Land, Labor, and Difference

From Patrick Wolfe's Land, Labor, and Difference:

In Australia:

"In keeping with Social Darwinist premises, as corroborated by Aborigines' manifest decimation, their confinement on missions and reserves was seen as a temporary measure, since they were believed to be a dying race."

In the US:

"Even though the terms 'African,' 'black,' and 'slave' became effectively interchangeable, in practice the match was by no means perfect. For ont only did free blacks exist at all stages in the history of North American slavery, but, in the majority of cases, they were not fully 'black' at all. Rather, these people's non-slave status was correlated on the genetic dimension by the fact that, in the main, they were of European as well as of African extraction. The contradiction between the slave as property and the slave as human being went to the core of the institution of slavery, recurrently surfacing when, for instance, slaves ran away (stole themselves?), committed crimes (with mens rea?), or converted to Christianity (property with a soul?)."

". . . people who straddled the boundaries whereby the juridical opposition between slave and free was coterminal with the racial opposition between black and white presented so many problems that they were often not granted the acknowledgement that a separate category would have entailed."

"What does it mean to free slaves and at the same time to homogenize the status of blackness? Apart from anything else, it means that the boundary that previously separated a free black from an slave disappears, which is to say that, in place of the slaves, a new and more inclusive oppressed category emerges, one that, being defined by race, does not admit the awkward exceptions and contradictions manumission had entailed for the peculiar institution of slavery. Emancipation, in short, canceled out the exception - you can be an ex-slave but you can't be ex-black."

"Though born of slavery, therefore, race came into its own with the demise of slavery. For all its usefulness as a justification, so long as slavery persisted, race was relatively redundant as a mode of domination. The point is though, that the reverse applies - given race, slavery becomes redundant as a mode of domination."

". . . demographic imbalance is a product of history. In this case, it represents the difference between one group of people who had survived a centuries-long genocidal catastrophe with correspondingly depleted numbers and another group who, as commodities, had been preserved, their reproduction constituting a singularly primitive form of accumulation for their owners. Moreover, these histories were ongoing. In large areas of the agricultural South, for instance, the ending of slavery did not mean that blacks became anomalous overnight. On the contrary, they continued to furnish a cheap source of labor. Even when unemployed, their mere presence as a hyperexploitable alternative depressed white worker's wages. Thus we need to be clear: in the wake of slavery, blacks did not become physically anomalous as labor; they became juridically anomalous as equals. In the case of Indians within, by contrast, their very presence was anomalous - as Gary Nash put it, whites 'coveted Indian land but not land with Indians on it.'"