.
From 1619 up to 1954, Black African Americans were nothing but slaves up to 1865
and then an exploited, rejected, ghettoized non-human population with only one right, the
obligation to work under the whip or the financial tyranny of the white masters till they die –
and let me be clear: I did say till they died of it. The rule was simple:
“One drop of Black blood makes you Black, and Black = SLAVE = NON-HUMAN.”
Hence, they were not equal as they should be like all men, meaning all humans,
who had been created equal, since they were not human. It is clear the US was a republic
of all free men in the colonies soon to become states, and free meant (Blacks and Indians
excluded) only men over 21 who were white by definition, had some property, land, or
commerce, paid taxes and had been born in the colonies soon to become states, or had

6. been naturalized, and this naturalization did not provide them with the same rights as all
citizens, for example, the right to run for president.
But as soon as the slave trade was stopped, the Blacks were all or nearly all born in
the USA, and yet they were denied their citizenship. The entire system was and still is very
careful to keep the Blacks from four elements, basic for citizenship:
1- They were not white, and one drop of Black blood was enough to make an
individual Black, hence substandard as for humanity.
2- They had no possession, and no right to have any, land, or home, or even their
own lives and bodies (no habeas corpus for them) and the entire system was based on a
several-centuries-long deprivation of any property right and any property, and that keeps
them down in the footnotes of the margin of white society.
3- They paid no taxes since they had no income and even today their income is so
low that taxes for them is nearly a myth, apart from the sales tax they pay every single
time they buy something in a store. Better buy on the Black market to evade this sales tax.
4- They were not Christians and had no soul. So, they could not have any
education, et best and exclusively vocational training if not vocational taming, like circus
animals to clean up streets, or Dunn High School in 1969-70, or the bus station and its
toilets at 7:00 in the morning as I saw it in 1973, or eventually to produce what they will
never be able to buy.
KU KLUX KLAN
In other words, they were not created by the white god of the WASPs. They were,
like all animals, the production of the wilderness, and they had no more rights than wild
beasts who could not even be tamed like horses or cows. They had to be controlled like
tigers in a circus in a cage. This is entirely contained in the original constitution, not in real
words of exclusion against Blacks or Indians, but because it has no words of inclusion for
them to be considered as part of the beneficiaries of the constitution. The famous
amendments of the late 1860s, Amendments 13, 14, and 15, changed all that by clearly
this time being concerned by the Blacks and by their integration into the political project.
But these amendments were implemented at the most five years under reconstruction and
then they were systematically negated at all levels of the republic, from local city councils
that expelled Black representatives to the Supreme Court itself that asserted among other
things that equal but separate was acceptable at all levels of society, though it was

7. obvious that it was a big lie since everything Black had little resources and means that
were not in proportion with what everything white had. Segregation in all fields became the
norm, not rampant as some may say, but openly asserted and implemented, including with
lynchings, pogroms, and punishing expeditions against all Black communities that could
menace the white supremacy of this republic that was no longer a republic but was an
autocratic racist institution.
And that was the rule up to 1954, and do not be naïve. The implementation of this
1954 Supreme Court decision regarding the integration of education took time to be
implemented. Dunn High School in Harnett County, North Carolina was one of the latest
high schools to be integrated and it happened only in September 1969, and I know about it
because I was there at the time.
Now, today, in 2022, have things changed? After the eight years of a Black
President who defended the idea that things were getting better, we got a long backlash. A
backlash at the level of police lynchings and even civilian lynchings of Black males
happening at the highest level ever for the last fifty years. George Floyd, due to his death
in 17 minutes entirely filmed and broadcast, under the knee of one police officer and with
two more doing nothing to stop it, started a movement that was so strong it forced the then
President Trump to come out and do extreme things and say extreme words to contain the
movement, and in fact, he failed. Since then, some police officers were convicted and
sentenced to long prison terms and some civilians had the same fate for chasing and
shooting down an unarmed Black jogger. Is it the sign of a real change? In such extreme
matters and situations maybe, but the segregation in jobs, employment, housing,
education, and the possibility to borrow money or get a mortgage are everyday realities.
Systematically Blacks are at something like what seems to be a 50% disadvantage as
compared to whites. The Blacks have systematically been sidetracked, contained, pushed
aside in all possible fields, and I would say except showbusiness. But that is the most
important shortcoming of the book. It alludes to what I am going to say, but it does not
seem to capture the deepest positive dynamic of slavery, not planned, or expected by the
white enslavers, but the result of a deep, everyday, every moment resistance from the
Black community of Black slaves.

8. Since the work of the field slaves was measured every night by weighing how much
cotton, for example, they had picked, the slaves organized themselves so that they all
worked at the same speed and hence all approached the same average weight of picked
cotton. They chanted in rhythm with the work. Note this practice will go on after
reconstruction with the chain gangs building the railroads or building the roads. They
chanted to regularize the work of them all. The book here insists on the fact white
Blackfaces imitated what they thought was the Blacks’ artful performance. These
Blackface were mocking the Black slaves for the only pleasure of the only possible
audience, whites. But that is totally marginal on the impact of the Black chanting in slave
work, directly imported from Africa where music is a rhythmic art, essentially rhythmic and
based on chanting and drums of all sorts. This is typical of Black Africa which only had
drums of all sorts, which practiced very rhythmic dancing, performed very long collective
chanting rhythmically performed to the drums, and at times, some simple pinched-string
instruments. I have seen that with my own eyes in the Black neighborhoods and their
“cafés” in Kinshasa in 1968.
LYNCHED
The point is that this musical performance was a basic resisting stance of the
Blacks against slavery and the evening whippings of all those who were under the norm,
and at the same time, this resisting stance managed to keep the best cotton picker down
so that the whites could not increase the level of production for all the slaves because a
few, ten or a dozen slaves managed to pick more cotton than the others. This chanting
was also used by the Black house-servants taking care of the white children of the
plantations, with lullabies and nursery rhymes, and the result was an impact on music in
America that was absolutely unpredictable. It produced Gospel music, Jazz, all sorts of
rock and roll, Black and Soul, and many other types of music. And it is this music that
became the dominant western music in the world as soon as amplification was developed,
and even before, as soon as the radio and later the gramophone were invented and
became popular in all sorts of bars, cafés, dancing clubs, pools halls, etc. And it was able
to cross the segregation line because radio waves cannot be segregated easily.
That’s the heritage of Black slavery in the Americas in general, in the USA in
particular. When you look at the fundamental and essentially white art of the cinema, it
was segregational from the very start. You can see how segregation kept the Blacks in

9. “their” place, which is to say off the screen, or only in some subservient and speechless
parts. It took some time before a Black actor got a key role and was allowed to come to
dinner tonight. That did not happen in music that was Black and dominated by the Blacks
from the very start of microphones, radio, gramophones, and other dancing halls and
speakeasies. But this was able to retrieve very old traditions all over the world where
people who are exploited very often invent such musical resistance against exploitation or
autocracy. After the Second World War, I remember the song carpenters and joiners
working in big workshops with irritating autocratic foremen started singing or whistling
when the foreman was a little bit annoying to everyone or one particular worker. The music
is simple but very rhythmic, and the words are absolutely ridiculous. But it was effective,
and the concerned foreman fast retreated to his cubicle. Two lines of seven syllables with
a heavy feminine last syllable, and then four more dynamic and rhythmic lines of four
syllables. Note the fact the character is a woman in an industry where women were
absolutely absent at the time.
WHITE CRIMINALS: SON, NEIGHBOR, FATHER
Elle a cassé sa jambe,
Sa jambe an palissandre.
C’est en montant
Sur les ch’vaux d’bois
Qu’ell’ a cassé
Sa jamb’ en bois. (CODA as many times as necessary)
She broke her leg,
Her rosewood leg.
It's going up
On wooden horses
That she broke
Her wooden leg.
They could sing, they could whistle, and they could bang their hammers along with
the song. Everyone could take part, being only by humming the music. We find such
“popular-music” practices everywhere in the world, some of these popular songs with bells
and animal cries can be found in the first opera-oratorio in Europe at the end of the 13th
century in a celebration in the Beauvais cathedral for Christmas, Ludus Danielis, the Play

10. of Daniel. I have seen some of these popular practices in some villages celebrating the
local “gods” in Sri Lanka in 2005.
And this anti-Black segregational spirit is still at work in the US Senate where the
confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court is stalled in
commission or committee and will have to be taken to the full Senate for a vote. The
candidate or appointee is a woman, Black, and very outspoken on racial questions.
POLICE CRIMINALS, FROM CHAUVIN TO THE OTHERS
To conclude I will go back to the universal trend and movement these Black African
Slaves brought to the Americas and the world, even if it took five or six centuries for it to
really reach universality. And that’s the most important achievement of Black Africans in
the world. Then you just look at the sphere of sports and you find the same domination of
Black athletes in many sports because for them it is the easiest way to get a college
education and a full scholarship, but even so, they are under intense pressure from the
State and from their own “bosses” and “coaches” who are more racially autocratic than
democratic. Remember Mexico City Olympic Games and the campaign by Black
sportsmen to go down on one knee during the playing of the US national anthem. But
when you consider how many Black or Northern African players are in European soccer
teams, for one example, you can understand this rise of Black athletes is far from being
over and it is in many ways less complete in the USA. In Europe today soccer clubs and
games have to get confronted with two misbehaviors in the audience, both segregationist
in nature, with visible and hearable remarks against Black and Northern African players on
one hand, and gay players on the other hand.
Then this book is essential for anyone who wants to understand the race problem in
the USA, the only country in the world where such an anti-Black-African segregational
systematic policy still exists, and it is not by bringing up mostly isolated instances or events
in other countries, none of the size of the USA, that it will erase the social and political
evolutions that are taking place in the USA. In Europe, such events are treated as crimes,
certainly not as misdemeanors, and absolutely not neglected. And in Europe, it is not only
the Blacks that are concerned. It is a shame the USA is still in this unbearable situation
and that the Canadian Prime Minister was a white Blackface on his campus when he was
a university student, so not that long ago. And keep in mind that Indians, Native
Americans, and First Nation people in Northern America are still the descendants of very
recent segregational practices that have not at all been redressed and repaired, in any
way repaired. But listen carefully: the US Supreme Court will be against any type of
affirmative action that would be directed exclusively at Black people and that would impose

11. quotas of any sort in any field. Yet when considering diversity in companies, the idea of
taking into account the average proportion of Black, gay, Jewish, Moslem people in the
industry of this company or in the region where this company operates, to examine if there
is any discrepancy with the same proportion in the company is definitely using a quota
approach and here jurisprudence is important.
The worst possible form of racism or segregation is racial or gender color-blindness.
Diversity wants all people to be accepted the way they are and not the way you may
dream of them.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU